Welcome to the first of the roundtables.
And I want to say something about how
these came into being.
When Frances and Gail organized this,
they decided to have two roundtables.
And I thought that was a very good idea.
And we were absolutely thrilled at the response.
This, to me, is the highlight of the whole thing.
Because when we invited people to apply
to be on the roundtables, we only
got some of the most stellar people, all of whom
could just as well have been among the original.
The ones who are poets could have
been among the original poets-- that
is the poets on the other panels, and so on.
I'm not going to introduce and I'm not
going to give you the squibs on all of them
because they are in the program.
But I just want to say, we have people
from as far as New Zealand this afternoon, Wystan Curnow,
and Graca Capinha from Portugal, and people from all
over the country on this panel and distinguished writers.
All these people have books, plenty of books,
and are very distinguished.
And so the idea that you can speaks really for the center
and the whole program that we have
these that you have a chance to meet these absolutely stars
of their own.
So this will be very exciting.
Now the way we're going to do it is we're going to go from--
we're going to follow the order that's printed in the program
except Vanessa wanted to go last.
And so we have Jesper Olsson, Marie Smart, Linda Reinfeld,
Charles Alexander, Brian Reed, and Vanessa Place.
We're going to go in that order.
Everybody's going to have up to eight minutes to make
their own statement.
I'm going to cut you off after eight minutes
because we want to have a real discussion so
that we talk to each other and bring everybody in.
And then once you have talked to each other, when there's time--
and I hope they will be-- then we
will open it up to the floor.
OK?
So stand by.
And we will start with Jesper.
OK.
Thank you, Marjorie.
Is this mic, or?
No.
I need that one.
OK.
And you really have to talk into it.
OK.
First of all, I want to thank everyone
for the talks and readings.
After I've been immersed in it during the last two days
it's been fascinating and funny and inspiring,
to use that word here, which was actually
the only deliberate constraint I set up for my response.
Yesterday afternoon, I wrote down some comments
and questions that I plan to bring up today,
some of them emerging from the academic's inclination
for taxonomy and institutional distinctions.
Of course, not with the intention
of safeguarding borderlines through
to force out a set of criteria for that something
called a poem should be called a conceptual poem.
But mainly, since such identity issues
have been touched upon briefly already
and are touched upon in the introduction
to the UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing.
For example, what distinguishes conceptual poetics or poetry
from the writings and conceptual art?
Is there a certain negotiation between conceptual framing
and materiality in the former that sets it off
from the latter?
Could this kind of negotiation be
considered an act of poiesis, the making of progress,
the shaping of language?
Is it such an operation, even if deferred
to the activity of selecting and moving linguistic data, that
makes up for specific materiality
or even a specific essential quality in the language
and, for example, can its transcriptions?
And if so, won't all conceptions or definitions of poetry such
as, for example Roman Jakobson's, make themselves
heard again in this context, and what would that imply?
And so on and so forth.
But then I went to the poetry reading last night
and came back and decided to begin again.
And I don't want to address the concept of conceptual poetics
as much as some of these writing strategies and methods that
have been manifested here at the Poetry Center,
but also elsewhere of course during the last 5 to 10 years
or so.
But also earlier certainly.
Because one of the most exciting consequences of the use
today of appropriation transcript and strategies,
transposition between different contexts or media.
Le tout le monde cut up montage remediation-- redescription,
to use a term that I bumped into recently in a new book
by the French critic Franck Leibovici,
where he uses it to trace the contours of what
he calls a poetic document.
One of the most exciting consequences of such strategies
is without doubt the way they open up
new vistas for literary history and criticism.
Marjorie Perloff's brilliant rereading
of Benjamin's Arcades Project as conceptual poem the other night
illustrates this.
And for example, in France during the last 10 years,
these forms of writing, which have been deployed by numerous
poets, have paved the way for a new approach to Lautréamont
or rather Isidore Ducasse's strange second work, Poésies.
However, apart from being a gift to the literary historian
critic who can construct a framework for reconceptualizing
earlier works the literature and reconsider traits in them that
had before had to be seen as failures or oddities,
these methods do of course also raise questions
about the writing and reading here now.
And with yesterday's poetry still sounding-- or roaring--
in my head, I would like to propose three such questions
or comments or whatever.
The first takes as a starting point Caroline Bergvall's
wonderful moves from modulations between different languages
last night, an issue that she also addressed in her talk
during the morning and which was also discussed
by Marjorie in her lecture.
For example, in relation to Finnish poet Leevi Lehto,
who also has come up with a thought-provoking idea
of a broken or failed English as the potential lingua
franca for a global poet to come, not the least on the web.
And in regard to this, I was wondering--
and this is a somewhat vague question,
come to think-- if the concept of translation
could be and/or should be expanded and approached
as a kind of a key concept to describe
the poetics, the wrapping methods deployed and discussed
here.
And also, I'm curious about how you look upon a suggestion such
as [INAUDIBLE]---- from an Anglo-American point of view,
that is.
The second question or comment I want to make
was it's linked to Christian's stunning performance
as well as to a piece of advice he
gave during yesterday's panel, I think
it was, about where one should look for poetry today--
not in literature but in science, in comics,
in the mass media, and so on.
And in relation to this, he also mentioned the importance
of producing an epistemological contribution or addition
or something or effect through through this processing
in poetry of existing material found elsewhere.
In France, some contemporary poets
have tried to articulate this manipulation
as a kind of epistemo-critical tactics,
to use the word by Olivier Cantin, based
on the reconstruction and distortion
of cognitive patterns, to put it bluntly or very roughly,
that tries to go deeper in its analysis of current culture
than mere de tournament.
And of course in France we have to distinguish yourself
from the earlier methods of the situation is, for example.
So what I want to ask is perhaps how
one should count for this production of new knowledge
through these methods and also how
one should account for potential political critique
in this project.
I could want, for example, re-use here
in this context an old concept such as defamiliarization
could still be used in a productive way.
And I guess there's a number of possible accounts or answers
to come up with here.
My third comment and/or question connects
to the issue of rereading earlier works
through the same conceptual poetics.
A couple of years ago, we at the magazine
OEI that I co-edited in Sweden suggested the term archival
activism to describe part of what we've been up to since we
started in 1999, which is a kind of recontextualization
of a static and non-static material.
Or we juxtapose poetry with technical diagrams and manuals
and primers or tracks on alternative orthography
and so on.
And this is, even if it's mostly material from the 20th century,
it's also older material from early centuries.
And in the last issue that we did
that we put out just a couple of weeks ago,
within the past some of these editorial ideas by devoting
the issue as such to editorial aesthetics or editorial
poetics.
Which brings me to the question then--
and the editing is, of course, another concept
that could be addressed here, and has been addressed here,
I think, both in relation to traditional editorial practice
and to the writing program.
Anyway, this brings them to the question,
in view of the collaborative strategies that
are being developed in the poetry discussed here--
I'm thinking, for example, Christian's
recent genetics project, The Xenotext--
how much is really the idea of poetry as a solitary activity
affected by this?
Could one or should one, for example,
include editorial collectives and editing in this field?
I have no idea really what that would imply,
except for that Kenneth's most suggestive conceptual poems
so far-- in that case perhaps wouldn't
be Soliloquy or Day or the still unfinished Day
but the continuously expanding archive of UbuWeb.
Thanks.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Should I just?
Yes.
So I'm going to continue what you were talking about in terms
of the material that's already there because that's
a concept that I'm very interested in
and going back to some of the questions
that Tenney Nathanson posed yesterday.
I'm going to start by briefly talking about Beckett
because one of Beckett's radio plays
is going to help me frame my comments here.
And I'm going to talk about Cascando.
And for those of you who maybe haven't
looked at Cascando for a while, the premise of Cascando
is fairly simple.
There's an opener.
And there's a voice.
And the voice is in a box.
And then there's music, which is also in the box.
And the opener, what the opener does is open the two boxes.
And in this radio play, what the voice says
is fascinating because, well, what the BBC commentary will
tell you is that this is a radio play
about the creative process, which is a little bit too
simplistic of an explanation.
But what the voice says in Cascando is, this one,
this one is the right one.
No more stories.
Nearly there.
Almost there.
I'll sleep after I finish this story.
And he's trying to tell the story of a character named
Woburn.
And he's always nearly finished, nearly there, this one,
this one is the right one.
And what fascinates me is that yesterday, when
Tenney Nathanson was talking, he posed a question.
And the question was this.
Was it worth doing?
Was this one more worth doing than that one?
So this question of 'this one, nearly there,
almost finished,' how does that apply to conceptual poetry?
So in thinking about this notion of being nearly finished--
and we've been talking a lot about Duchamp--
and when you think about it, it's
almost an irrelevant dialogue, when
you think about the creative process involved
with conceptual poetry.
Conceptual poetry is never nearly finished.
It's ready made-- a lot of it.
It's material that's already there.
So that's a concept that really fascinates me.
So moving on to that is, of course
that goes back to Craig's question,
the new test of poetry.
Not whether it's better, but whether it
could have been done otherwise.
So is this one, is it the right one?
And what's interesting in conceptual poetry
is that, I'm not saying that it's an uncreative process.
I think certainly not.
But the interesting thing is that the creative dialogue
has been reversed somewhat.
Because in Cascando, what you have is representation
of the creative process.
Will this one be the right one?
Is it the right one?
I can't come up with the right one.
Whereas in conceptual poetry, it's all already there.
Was this the right one?
So that play on the creative process,
I do think it's a reversal of the creative process
rather than a negation of it is what I'm trying to say.
So the other thing I want to talk about
was Kenneth Goldsmith's talk yesterday.
It seems like it was a while ago, but it was yesterday.
Because to me, when he was talking about the fact
that I don't need to say anything,
it's all already there.
I just need to decide what to write down.
And I don't want to simplify this too much,
but he's not the voice in Cascando.
He's the opener.
In Cascando, what the opener says
is that, I don't say anything, I open, I close.
Kenneth Goldsmith to me is saying somewhat
at the same thing--
I start the recorder, I stop the recorder.
It's sound.
I open.
I close.
So I'm not trying to simplify the relationships here
because it's not all that simple.
Because in Cascando, the opener does much more than open.
The opener talks a lot.
So.
[LAUGHTER]
The opener is a voice as well.
The opener talks a whole lot in this play.
So he's not just an opener.
But the search for le mot juste, this search for the right one--
is this the right one, can I come up with the right word--
it's almost irrelevant because the words are all already
there.
Kenneth Goldsmith in writing Day,
the words are all already there.
There's no anxiety what word comes next.
So the question, the relevant question--
that's why I want to go back to Tenney Nathanson's question--
is, was it worth doing?
Was this the right one?
And how do you tell that it was the right one,
rather than what will be the right one?
And I had some other points to make.
But I mean, that's pretty much what
I wanted to say in a nutshell.
I don't think I've gone on quite long enough.
But I mean, yeah.
You must go on.
I have more time?
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
So I had a few more things I want to talk about.
I can continue.
OK.
Because one thing we haven't talked about yet
is chance and chance operations.
I mean, the word chance almost hasn't come up yet
in the discussions.
And we've talked about Duchamp, the readymades,
and all of this.
But chance is also also something
very important to Duchamp.
And I'm thinking specifically of the 3 Standard Stoppages,
this notion of falling, a chant Cascando,
and the falling of the three strings that he dropped.
And the notion of chance is interesting
because what conceptual poetry tries to do from way back when
it was language poetry, I guess, is supposedly,
it's trying to cut out subjectivity.
And what I'm saying is that subjectivity is being equated
with chance in a lot of ways.
And when you think about the way that Duchamp
talked about chance, he called it canned chance.
When he was playing roulette, that's what he called it.
He called it canned chance.
So a lot of conceptual poetry, what I'm seeing
is that a lot of it is canned subjectivity.
I guess because to me, chance a lot of times
is the same as subjectivity, or that's
the way that conceptual poetry sees it a lot of times.
And I guess what I mean by that is that it's never objective.
The choices are never objective.
It's always, if there's chance, there
is always a canned chance.
And no, it can't be just anything
because decisions were made.
There are two books that I want to mention in particular.
Well, actually I want to mention three things.
Crystallography, in terms of a canned subjectivity,
I mean, it's a brilliant book but among many things
that it is, it's a book about Christian's father.
And Susan Howe is not here, but The Midnight, it's
a book about her mother.
And that this is a very personal poetry in addition
to the-- it's not just a machine language,
as I think a lot of poets would say it is.
It's really not.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
There's absolutely no personal biography at all in that book.
There's none whatsoever.
It's not about my dad that at all.
There's nothing in there but my father.
Your father was not a gem cutter?
No, of course not.
[LAUGHTER]
He's an alcoholic plumber.
[LAUGHTER]
Now you don't get to talk.
You don't get to talk, Christian.
You don't get to talk.
The subject just be silent.
About what one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.
We can set historical facticity aside, right?
Right?
I think that's--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Marjorie says I'm right, Christian.
[LAUGHTER]
She's right to be allowed to say--
Enough said.
It is a book about your father.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
It's different from what Susan Howe is doing.
But you're not a robot.
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
So moving on.
But a fascinating phrase that Kenneth talked about yesterday
was unboring boring.
And is there an unsubjective subjectivity
is what I'm trying to say, because a lot of times
poets will take subjectivity and they'll turn it into chance.
It's not subjective.
It's chance.
It's intervention.
It's all these other words other than personal, emotional.
It becomes chance.
Operations becomes chance.
And we talked about John Cage.
I think Marjorie mentioned John Cage, the fact that no, he
didn't let any noise in because he
had very personal feelings about what sounds are and music is.
But for John Cage, it was always chance operations,
not personal operations or emotional operations.
And I guess to end with that, I'll
end with a quotation from Charles Bernstein.
Because Charles Bernstein has this piece.
It's a digital piece.
It's not his father.
No, it's not his father.
It's not about his father.
It's about humanity.
There's a piece that he calls "Politics."
And it's a digital piece.
And the letters of color-coded.
I wish there was an image of it that I could show you.
But what this piece says is this,
"For all the utopian promise of technological optimists,
the answer is not in our machines, but in our politics."
So I think that's what I had to say.
Thank you, Marie.
[APPLAUSE]
Hi.
Thank you for being here.
I would love to pick up your images of paternity--
and to my mind more interesting, maternity.
And I promise to get back to that.
But I wanted to start by saying that when I first
saw the conference announced, I was
intrigued by the title, which is Conceptual Poetry & Its Others.
And the part that intrigued me was the "others"
part because the "conceptual poetry" part was pretty well
out there on the web.
Lots of people had definitions and ideas about it.
And that's all great.
But the "others" part, I wasn't so sure of.
So I was really happy when I heard
how the others came to this conference
through a collaboration between Marjorie and Charles.
And there was some thought, I guess,
of John Ashbery's "The Other Tradition."
And I thought, well, that's the other tradition.
But I was interested in the "others" tradition.
And so I was thinking of that magazine
that had run from 1915 to 1919.
And that set itself up in opposition
to Harriet Monroe's poetry magazine, the mainstream
magazine at the time.
And that magazine was called Others.
And Others had a famous motto, "The old expressions are always
with us, and there are always others."
And so here we are among the others which are the others.
Now I had a chance to look through those magazines
at the UB poetry collection.
And what caught my eye was not only that famous one,
the Spectric issue, which makes fun of all the images posed.
And I would say, the tradition of making fun of poetry
that one doesn't respect, the tradition
that's alive and well here.
But also the next issue, which has as its motto on others,
it says, Poetry for the mind's eye alone."
Poetry for the mind's eye alone.
And then-- and this is a little embarrassing,
we have to work on this a little bit-- not to be read aloud.
Now I'm going to say that this is the tradition--
from which lots of what's happening here--
is happening.
Because I don't see anything being read aloud,
in the sense that you sit and you got a piece of paper,
and you read the words on the piece of paper
in as dull and regular voice as you possibly can--
which is a lot of what I hear at the poetry readings
that I have to go to because of my job, and not this one
that I go to because it's a lot of fun.
I have heard every other kind of reading here, not just reading
aloud.
I've heard performing, deforming, reforming,
incanting, decanting, recanting.
OK.
We've heard lots of things.
We've had lots to hear.
But we have not heard, quote, "poetry to be read aloud".
Yeah, I had to take elocution lessons.
I think most people in this room don't know what that is.
Marjorie might have a mother who could tell her
what your mother was in a different place.
But little girls especially used to have to memorize poems.
I didn't mind that.
And then you would stand up in front of an audience
and recite them.
And it was important what you wore,
and you were to hold your hands, sort of like this.
And it was a whole thing.
OK.
This is not what's happening here.
OK.
But I see in Others, we've looked a lot
at European ancestors paternities, maternities,
things like that.
Very conceptual poetry I think we have it
on the American side.
Now just as a footnote here-- and I'm not
going to follow this up here, although I might somewhere
else-- in that issue of Others magazine
is Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird."
First publication of that.
Now that's a number for the mind's eye alone--
not to be read aloud.
No joke.
So quite wonderful.
So how do these others manifesting
itself has this tradition of others manifesting itself
in the poetry we've got here?
Well, I'm not going to get involved
in the major discussion of definitions.
But I would like to play with one of the definitions that
intrigued me and see how it might
apply to a range of the poetry we've been hearing.
And one is, I think it's Charles Bernstein who
sees it as conceptual poetry as language pregnant with meaning.
Or Charles, is it poetry pregnant with meaning?
Thought.
I beg your pardon?
Thought.
Poetry pregnant with thought.
OK.
Thank you.
So poetry pregnant with thought.
And this image of pregnancy, OK, and this since I
felt first very intrigued by it.
But if it's poetry pregnant with thought,
and if poetry is news that stays news,
then it might be staying pregnant.
And I was like really, really uncomfortable.
So I thought--
[LAUGHTER]
--we should expand a little bit.
And I said, he couldn't have meant that.
He couldn't have meant that.
That's too gross.
So maybe he's thinking, it's poetry.
You know, when you're pregnant, it's a good thing.
Because it depends how you get pregnant.
That would be a whole other question.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, it's because I speak-- but, OK, I won't go there.
But at the moment, I quite seriously
think that if it comes to the idea of this conceptual poetry,
this poetry we've been hearing of is more than most poetry.
I get some sense of it being inhabited by something other.
Now I wouldn't say that this is the only poetry that from which
one ever gets that feeling.
And I mean, I'm not just saying that this
is appropriated stuff.
But let's take something like Kenny Goldsmith,
where it's just clearly--
and I asked Kenny, so I can tell you-- it doesn't mean anything.
It's right there.
It's flat out.
Day is just that newspaper.
OK.
Good.
And always have that sense.
Always have that sense of something other is in it.
There's something uncanny about it, if only
because of the doubling feeling.
And actually, I'm with Marjorie here.
If you read it carefully, it is quite amazing of what
kinds of things emerge.
And so this being inhabited by some of the other.
And then I thought, well, does this work for other things?
Well, just this morning I was thinking about Tracie.
Tracie Morris talked very early in the conference.
None of the poetry she writes isn't about slavery.
Did I somehow went to that?
Slavery?
And this morning, I was just intrigued.
Embellishment hiding in the music, to say something else.
Always embellishment hiding in the music
to say something else.
And I wouldn't be surprised if we
were to look at, say, Christian's book
and hear that as well.
If we were to find--
am I OK with time?
Yeah.
OK.
And so I was thinking, again with the pregnancy,
which just keeps coming back.
And now that I think of Kenney Goldsmith's last reading
with the letters-- which made me even more uncomfortable
with the notion of being permanently
pregnant-- the giving birth to five babies at once.
It was very interesting to me how these things happened.
Then I thought, well, Caroline Bergvall and her language,
which is so inhabited by other languages and the amazing fact
of her being able to publish in English an English poem
and in a journal that publishes only Norwegian.
I mean, we saw that so these language inhabit each other
and in each manifestation of the language,
there's another language going.
As the occult--
Swensen, and I was immediately--
I mean, I have been looking for ghosts frankly--
and I was so happy to find the ghost in the garden,
to find the notes.
Let me see.
These ghosts, manifestations of unacknowledged but communally
produced grief.
And that I think gets a little closer to the kinds of--
it's not just a joke about this language
being inhabited by something else,
but that this is a meaningful kind of thing.
For Christian Bök, I mean there's hardly a place where
you don't feel the other.
But I was thinking of the viruses taking over.
I mean, that's very much a part of the thing.
And one could go on.
I was talking with other people at the conference,
and they were very struck with how Craig Dworkin managed
to get self-portraits in there.
So each of these things is inhabited
by some other kind of thing.
And this is a little thread that I
would be interested in tracing as I continue to think
about conceptual poetry.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Just as I start, I'm going to hand out rectangles.
I'm going to hand a rectangle out to everyone.
Here.
If someone will take these and find a way
to start them going around.
And I'll make it maybe less than clear later why I did that.
What a tangled web we weave, when first
we practice to conceive.
It's interesting, just hearing paternity, maternity,
and pregnancy--
of course, we also use "conceived"
to talk about what we do when we make babies and children.
But I wonder why we don't then call the ensuing product
conceptual humans.
[LAUGHTER]
It's absolutely great that this is here, and for some of us
have been here--
in my case, 24 years--
helping to cultivate a home for the work
that is related to Conceptual Poetry & Its Others.
And for the Poetry Center to embrace this and do something
so big, it's magnificent.
For me specifically, when I came here 24 years ago,
I brought one project in progress,
which was a book by Jackson Mac Low titled French Sonnets.
And it had a lot to do with both French and English
dictionaries.
And I had an odd dream about that time in which
the main characters in the dream were Shakespeare and Samuel
Johnson working on his dictionary.
Last night, oddly enough-- don't often
have dreams with literary people in them.
[LAUGHTER]
But last night, I had one.
And I was walking along the Seine in Paris,
and there was Craig Dworkin.
[LAUGHTER]
And sitting at a chair, at a table, only oddly enough,
he was entirely encased in either of vinyl or leather bag.
And yet somehow within that, he was breathing and functioning
and speaking normally.
And that's my distance in 24 years,
from Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson to Craig Dworkin.
Very pleasant dream, right?
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
One of the things I wanted to maybe later return to,
if this panel is to talk about it,
is a question that actually Craig brought up
which is, is there social and political import
outside of this work?
Where does it point to?
Or does it incite to activism?
And I remember, when he said that in his talk,
there was a, pretty soon after, a question from Kenny--
or a comment from Kenny-- about wanting
to preserve the sacred space of the poem for misbehavior
for theft and transformation and faking
and various things, which you could not
do in the real world with impunity.
But we need to have a place for that.
And I guess I'm wondering, can we reserve the space for that
but also take it out into the world
with political and social import?
Or is that a kind of conundrum we work at?
And I think there's been a lot of commentary--
Brian Reed and various people-- that we do
take it out into the world.
And we do read, for example, Rob Fitterman's Metropolis,
16 in the list in it.
And we think about those corporations and corporate acts
and what they mean and how we are part of it.
But I think that's probably open for more conversation.
OK.
Those are a few of the random notes I have.
Or not necessarily random, but different things I
want to address.
Another one I want to talk about is
how great it's been that much of the work here--
certainly Christian's performance,
much that Tracie has talked about, Charles's recantation--
has to do with, for me, it has to do
with the physical pleasure.
A physical pleasure in poetry. and
an absolute physical pleasure.
And I'll read something about that in a moment.
And I think even in Cole's talk, mentioning
when subject matters dominant in poetry,
the surface and the texture tends to fade away.
And we don't address it so much.
And this bringing out the surface and the texture
is part of a physical pleasure.
I'm just going to read the first two
paragraphs of the main piece of a book I've been working
on in a while that addresses that, and also brings it
back to something not at but maybe near the origins
of poetry and English.
"To Louis Zukofsky's definition of the value of poetry
as the experience of pleasure through sight, sound,
and intellection, I would add another quality--
that of tactile physical pleasure, related to sound,
but located in the pleasure of producing sound rather than
hearing it.
The addition of physicality leads
us to start somewhere near the beginning, at least of poetry
in English.
"And though I might venture with little cat feet
into Chinese, French, Italian Greek, Roman, Russian, Spanish,
and other poetries, I will remain primarily with English
simply because it is what I know best.
Though I carry no illusion that its poetry
is even one iamb better than that
written in any other language.
To the beginning we go and to physical pleasure.
"'Hwaet.
We Gardena' from the first line of Beowulf, circa 680 to 800.
You don't have to know what that means,
although it helps to know it is a kind of boastful greeting
said with gusto.
That the "ah" of 'Hwaet' should be
pronounced like this short "ah" of draft or gnat.
That the "hwuh" could literally be
sounded like a wind blowing until it
closes in that W sound.
And that the word 'We' is pronounced
more like the contemporary W-A-I than like W-E, as in us.
"That the R in 'Gardena' should be slightly rolled
and the first syllable of 'Gardena'
should be noticeably longer than any other in that word.
The "dei" in 'Gardena' should be spoken like "day"
but cut off just a bit short, and the final "nah"
should sound like the final "na" in banana.
Now say it all, first slowly.
Hwaet We Gardena.
Then again and again, each time a bit faster,
but more with confidence than we speed until you
say it as if you are greeting a friend who
has come into the very friendly pub in which you would
like to down a pint now and then,
and have a very good time--
or what Tracey called fun, a recreational creative act
or something like that.
Feel what your lips do at the beginning
to both produce and cut off that wind, how the tongue slaps
inside the mouth on that first T, how you
go to the back of the mouth at the beginning of 'Gardena'
but then come up toward the front to roll that R.
And then just stop, neither too suddenly nor with too much
lingering as you let out that short exhalation of "nah."
If it doesn't feel good to say, you're
either not doing it right or you haven't considered
that speech is a physical pleasure related
to kissing, breathing in cool air,
cooing, whistling, oral sex, licking a popsicle,
and other great things you can do with your mouth.
And then I'm going off on a different tangent
with my final comment, to take this back to the visual art
world but a different culture.
And that is that I wanted to note some works
by contemporary Chinese artists that I
had the pleasure of seeing recently.
And these were in an exhibition called
Shu: The Reinvention of the Book in Contemporary Chinese
Art, which was in New York and then
in the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and two artists
in particular, one Xu Bing, the other Song Dong,
work that I think relates but gives
a different context to some of the things we've talked about.
In Xu Bing's Book of the Sky takes
place in about a room that's about 50 feet long by 30 feet
wide.
And in that room, on the floor are literally hundreds of books
all open to the center, printed with Chinese characters.
Along the walls are pages from these books,
totally covering the walls as wallpaper.
At the ends of the books on the floor
are wooden little platforms.
It looks like altars you would go to.
And hanging from the ceiling are about a 12-foot wide scroll,
the length of the room that comes almost to the floor
and then back up lit from above, looking like an altar
to the book and learning.
But in fact, all of the 40,000 characters carved by Xu Bing
and printed are not Chinese characters.
They look like them, but they are absolutely unreadable.
There's some kind of comment on that going on.
And then the Song Dong, I'll shorten this
by just referring to two works which are
about things that aren't there.
And one is so-called Book Without Words,
in which he has a book, and every page has a rectangle,
like the one you have.
He says it's his most important work he's done.
He's never shown to anyone.
He reads it every day.
And he notes at the beginning of the reading
in the left margin outside the rectangle
and the end of the reading on the right side of the margin.
And he reads anywhere from a few minutes to a half an hour.
He's been reading it for 11 years.
And he's not finished yet.
And he's never going to show it to his wife.
He hides it And he calls it his most important work.
And then another work that he did,
Song Dong, called Water Diary--
It's an ongoing work--
where he keeps a regular diary, but he writes it
in a calligraphy brush dipped in water on stone.
So it evaporates almost immediately.
And I oddly find both of those works by him
to be, in my mind, highly expressivist, and even
spiritual, in a sense.
And so I would probably dispute this gap between expressivist
and conceptual.
Although as I have understood many people talking
in this room-- and I think Craig might even agree--
it's really not meant to be an impermeable gap.
There's a lot of conversation between that.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, first off, I want to thank Frances and everyone affiliated
with the Poetry Center and people
from the University of Arizona, who have made this fantastic
event possible.
It's really been an extraordinary few days for me.
I'm a poetry critic, not a poet.
And it's an extremely rare opportunity for someone like me
to come, be a hanger on, and witness so many first class
writers reading their work, talking about it,
discussing the ins and outs, theory and practice
of composition, talking about the nature
and future of the art form.
And I'm really inspired.
I want to rush back to my cubicle, my computer,
and my cat, and get back to writing.
And I'm at work on a book project
about visual, verbal relations in contemporary poetry.
And I do want to apologize in advance
if any of your words or ideas find
their way into that manuscript.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean it only in praise.
And I promise that I will adhere to the letter of the US Digital
Millennium Copyright Act so that your substantial income
from permission fees is not interrupted.
[LAUGHTER]
As trying to figure out what to talk about today as a critic--
not somebody following after the sorts of creative
or non-creative work that's been going on here--
I decided that I wanted to start with a moment in Marjorie's
keynote address where she brought up
the Russian foremost critic Yury Tynyanov
and his ideas about how literary history works.
And in a quotation that Marjorie read,
Tynyanov talks about the evolution of genre.
But it turns out that's actually a very bad translation
of the Russian.
The word is not "evolution."
Evolution makes one think that there's
something homologous between biological and literary
systems, that one can talk about poems in relation
to the survival of the fittest, that this
is the poem that is best suited to now and it will win.
The word in Russian is not of evolution-- "эволюция."
It's "смущение," which comes from "смущать'" which means
to confuse or to confound or to mix up.
And so if you think about it, that is an interesting idea--
that genres become confused over time.
It's not that they evolve in any one direction.
They just get more confusing.
And that's helped me as I've grappled
with an academic parlor game played ever
since I arrived in graduate school, which is "What
is the state of poetry today?"
And you see this debate going on endlessly.
Is postmodernism over?
If so, what is post postmodernism?
Are we post-language poetry?
What would it mean for language poetry to be over?
Are we post avant-garde?
Can the avant-garde ever be over?
I mean, these questions go on and on.
Where are we today?
It's a question that I find both ridiculous and endlessly
fascinating.
I mean, are we into the period of new lyricism?
New riddle-ism?
New narrative?
Are we in an eclectic moment?
Are we elliptical?
Are we rhomboidal?
[LAUGHTER]
These questions are silly, and yet they
do speak to this desire on the part of commentators
to try to encapsulate or describe things that they
see going on out there.
And in the spirit of this, I'm about to engage
in some absolutely wild unsustainable generalizations.
[LAUGHTER]
And it comes partly from the kinds of work
that we're seeing here this weekend
but from also my reading of a lot of other poets
and trying to figure out how to talk about them.
People like say, it's different, it's
Sawako Nakayasu, and Kevin Young, Lisa Robertson,
Harryette Mullen,-- a range of different kinds of writers
and in thinking about how one could ever
lump all these people together in a meaningful way.
Some possible starting points for conversation.
One is that a lot of today's writers
seem to be very aware of poetry as a multimedia or mixed media
art form.
That there is a sense and the awareness
that the word is not just on the page,
but it can be performed orally, kinesthetically, animated
on screens.
That the word can be seen, and that in order
to explore the full dimensions of poetry,
one often resorts to working in different media
or learning from other media, or that the same poem can be
practiced in different media.
And that this awareness, that it's not simply
that language is verbal, vocal, visual, but bound up
in questions of mediation, it has led a lot of writers,
it seems to me, to begin questioning
what materiality is.
It's not just that language is something obdurate,
that you can pronounce it and savor
the sounds of its sensual.
But that language is all about and bound up in questions of,
what is information?
What is embodiment?
What happens as one moves from one arena
to another site specificity?
And so that questions ranging from ekphrasis to silence
come to the fore in new and intriguing ways.
And it does so in, and often I would add, two corollaries.
One is that this way of thinking about language and writing
is what Kristeva--
Julia Kristeva, the theorist-- would call post-semiotic.
That language is always seen as having
cultural, social, and historical specificity sedimented in it.
This is different from, say, the Russian futurist ideal
that one could attain a pure transrational language that
would be international, not in any way
specifiable by identity, by nationality, and so forth.
But we're in a post-semiotic approach to language.
And also the sense that language is subject to and
ought to be archived.
That one looks around and finds traces
of languages in the past in order
to understand present language use.
And that in creating an archive, one
is contributing to the ongoing processual investigation
of what is language and what is poetry.
I'd finally say, in this kind of a typology,
that a lot of these kinds of writers
are interested in project-based writing.
That instead of the lyric being the unit that
is given the greatest weight, what we've begun to see
are books that are unified around a particular area
of inquiry, a problem that is to be solved,
or an intuition that is explored variously.
And it's not even the book is necessarily the unit,
that there are ways in which one can watch the writers that
have been here, exploring "what is
an anagram" in a variety of different kinds of conditions
and places so that it's project-based work.
And at that point, one begins to try
to figure out what are the bounds of the poem.
And it begins to become a question of "where
is a poem," so that something like Caroline Bergvall's
shorter or short Chaucer tales--
where are they?
They're downloadable.
You can see them in performance.
There are different kinds of recordings of them.
Are those different poems?
Are they part of the same poem?
Do one have to gather a variorum of all possible recordings
in order to talk about them?
So that these questions of boundaries
are exploded and newly interesting.
I think I will wrap up after those generalizations
that everyone should feel free to attack by announcing
a label for this kind of aesthetic
that in the spirit of Frank O'Hara, we can say,
I just invented it--
but I just plagiarize-- but I've just invented it,
and it will be widely known.
From Nicolas Bourriaud, his book Postproduction, French museum
curator and thinker, who argues that we should begin
trying to find a vocabulary to describe
the art of the '90s and the present decade.
That this is coming out of the political and social conditions
of the 1960s.
That times have changed, we need a new kind
of analytic rhetoric.
And one of the things he suggests
is that we should look at the sorts of languages
to come out of DJ culture or other kinds
of contemporary performance.
And he is very big on the DIY--
do it yourself.
And the idea is that today's writers
have so many tools available to them--
from Pro Tools, where you can manipulate sound on a Mac
laptop, or video tools, that you can put your cell phone
and record speakers and then manipulate that later.
That with all these tools available,
one becomes a kind of post-production studio,
working with the word in as many different kinds of venues
as one wishes.
That it opens out beyond poetry--
to be simultaneously filmmaker, choreographer, and so forth--
in very exciting ways.
I want to end by mentioning a couple of things
I've heard from some of the younger people
here who haven't asked questions--
I would urge you to--
that, for instance, collaboration
is very much at the forefront of what younger artists are up
to these days.
When one is talking about mixed and multimedia art forms,
it's hard to be an expert in all of them.
So that it would be interesting to hear
some of the people who've been reading here to talk about what
it's like to collaborate and be involved with distributed
agency, as it's been called.
And also the kinds of questions about lineage
and where in places oneself in regards
to the present industry once one is working in a mixed media
fashion.
Can one talk about only poets as part of one's background?
Does that make any sense?
So anyway, that's where I'll end.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Most of us will try to use a tampon at some time.
You're all going to make me lose my mind.
In post conceptual writing, the idea or concept
is prepositional to the work.
And so it's important to know how to insert
a tampon the right way.
The idea embodied in the writing,
the writing ideated in the body.
As in constrained writing and conjoined babies,
the concept cannot exist apart from its formal nature,
which is necessarily incarnate, necessarily twin.
Up in here.
Because we now understand that the brain is not Cartesian.
Oh, what to me, the little room.
Inserting a tampon seems tricky at first.
But after trying several times, insertion
becomes as easy as putting on lipstick.
America is going to go all out.
And there is no essentialism in the matter of the medium,
just as there is no segregation of conception and perception,
production and consumption, actus and reus, song
and silence.
The key is to relax.
Most of us will try to put on lipstick at some time.
Most of us will try to kill someone at some time.
Some of us unintentionally, some of us, someone else.
Worrying about it may make you tense, making insertion
even harder.
Many of us will die thinking putting on someone else.
Someone will die thinking of his beloved--
if I can't have you, no one can.
Another will die in the arms of his enemy--
if I can have you, anyone can.
Up in here.
This is expressionism, yet avoids transom subjectivity.
That was brimmed with prayer and rest.
This is appropriation, yet dodges trim fidelity.
Post-conceptual writing peeps through the tumorous masks
of the many.
Like the African kru mask, the eyes
are several and protruding.
They see out and in.
The unliving shot through with the sight of the future dead.
The tip of the applicator's larger outer tube
should be pointed to into the body, towards the lower back.
The end of the smaller inner tube with the removal cord
showing should be pointed away from the body.
Subjectivity is neither voided nor exclusive.
Language roams both at large and at lyric.
Terrorists trying to act the fool.
We are aware of the bleary implications of multiplicity
and the cool terror of the short-term eternal.
Up in here, up.
The cult of the author is not replaced
by the cult of the authority or the kissing crush of anxiety.
There is no presumption that the individual ought be evacuated
or extenuated, or that mergers and acquisitions is
any more or less romantic than acting as either art's arbiter
or abattoir.
In here, there is sentiment solitary and confusion communal
and isn't it uncomfortable?
With the other hand spread the folds
of the skin around the vaginal opening.
He bade me out into the gloom.
There's chance.
America has done lost its cool.
Anecdotal, as many biographical events,
meaning it may be proof of psychology and ontology.
For even fascists have fingerprints and daddy
is Marinetti, come, Missy E.
Place the tip of the outer tube of the tampon
applicator in the opening of the hell, we say.
Work stirs bombs to be packaged as carefully
and as tightly wired to the vagina.
The piece must be read more closely than the CV closer,
than nary ambition, than dance to dancer or pisser to pissoir,
than the open shores of the evermore to the never shall be.
We're going to bring it home to you.
Even the dematerialized is materialization,
gendered colored and quick.
Just ask information management.
And it's going to be quick.
For all you terrorists make me sick.
We all agree that some have bigger tits.
And my breast lies upon his breast, pointed and pointless
like the tribe's tubular eyes.
Like lumber lies latent in ships and trees,
and maybe more or less permeable, penetrable,
and seaworthy.
As the picture shows.
For the question is not whether you've
built the boat itself, though you might, could.
The vagina slants upward.
Or whether it's a skiff or a scowl, though it may well be,
and towards the back.
But whether you pompom the French sailors
and what's stowed in the hold.
So in the tampon, towards a point
low in the small of the back.
Symbolic or semantic, the curved area of the lower back.
We want cargo.
Oh, what to me of my mother's care?
Appropriation is, what the hell you smoking on?
One gesture, think it's, were an echo,
time we flarf this one bitch.
Gesture, wearing slapped, erasure
is one where Eulalia gestures to echo,
wherein I am the sacrificial lamb.
The Taliban.
The statistical me, army.
Authentic and to ready-made ubiquity.
The house where I was.
We are media denim, safe and warm.
Expansive in our cognitions, our recognitions, our recon,
our shrunken ambitions.
Load up.
The danger of a face man is replication
without embedded critique, whereby
I regurgitate the cha-cha of culture
as freshly copied bit writ by me.
Gently push in.
Or Alternatively hop aboard the 2-2 of Arbeit Macht Frei
fungibility.
The danger of expressionism is a belief in the ace of Yeats.
The tampon applicator insertion of one transcendent.
We were overlies, the et ceterative eyes of flies.
Let's have tradition without trajectory,
meaning without missionary position, co-cogitation
without the bang bang against the laurel headboard.
For us, defacement is also the thinning of the cervix
as it dilates during labor, which expresses something that
is, by virtue of its birth, no longer a historical, no longer
mine.
For flushable cardboard applicator, airborne.
Post-conceptualism is the realization
of the sentimental, the senti- that
is cogitative perception, the mental that
is popped cognition.
The shadowy object of the concept
may not be dematerialized any more than a Dada scream
on scrummed or rose blossom, unpeddled
for the tangled web of my hair.
Of what is actuality and what is effect
is true as to be as pink and gray
neurology, as all things produced by belief.
Tampons ease in the applicator by.
We live amidst a glut of popping eye sockets,
slightly twisting or rotating it from side to side.
And in the wet collision between the synthetic, that
is to say perceptual and analytic,
that is to say conceptual fundament.
And in each, I'm a stone motherfucker,
carving out handholds in the pendulous rock.
Hook up.
Avoid twisting a plastic applicator,
which slides in best when pushed at the proper angle.
My breath mixed with his and hers, hers and his,
it's and it is.
Locked and cocked, will hide us from the bitter storm.
Navy, stop.
Post-conceptual writing is a cathedral
of the least seen in Kong, comprehended.
When the outer tube is inside the vagina, picture
this is an objective allegory.
Then the two fingers holding the applicator tube, touch
the writing is rubric and rebrus.
Blow them, and then place your finger or fingers up.
Another Baroque carnival with me tomorrow, borrowed motion.
Air Force, so hiding hair and dewy eyes.
There's far too much presence for us to pretend absence.
Too much shit at our vaginal opening
to pretend to meet middle-aged management.
Too much of the other hand, at the end
of the inner to them up to, where the court comes out
of not enough Marines.
Post-conceptual writing is a poetics
of the leather-bound, improbable.
The crowning point where sound calls around the neck, and baby
turns blue in creamy anticipation.
I am no more with life and death.
Like all rank gods, we insist on excessive instantiation.
That is to say, what if everyone was a woman?
That is to, say nothing.
That is to say, my heart upon his warm heart lies.
What if everyone was nothing?
That is to say, another kind of man.
Push the inner tube until it is completely--
or what if everyone was-- inside the outer tube?
This pushes the tampon out of-- what-- the applicator.
And my breath is mixed.
Slice them up into freedom, into your vagina.
That's his breath.
That's what's up.
Darling, I want to say, is that still you?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks, everybody.
I'm going to try and summarize, just very
briefly, what some of the unifying features were.
And then chief panel members want to talk to each other.
And then we'll open it up for discussion.
You notice that thread went through--
now the improbable, for instance-- "other" that I think
everybody agreed that there's some kind of "other"
that has entered here.
That it is not more traditional kinds of poetry.
Brian described it so beautifully in that all
these other things are going on now.
And in fact that the text themselves
exist in different states.
I already argued this years ago about some Kenny Goldsmith
works-- that they're differential texts, in a way.
There isn't one text anymore, for one thing.
Moreover, people who work with text
work with all kinds of other things.
And ghosts and others come in, as Linda said.
And then the whole notion that Marie brought in about chance--
at which I'm very tantalized--
as a kind of and nonsubjectivity, and so on.
At the same time, maybe this is just our old friend,
defamiliarization.
Jesper brought this up in new dress.
And I think the question is about archive and editorial
things-- are things we really do, we will have to discuss--
that are important.
So actually, I don't think there was any great disagreement
on the panel.
The idea of physical pleasure and the actual tactile
pleasure.
Very good point, another thing.
So we have a kind of agreement, but also
an agreement I think that some of the more contentious things
that came up, before that some of the claims made,
that it's totally new, and so on.
It's also perhaps not the case.
And then of course, Vanessa, you're
talking about post-conceptual rather than conceptual,
so which is that.
But then as Brian said-- and I'm glad corrected me--
but of course, it is an evolution.
And I actually think I had a correct version of Tynyanov
somewhere that Michael Heim gave me.
I'm very glad for that correction.
But it is-- you'll still agree that Tynyanov's is a very
important point--
about how genres are not fixed and things change.
But on the other hand, then they come back again.
And the main thing is not to always make claims.
And the idea of collaboration which
came up, which is important.
It is of more interest to people.
And yet, how do you do it?
But you almost have to do it when
you are using all these different media
and different forms.
And you may not be any good at using the others.
So that that itself becomes a problem.
Now do you all want to ask each other?
Do you have questions for one another
that you want to bring up?
Are we all agreed that by now, we're
in post-conceptual writing?
[LAUGHTER]
No.
We don't even know what's conceptual writing.
Well, I think, though I'd like to say that post-conceptual
writing is better than conceptual writing--
it's newer and it's better--
I think it's more like post-trauma.
[LAUGHTER]
It can exist at the same time or shortly on the heels thereof.
And one may never recover from either.
One thing, I think just as we are multimedia
and now we're maybe multi periods, too.
We can be conceptual, post-conceptual, even
modernist, postmodernist, and romantic, and expressive,
as all at the same time in the same work.
And I actually think that may be possible.
But just one comment about Marie and chance.
I know Jackson Mac Low specifically used
to very much correct people when they said he was using chance,
that he was determining procedures.
And so there was nothing about chance about it.
And that's just a complicated term, using chance
and how you just be careful about it.
I still think one of the best things is Katherine
Hayles's essay on chance operations--
which is in the little book I edited on Cage--
which she says, to bear in mind that it is an operation.
You may generate something by chance to begin with.
But once you've generated it, then you're
following it as a rule.
And so I prefer actually thinking of it often
as rule-based rather than that.
Why don't we open the floor to, unless?
Why don't we open-- yeah.
Question over here.
OK.
Can I just posit up the mic?
Is that OK?
You can, but why don't you give your name?
I've been disappointed that, from the floor discussions--
Why don't you give your name?
It's useful.
My name is [INAUDIBLE],, and I want
to respond to Marie and Brian, and I guess everybody.
In a way, Linda, of course.
Marie, when you mentioned at the end
about machine versus politics, and I was wondering,
it could perhaps be the politics of the machine.
I think you need the mic.
OK.
Sorry.
It could be perhaps the politics.
I come from an oppressed culture and from music and science.
So I'm going to introduce some elements here
of evolution and physics, things like that.
So about what Craig and Christian and Ken are doing
are sort of responding to Beckett, whom I adore.
And there is a word, exactation, which
is Darwin's theories being mushed over this time.
And some of Darwin is OK, but there
is a chance and willful adaptation both working
through artificial intelligence now, but also in our brain.
And these things come up in the creative mind as well,
and the trouble about talking about these or doing these.
And I'm very much impressed by Vanessa's writing
about this because she is doing it,
what I'm going to talk about, which I also attempt to do.
First of all, writing, when we hear Avital Ronell talk
about writing, it's work.
It's ergon.
We just do the work.
And it's not just in the mind's eye
because the mind is not just between these two.
The mind is outside of ourselves as well.
And this is part of this exactation concept.
And also the fact that we cannot talk too much about these
things is because when we talk, we're talking about something
that doesn't exist anymore the minute that we talk about it.
It's like Schrodinger's cat.
And I wrote about this in how too many, many years ago.
Can we come to the question?
I mean, we want to give other people time.
OK?
Well, it's comments, actually.
All right.
But let's keep it a little short because we have other people.
I wanted to mention actually that concept is the vehicle,
just like Cole mentioned.
And that's basically it.
That there is adaptation by exactation.
And so these are the things I'm throwing out there
as comments or response to what you
two are saying, to Brian, Hugh, and Marie, and Linda.
Thank you.
Thanks, everybody.
I just wanted to respond to--
Name, can we have names?
Oh, yeah.
Rob.
Sorry.
I was very interested in Marie's term,
unsubjective subjective or unsubjective subjectivity.
And I think that there's a way that we
could think about this in terms of subjectivities
that seems interesting to me.
And why I'm bringing this up I guess
is that I think the web is very useful to talk about
at this point because we now have access
to everybody's subjectivity.
And I get in a lot of trouble by saying,
I like subjectivity, I just would rather it not be my own.
[LAUGHTER]
We got some pretty interesting examples
of this from Craig's piece, I think,
and also in Caroline's piece, where
you have lots of subjectivities coming
through the language itself, or of course, in Craig's
piece, where it's web based.
And why I think this is important,
why I think this is essential to this question,
"why conceptualism, why now," is very interesting
because for me, "why now" is we have this opportunity--
and, one could even say, responsibility--
to carve our way through this morass of information
and unsubjectivities.
And this is one term that I think
is really useful to think about, unsubjectivity or subjectivity.
Thank you.
My name is Jake Whitby.
I'm really interested in the concept
of this boring boring and unboring boring.
That's Kenneth Goldsmith.
Well my question, being a new fairly ignorant student--
like I'm new, I'm not as well read--
is for me to study stuff, that is,
to contextualize unboring boring versus boring boring.
It's like O'Hare and Ashbery's unboring, where as Lowell
and Sexton are boring.
And that's how I best learned, and I can contextualize things.
I mean, compared to other events I
go to and things that are going on, this is very unboring.
Maybe I'll just use the modifier.
And a lot of other stuff I see and read, it's very boring.
[LAUGHTER]
How for me when I best contextualize--
if you could give me some examples
that you know better than I do--
when I can contextualize what's going on conceptual poetry
to the boring boring.
Oh wow.
Who would like to address that?
Was it Marjorie?
Was that you?
We were talking about having students present readymades
in class, and they didn't work.
Yeah.
That's a boring boring.
And the readymades that Duchamp does, that's unboring boring.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I guess I'm going to take my arguments with my own way.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, just to respond to that and I guess what the panel was
saying that I think, one of the things that Kenny raised with
that-- and that has come up with notions of the physical
pleasure and conceptual notions in general--
is why something bores us.
And it has a lot to do with, I think, at the heart
that we haven't really explicitly said,
but it is implied.
And that is the notion of repetition and redundancy.
And why that becomes boring is because of its safety,
because of the way that it lulls us
into a physical interaction with the body, of rhythmically
that we are so familiar with we're not
interested in the disruption.
So we're talking about how do we disrupt things
that our physical body, that we know that's beyond the mind
but is just part of our existence.
Is it boring when it's something that we feel comfort in or not?
Or is this-- quite also this physical comfort--
predicate the idea of something being of interest revelatory?
Some people can argue the exact opposite, like when
you put chance in that context.
Which is the origins of what we talk
about when we discuss poetry--
the spirituality, the notion of an elevation.
People would say that's not born of it,
but it goes back to what you were saying
at the very beginning, Marjorie, about how
this visuality negotiate with poetry and poetics in this way,
and the mastery of imitation as a form of repetition
and redundancy and stuff, too.
So maybe this is what we're talking about.
It actually does come back to the notion
of physical pleasure, the body and the Western concept
of the body should be alienated from us.
And I think this also brings up a really, really interesting
Greenbergian question underneath that, which
is, how do you tell what works?
Let's talk about Fountain for a second, OK.
Part of the thing with that, it wasn't just
a urinal on a platform.
It was a urinal, A, in a museum.
It was also a urinal on its side.
And what I don't see talked about very much is,
the view of the urinal, when you were
looking at it in the museum, is the view
of the pisser to the pissoir.
That's what I was alluding to in my speech.
It's the God view.
You're looking down.
Which is a view, A, if you're a woman, you can never have,
probably.
And B, if you're a man, you haven't had it like this.
So suddenly, it is unboring.
It's decontextualized, not because it
necessarily even the institutional critique,
but the actual perceptual critique, which is,
I think, part of what Tracie was talking about.
So these are elements that you can take into your assessment
of, why does something--
I mean, we all have our little Greenbergian
thing that goes up and goes, oh yeah, that's it.
But then if you try to rationalize it or do a content
thing of like, well, what can I take from "oh yeah,
that's it" to something else.
It's things like, what is the shift in perspective
that makes it worth it?
Yeah.
And also, it has to do with perception, which is often
the term I would prefer to any of the psychologizing terms.
When you think of boredom, boredom
can be a synonym of "I don't like it,"
which is why my students could use it.
But boring can also be used in the sense
that Cole was talking about figure and ground
relationships.
Often what constitutes the ground
is called boring, because it's that against which we
differentiate what stands out.
And the boring boring, I would say,
in a lot of contemporary writing would simply be when you pick
up the journal and you randomly open the page and you look
at it and like, uh, it's just like everything else .
And it's perceptually based.
And one can be attentive in different ways.
And you can take the lyric that you would normally
pass over and read it against the grain or any
of the kinds of methods that Craig talks about in his book,
Reading the Illegible.
So the boring boring can be made newly interesting.
It has to do, again, like perception
and-- as Tracie was talking about-- embodiment,
and how these things are playing out,
and how it becomes aware and conscious.
And that's what I find really exciting
in a lot of contemporary writing,
is investigating this kind of complex of issues.
And in many ways, when I talk about mixed
or multimedia, that's really talking about perception,
sensation, recognitions, that our senses work analogically.
That one can move from sight to sound and interesting ways,
as Cole was talking about.
They don't have to be metaphoric.
And so in trying to figure out how one can use terms
like "boring boring"-- that could be jargony instantly,
that can lead you to these kinds of very
profound and interesting questions.
Everybody is ready to speak on this.
I just wanted to pick up on the couple of comments
about recontextualization and connect it to something
that Linda brought up, which was the other that
is inhabiting things.
And again, not meaning this metaphorically,
that recontextualization is more than changing the frame.
But if something happens in displacing a text or anything
text here, that opens a crack that allows something else in,
so that making strange is a matter of somehow accidentally
allowing in a stranger into the heart of the text.
So how to think about that in concrete terms
rather than the metaphoric, which
is where my mind defaults, but I was suggesting that.
Name?
Just to tack on to what Cole was saying.
Although I certainly have made my life
trying to take on stigmatized terms and accepting them,
I would know just something from a more conservative point
of view that I had in terms of literary history.
And it has to do with, for me, the very negative aspects
of what progress consists of-- evolutionary dynamic.
Which is that within literary history, very often
the new methods of writing and reading
do open up new possibilities.
But they also, at the same time, close off other possibilities.
And it makes it impossible to go back to those other things
because we lose our ability to read them, find it boring.
And boring is often a term of contempt.
Sometimes we want to embrace it or what
we want to be entertaining.
But basically, it has a pejorative edge to it.
So it's always about exclusion.
But it isn't necessarily a conscious exclusion.
You can't get it, but we lose access all the time
within literary history to those things which no longer can
be read, given the new dynamics and criteria--
not only of value but just of what we can experience.
I think one of the most important aspects
of what I call second wave modernism and on--
which is poetry in the US from the 1920s
and on-- that we've understood this term "boring" much more
within a socially specific context in which
different cultural groups, different kinds
of aesthetic groupings, have created ways of understanding
things which systematically make it impossible to access
other things.
And that that's derided, thought of as boring.
And this is, of course, the great problem with Greenberg.
Because Greenberg cannot accommodate anything other than
a monological path.
So the negative aspect of evolution,
which I don't think we can totally avoid,
is a dystopian possibility.
And I don't think that there's a solution for it.
I mean, for example, it becomes impossible to read Rossetti
and Swinburne, In a way, in the wake of first wave modernism.
And maybe we can now go back to it.
But for many people--
and for many people now-- it's just impossible.
So the great pleasure of Swinburne
is very hard to recuperate.
I mean, you can do it if you decide you want to do it.
But as a practical matter, it's quite difficult.
Carlos?
Let's see.
Can I see hands?
First, Carlos.
Then Wystan, Gabriela, and Anna.
OK?
In that order.
Yeah.
We'll get to you.
Thanks, Marg.
You already said my name so I don't need to say it again.
I'm a little weird, but I'm going
to raise what I hear circulating as a philosophical argument
in a poetry symposium.
Always dangerous.
But it has to do with the question
of unsubjective subjectivity and chance.
And I think it relates to this issue of boredom
because ironically, I've always differentiated
between individual identity and subjectivity,
and understood subjectivity as a capacity to act and a capacity
to have agency.
And therefore, you can be a subject to the state.
You can be a subject for yourself,
but you're subject because you're capable of acting.
And that's different from your sense
of identity and individualism.
And when I hear conceptual poetry--
when I hear Craig's piece, when I hear Kenny's piece--
actually, there's a lot of subjectivity
behind that in terms of the choice,
in terms of the editing, in terms of the timing,
even in terms of the performance.
But there's very little identity.
There's very little individualism and that kind
of romantic notion.
So I think that it'd be interesting to differentiate
what we understand as subjectivity from what
we traditionally understand as identity.
Because when we do write poetry in a project-oriented matter,
we do collaborate.
We tend to open up our subjectivity to chance
because our sense of how we choose
and how we take responsibility for our choices and agency
will be affected by our environment,
whether it's the other people we're working with
or whether it's the time and place in which we're
working with.
And I think that affects identity and personality
and individualism, but not necessarily the subjectivity
and the capacity to do something.
I'm sorry, I just have to--
I would absolutely disagree with that.
I would just totally disagree with that.
I think that the position of abstract identity
is a classic, white male, European thing.
The dematerialized identity is as much of an identity.
Lawrence Weiner is a perfect example of white male identity
art.
It's just that people don't call it that.
And so I think that that distinction,
It's a distinction with no difference
at all, as far as I can see.
We only recognize identity by what
we see is against a backdrop.
Why does it have to be--
well, I won't get it, but why does
it have to be a group identity?
Well, it's both.
It's both.
It's obviously both.
All right.
Let's have Wystan go.
My question relates much to Linda's reminder--
it's all from that.
And it's this question of others and poetry
being inhibited with something else, which
you connected with poetry being pregnant with thought.
I just think it would be useful if we got a distinction going
between meaning which is inside poetry and meaning which
is outside.
I prefer cohabiting-- something that cohabits
rather than inhabits the meaning of the poem.
I think that, to give white to all complexity,
and ideas of conceptual poetry that we're
having in this symposium, we need
to complicate notions of service meaning
rather than meanings that are inside and in the inhabitant,
and elaborate a language for meaning which
is of the surface, of the context,
and of the contingencies that in which the work resides.
So contingencies and contextualities
pull in conversations about chance.
There was a pull-in of conversations about other texts
that precede or follow.
And I think there is a realm of complex meaning
possible by exploring that way-- horizontally
rather than vertically.
Let's move it paratactically rather than downwards.
Are you going to talk about that this afternoon?
Maybe not.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
I think the next person was Gabriela.
I'm just doing this in sequence, and if you
want to speak, raise, because otherwise,
we won't be able to take care of it.
All right, Gabriela, and then Anna.
And then Robert?
Roberto?
To go back to this recontextualization
and the conservative or the old school,
I was wondering if we could--
I had a question about metaphor.
And Kenneth mentioned moving.
What he's doing is moving information from here to there.
So what that immediately echoed for me was μεταφερειν
in the Greek bus, as in moving or translating.
And so I was wondering if in this expanded
field, as he called it, would it expand the notion--
or expand it to the ground--
the notion of metaphor?
And since Bourriaud was invoked, could we
say we're moving sideways from relational aesthetics
to translational aesthetics?
Well, that was the question I raised, actually,
about the translation being a possible concept
for articulating a lot of the stepping strategies that
are being displayed here on the conference
or manifested in the works of the poets here.
And I was just throwing out the question
because translation seemed to be a concept that
can be applied to almost all the activities that have been done.
Even though the detective job that Craig
talked about yesterday about David Hicks,
even that could be seen as translates to act, actually.
Well, I haven't got an answer to that.
And I'm not sure if it would be productive,
but it might be able then to connect these kind of practices
to sacred practices to other issues that
relates to translations between cultures
and so on today, which is an imminent issue
in cultural poetics and cultural theory in general.
That's exactly what I want to speak to.
So thank you.
Anna?
My name is Anna.
And I've been hoping that I'm not just
projecting my work on all of this
because I think it's all about translation.
And I'm really glad that other people do, too.
Because these issues that keep coming up,
the dual subjectivity and obscuring
of your own subjectivity, the simultaneous,
a lot of the work that we're talking about
is about doing a reading of something
by reframing your reading of it and, simultaneously,
writing of it.
That's authorship that's also in the service of questioning
authorship and authority and the idea of displacement,
and certainly being inhabited or haunted by the other,
by others.
These are absolutely the issues of translation
and of the translator and the translator's subjectivity.
So if we're talking about--
I would like to phrase translational aesthetics,
I think that's really being useful here--
if we're talking about not literal translation
or not translation per se, but a kind
of translational aesthetics, then we
might want to be also thinking about
and implore some of the problems of translation
and the ethics of politics.
And I was really glad that you brought it up.
I don't think that we need to talk about ethics and politics
in ways that shut down and the experimentation
in the same place to work things out.
But it needs to be part of the conversation as well.
I don't use words like appropriation.
That's a huge issue.
When translation comes appropriation,
that's generally considered a negative.
And who is appropriating what?
What are the power structures?
And when we translate into English,
what are we doing in terms of power and hegemony?
And so I think that those questions, slightly modified,
are probably hugely productive for the conversation
that we're having.
And so I'm really glad that that is already in the [INAUDIBLE],,
just bringing all my translator baggage to the--
Yup.
Great.
OK.
I think Tenney was next?
Thanks.
And this follow on really nicely from what
Anna was talking about.
Just wanted to offer a quick plug.
I really like what Jesper had to say about the quotation he
offered on the notion of broken English
as the lingua franca of poetry.
And so the plug would be for the Tijuana poet and blogger
Heriberto Yépez, whose work a lot of you probably know.
But he's done incredibly wonderful poetry
and performance pieces that can be canny, explosively funny,
really disturbing, specifically about broken
English or English as the horrific lingua
franca of the future.
And it's the work it's that in the specific context
of somebody whose local community has been pretty
much obliterated by that.
It's Heriberto Yépez, if people don't mind.
Brian wanted just before Can we have the mic?
Before, and then the next one is Rebecca.
OK.
And the expanded field discussion of translation
is always a fascinating one.
But I think in this case, it's important not only to go that
direction, but translation and metaphor-- carrying across--
but one could also use transfer, transmit,
and a range of other kinds of words
that are etymologically related that would actually
push the discussion in interesting directions.
Because a lot of what Kenny is doing
could also be talked about in relation to digital technology,
language about copying, replicating.
That lead us in a different kind of direction.
And when I was talking about information and embodiment,
I was trying to get at these sorts of things.
What constitutes content?
How is that portable?
How is it led from one mediation to another?
Is it remitted? ?
Transmitted?
These are kinds of conversations that
are going on in communications theory and media theory.
And while cultural translation is of course important,
language can be looked at in so many different axes
as carrying in different ways--
carrying itself, being carried through conduits,
And then one begins to talk about borders
in a variety of different fashions.
So it's a potentially extraordinarily rich
conversation.
And so when such translation, I would
invite to be within these kinds of other debates as well.