We're going to proceed the way we did this morning exactly
according-- this time starting with Barbara Cole.
As it is written, everybody will have eight minutes.
And I think you now know the drill from this morning.
And then we will have--
the panel can address each other,
and then we will have comments for the floor.
And I know many of you have lots of things you wanted to ask
and say some things that were left over from this morning
[? or ?] [? two. ?] And when we get to that period, by the way,
I hope the person who takes the microphone--
Hello.
Yeah.
Well, when I see hands, I'll say a so-and-so, so-and-so-so,
so we can do it in that order so that people don't just speak
out, OK?
I think that would be good.
All right.
Do I need that mic?
Yes, you do.
Thank you.
Thank you to everybody for organizing this.
This has been--
I know I'm yet another person to say this, but it's very true
and I wanted to also add my thanks to the list.
This has been a profound event and really amazing.
In 2005, I--
2005, I edited an issue of Open Letter with Lori Emerson.
We started talking about that issue two years before that,
and we knew it was going to be on the work of Kenny Goldsmith.
And we weren't sure what else to call
it other than just sort of like Kenny G Loving.
So we came up with the title of "Kenneth Goldsmith
and Conceptual Writing."
And we did so with great hesitancy and reservations
about actually the sort of that gesture of naming and labeling.
And I was very glad that Jesper this morning brought up
the issue of framing, and that Charles just circled us back
to that issue of framing and to the very notion of us
sort of being gathered here together to sort of be naming
or framing so much of the writing
that we've been talking about as conceptual writing.
So the way that we handled it in open letter
was to essentially not address that problem at all,
and to simply let the essays speak for themselves.
And our introduction skirted the issue of actually discussing
what we meant by conceptual writing,
how we understood that term, and we simply left it up
to the writers themselves and the contributors
to enact that term.
So in that spirit, she do the conceptual in many voices.
"Attention, colon, write down anything you hear for one hour.
It all started when we were brought here.
Oy vey, oy vey.
Every word here is creatively intended.
To see what is happening in relation to what has happened.
What is the state of poetry today?
There was a certain point at which the story changed.
What the opener does is open the two boxes.
What the voice says is this one, never
trust what poets say about their own writing.
To whom, when, where, how much, how much,
we are in the midst of a queer and degenerate
avoidance of meaning, coherence, truth, and tradition, a broken
or failed English, speaking and embodying or distributing
speech.
The space as doubt, the question of linguistic belonging,
the fetishizing of sounds, performing, reforming,
deforming, this gutless indulgence.
All they do is play around with words and phrases refusing
to add up to any.
Idiom is related to idiot.
Flora leads to follow.
A revolt against the transparency of the word.
Bound up in questions of negation.
Are you one of us, not one of us?
In the middle of the way was a stone,
a poetry of intellect instead of emotion.
Is TS Eliot recuperable?
True, false, depends.
Not recently.
I just wanted to say that this is about my father.
I'm a modernist, too, but I'm a happy modernist.
Yesterday, sequester day, way back when
it was language poetry, potential mishearings
or hearings, portal, mortal, a poetry of intellect
instead of emotion.
Hello, is there a brain inside that mind?
Shifting content into different containers,
a poetry of intellect instead of emotion, archival activism.
It all started when meaning unmoored from vocabulary,
give it up, turn it loose, shut up, [INAUDIBLE],, shut up.
I've been troubled by many things, and also stimulated.
Then I went to the poetry reading
and I decided to begin again.
Language as material, language as process.
Gertrude Stein all over again.
Made, composed, the real work, as opposed to the copy,
reading the illegible.
It all started when material that's already there.
There's a good part coming up in which
I ask, what is conceivable in conceptual literature?
Valueless speech, misbehavior, theft, transformation,
appropriation, citation, reproduction, sloppy copyist,
language as junk, language as a pony that refuses to be ridden,
a rat seeking a dark cavity, the ketchup that loses the race.
A different kind of difficulty defined by what it is not.
Isn't that too easy?
Marjorie's saying that's too easy.
Marjorie says I'm right.
Spontaneous overflow supplanted by meticulous pro--
meticulous pro-- meticulous.
Spontaneous overflow supplanted by,
supplanted by period, marks of quotation, pronoun, period.
It's so tiring to read--
identity and all that shit.
I'm still trying to understand conceptual poetry,
but I think I'm a step closer.
It all started when-- it all started when we--
when we-- when we-- what happens to the proverbial voice
of the poet?
It's the framing that matters.
Everything was fodder, canned chants, troubadours of boredom.
If anything is allowed, nothing is possible.
Someone has always done anything before.
Proof that there is life after the continuous present.
I love originality so much that I keep copying it.
One person's difficulty is another person's pleasure.
And other great things you can do with your mouth.
If you'd like to order at home, $19.95, plus tax.
Because I loved language more, poetry is all around if only
we have ears to hear it.
The answer is not in our machines, it's in our politics.
Do we get to go eat now?
That's the last question."
[APPLAUSE]
I would, of course, like to add my thanks.
This is a fantastic conference to all who organized it.
And I'm immensely grateful for the time I've had,
I'm having, and will still have.
I want to make some comments about forms and about history.
I hope I don't have too much to say but--
The mic's not on.
It's not on?
Close enough-- it's not close enough.
Oh, I see.
It's not close enough.
Is that close enough?
That's better.
Yeah?
You want me to repeat what I said, or did you all hear it?
Repeat it.
Repeat it, OK.
I wanted to say how grateful I am.
You don't have to--
All right.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about forms,
and I talk a little bit about history.
And what I wanted to say about forms
I can start saying by quoting from a really good recent book
called Words to Be Looked At by Liz Kotz, yeah?
And this is something she says.
"If, as Rosalind Krauss has argued--" every time
I hear that phrase the expanded field,
or the extended field of something,
I always think of Rosalind Krauss
because that's where it comes from.
Anyway, "if, as Rosalind Krauss has argued,
the breakdown of medium-based practices
provides one model of an historical shift
from specific to general forms of art,
another logic is at play right alongside it
in which a general template, or a notational system,
be it musical scores, fabrication, instructions,
architectural blueprints, or diagrams,
or schematic representations, generates specific realizations
in different contexts."
What Kotz calls the general template
is what here has been referred to as the idea
following on from Sol LeWitt's ideas--
idea in his sentences for conceptual art,
or the machine, as it's commonly been called here, too.
And what I want to call here the pretext, or the pretext,
for writing.
It may be applied--
this general template idea may be
applied to Oulipian constraints, various language poetry
procedureless practices, the Fibonacci series,
in early Silliman, in Mac Low's various genres or projects,
the pronouns, the asymmetries, the gathers, even to include,
I think, Bernadette Mayer's experiments
and the additions provided by Charles Bernstein.
Appropriation is another general template,
although each specific realization
would seem to have an equally specific pretext.
It is nonetheless a template whose various framing
strategies point to generality.
Better put, the pretext provides the context
for the specific realization.
Other practices with similarly specific pretexts
include writings through, as with Cage and Mac Low,
and translation.
The notion that pretext provides for--" sorry.
"The notion that pretext provides
the context for the general template
is important, useful, and may be difficult--
an idea.
Difficult because the pretext is barely a text.
Is the idea more interesting than the application?
N plus 7, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, et cetera, or Lawrence Weiner's
general template.
The artist may construct the work.
Two, the work may be fabricated.
Three, the work need not be built.
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist,
the decision as to condition rests with the receiver
upon the occasion of receivership.
This is more difficult. When a statement is a general template
for all his work, each work is a secondary general template,
one whose realization may involve the receiver or viewer.
The devolution of authorship mentioned here
as an element of early language poetry theory
insinuates a further realization, a post text.
Wiener's many colored objects placed side by side
to form a row of many colored objects.
That's a work of Lawrence Weiner's.
It may be and has been written on the walls of a gallery.
In that context, it might be constructed
by a curator as an exhibition of abstract paintings, or by me
as a way of organizing a shelf of my books.
Similarly, with Mac Low's pronouns,
we have a general template in which
he describes the elaborate chance operations that
generated the specific realization of the poems that
make up the collection, which in turn serve as pretext
for the choreographer with which to generate, or translate,
specific dance performances.
Perhaps this returns us to the question of the performed text.
Is the poem in some sense or--
is the poem in some sense a general template or pretext
for performance?
You might think so after hearing Christian's readings
the other day--" yesterday.
What day was it?
Every day.
"You might think so after hearing Christian's readings,
or after hearing Olsson's readings.
What of the-- and what of the performer?
We assume the poet must perform the work.
But why?
This doesn't apply to Weiner's work or Mac Low's.
And a last question, post texts may
be something like Vanessa's contribution
at the previous roundtable this morning,
or like some of Charles's work, such as the arts--
such as artifice of absorption.
Where did that page go?
Where what used to be called primary texts
play the role of what once were called secondary texts.
This attempt to see the text as a chain of pre and post effects
is not made in the name of hybridity,
as if that were a value in itself,
but in the name of contextual and contingent meaning,
the kind of meaning not understood by or tolerated by--
or tolerated in the books of accessible poetry."
I think that's enough.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
OK.
There are several different subjects
that I'd like to talk about.
The first was-- came on the screen,
and actually I'm going to take that last, if I have time
still.
I'd like to start with responding to--
Are you talking into the mic?
Can you hear it?
Can you hear me?
Yes.
No.
OK.
Better.
Start with talking about or responding
to Caroline Bergvall's multilingual, translingual,
[? Mongolisiam, ?] and give some examples of text
that are in the first case--
let me get this slide out of the way.
In the first case, a procedural translation
which requires one to follow the poetics, first of all,
but also all of the different contrivances
of classical Chinese form when translating
a classical Chinese poem into English.
The result is a kind of Chinglish hybrid language
form, which I will talk about.
But I wanted to give this introduction
of an idea of translation as purely mimicry.
And to do that, I wanted to give the example of these two
concepts brought from the 10th and 11th century to China.
This is actually how a lot of poetry
was produced in the later dynasties, which
is just purely mimicry.
You get to choose either to mimic the semantic content,
or the form of the poem.
My idea is that translation is nothing more than mimicry,
generally, mimicry of the semantic content or meaning.
And that all translation, therefore,
is a kind of procedural creation where
you are bound to the constraint of the original source text.
In this case, though, one could also mimic the form,
and that's what I've done here in the following translation.
I'm going to read this in Chinese and then
in English, or in the Chinglish version, if you will.
This is by the last dynasty--
I'm sorry-- the last emperor of the Tang dynasty.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
The English-- "springs red grove blooms ebb past too fast, fast.
Dawn will bring chill rain down night wind blast.
Rouge face cry, men's gaze, sigh.
Time piles vast from our birth, life long [? dearth, ?]
springs flow past."
To talk a little bit about the constraints here,
all of the end rhymes and little rhymes and so on
are highlighted in the different colors.
Chinese, of course, is a tonal language,
and Chinese poetics requires a tonal oscillation
between yin and yang, if you will, within the tones.
So the prosody is not created in feet of stressed
and unstressed, but with alterations of different tones.
Because English is trans tonal, you
can tonalize English and not lose the semantic content.
The problem, too, of doing this without trans--
without putting the tones in is that you end up
getting a kind of nursery rhyme sounding text.
But with the tones, it so defamiliarizes the sound
that you end up having something that, I would argue,
doesn't necessarily replicate Chinese poetry sounds,
but mimics the sounds of the poem.
This is all to say that I'm highly
skeptical of translation.
Earlier translation came up as a metacritical term,
something we might think about as a form of conceptual poetry.
I like to think of mimicry as a better metacritical term than
translation since even in this sort of hyper-mimetic
translative process where you create--
and by the way, it takes--
I think I succeed maybe 10%, 5% of the poems
that I attempt to translate in this manner,
because there are very few monosyllables.
There's a fair number of monosyllables
but, of course, sometimes the translation
doesn't come through semantically.
And of course, to end rhyme and create all of the inner rhymes
and so on is nearly impossible.
But when it does happen, translation still
has not happened, because your ears and my ears are different.
And so even if the sound is similar,
the poem never comes through.
Translation means to move something, right?
The cognate terms that we came up with
was transfer and transmit.
All of these are impossible.
This is all metaphysics, and it's
all a faith-based initiative.
In the end, translation etymologically
is the movement of a Bishop from one place to another place.
Nothing happens.
Transcreation is also interesting,
but I think problematic because of the creative aspect.
Mimicry is, of course, unoriginal, right?
It is-- it's derivative, obviously.
And I think that the creative-- the idea of creation
may have a lot of baggage.
So I prefer transformation, or transformulation,
as perhaps a better idea about what happens in translation.
And so rather than getting closer to the Chinese poem,
you take this idea that if you only have the sound of Chinese
there, then you might actually have a translation.
And I kind of debunk that.
The next is taking Chinese characters
and writing through transliteration English poems.
This poem here, it's a process that happens all the time.
You were just talking about being in China with Charles,
Marjorie, and the signage, as you saw those kind of Chinglish
signage.
And also in the accent of Chinese speakers
when they're not fluent, obviously,
have a certain accent that holds to the particulars
of Chinese orthography of the phoneme.
And that's also represented in language
through transliteration.
So when you go and you find Rumsfeld
in a Chinese newspaper, of course,
Chinese characters transliterate these sounds.
Unlike any other form of transliteration,
though, the alphabet itself is semantic.
And so what happens is is you can
write an English poem using Chinese characters
and have a secondary, bifurcated semantic poem being
produced at the same time.
So I'm going to read this, and I wish--
I could turn this off and on.
And I can, just--
well-- yeah, sure, go ahead and turn it off.
I think it might be helpful to hear it rather than see it.
So here it is, the English poem.
OK.
"Close your eyes in a dark room.
Open your eyes, open your eyes again.
Outside the dark room, face what you see.
Watching the dark."
The interesting thing with a poem like this
is that if you're a Chinese speaker,
you hear a Chinese poem.
And it's totally different than if you're an English speaker,
you hear an English poem.
Exact same text, two different poems.
The Chinese speaker would hear ""[SPEAKING CHINESE] appears
as mournful memory.
Narrow shadows control answer as forest.
Gulls origin, mist enveloped temple.
Frustration overflows a day's grief as narrow sensation.
Concave particulars are better than virtue.
Earth replies by carving toward half light.
Distressed, flying, laying down pining for childhood,
resting on flying thoughts, Earth
beats upon the Sun's shell and enters."
Of course, the latter--
yeah, that's fine.
The last thing is just to think about how accent
in each one of these, of course, if you read it,
it has an English accent, if you're a Chinese listener.
And it has a Chinese accent if you're an English listener.
So it's a third, if you will, area of interlinguistic play.
OK.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, first of all, and as many people
have done before me, I want to thank everybody who organized
this incredible conference, and for the possibility
of learning so much and thinking so much about what
is going on in this country.
And I think that really the poetry in my country is that.
So I would like probably to start with two little sayings
by our major--
two major modernist poets.
One of them was Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and he says,
"I am neither myself, nor the other.
I am something intermediate."
Which is not a good translation because intermédio
in Portuguese means both intermediate and intermediary.
And the other quote is by Fernando Pessoa, probably
the major Portuguese modernist poet.
And this is a terrible translation.
It's my translation.
I'm sure it's been translated much better than this.
Anyway-- and it's something like, "the poet is a faker,
and he so completely fakes that he even fakes as pain
the pain he actually feels."
Fernando Pessoa created many poets.
He was many poets.
He was Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares,
Álvaro de Campos, Fernando Pessoa himself, and others.
Heteronyms he called them.
And one of the things that is really--
was really interesting to me was we were discussing
during this past few days the question of the subject
and its subjectivity is how it is something really like--
it seems to be at least something very
interesting to discuss at this point in here.
And in my country for some reason,
it's not, meaning that what you have as a subject
is basically the possibility of anchor somewhere in language
to be part of yourself, whatever that is.
I love the word constellation that has been used here before,
and I think that's what Pessoa was trying to do.
Because constellation means that it is there and it isn't.
Because the light we get from those stars probably--
it's just a fake.
It's not there any longer, the star, was that.
And so the other thing I thought was really interesting
was this problem with the materiality,
and the spirituality, or whatever you
want to call it, the emotional.
Because I want to quote Charles Bernstein about this when
he says that "language is the first extension of the body,
and it is the first forgery."
Forgery in the sense of lying, of course, and something made,
something that has been forged, or chemically
some way-- in some way.
So I guess for us the question of cheating-- and truth
is not a question, because there's simply
no way to get out of it.
But it is the politics of the choice between what
you think is truth and what do you think it's not
that makes the difference.
And so coming from a country that has just
passed in the parliament an orthographic agreement that
makes Portuguese, the Brazilian version of Portuguese,
the standard Portuguese language.
And this was voted in parliament.
And not that I'm against it.
I think it's really interesting that these things should
be taken to the parliament to be discussed and decided.
But the interesting thing for me was
to see how many of the Portuguese
intellectuals were completely against the agreement,
not because it's stupid to have a standard in law, but also--
but mainly because it was the Brazilian version.
It is my language, OK?
We gave them our language.
And so many of the writers, many of the poets say at this point
that they will not obey the law, and they
will continue to work using the Portuguese version
of Portuguese.
So this is very interesting, because as you may understand,
for me, the question of power and of politics is something
that I cannot think without.
I mean, we had a revolution 34 years ago.
We had a dictatorship.
We have many poets that could not be read.
Poetry does matter, by the way.
I was 14 when I was going to sellers
to get some books that if I was caught with them,
I would be in jail.
And so-- and poets made a great difference in my country.
They were very important as a resistance.
And having said this, I just wanted
to turn to, also, another question, which
has to do with the Portuguese history
itself and the question of discoveries that meant,
as we all know, the killing, the destruction
of different epistemes.
We call them epistemicides.
That is what discovery's meant.
That was the beginning of globalization, I remember that.
And so, basically, what is interesting to me at this point
is to what Tracy was doing and what
Calvin was doing to exploit this undertones of language--
of the Portuguese language.
Because many of the languages and
of the epistemological visions of reality that were destroyed
must be somewhere.
So for me, really, poetry is epistemological research.
I cannot think of poetry without thinking of both referentiality
and non-referentiality.
I cannot think of poetry as being intellect or emotion.
By the way, please forgive me for my very nationalistic
attitude.
But neurobiology-- one major Portuguese neurobiologist
who's doing his research here in the United States, Antonio
Damasio, proved, apparently, in his lab
that there is no language except if the emotional part
of your brain works first.
So you cannot speak without that.
So for me, what I take as a possibility is the possibility
of research in an agonistic model of language,
exploiting that, and see what is the word hypertext, but also
the possibilities that can be open through this kind of work.
And that is for me also the modernist project.
I mean, the enlargement of consciousness, the possibility
of going into some inconceivable,
yet inconceivable, but also probably reproved,
non-approved, yet to be proven, something, whatever that is.
But I just cannot accept the fact that what you have
in language is just a thing, thingness.
And please forgive me, but the celebration of thingness for me
is just another repetition of the market.
That's the product and something that you sell, and that's it.
So I don't see anything in there for me.
But I'd rather have what--
and I take the Brazilian anthropologist, Alfredo Bosi,
very briefly just to speak about what he calls a post modernist
attitude as a counter anti-modernist in the sense
that you simply refuse to go on with this kind of project,
and so you stick to whatever you have.
Or you accept another version, which
is for me probably the most interesting,
what he calls the ultra modernist attitude, which
is basically even repeating whatever the modernists were
challenging us to do to try to go somewhere.
I don't know where, and I think that it is really interesting
that I don't know where.
That is what makes it interesting.
And that's basically what I wanted to say.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah, so this has been a very rich time
to spend together with all of you.
And it's been a tremendous pleasure.
It's-- I notice as we're speaking on this particular
panel that, in a sense, it seems like we're opening out,
that we're taking the kind of core of what's been presented
this weekend, and each person is now sort of moving it out
in their own direction, which I think is a very useful thing
to be doing at this particular moment.
So it's lovely to see that.
I'm going to, I guess, take some direction from Brian Reed,
and also from Tracie, to give you
a couple of remarks of things that have occurred
to me during the conference.
The first heading is the mix.
If-- I guess appropriation as becoming increasingly important
as we're talking about it as an element in the arts.
And I think it also can be increasingly
important in criticism.
Marjorie gave us a model of that looking at Benjamin's Arcades
Project on Thursday night.
In a digital world, to move into the direction
that Brian gave us, appropriation
is known as sampling.
And the inner animation of language art
with still and moving images, sounds, and theory,
and commentary is called mixing.
So I had a book with me that I just
wanted to share and talk about a little bit, Paul D.
Miller, a.k.a., DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid's book,
Rhythm Science, which is what he calls sampling and mixing.
He says, "Rhythm Science is not about transparency of intent.
Rhythm Science is a forensic investigation--"
I kept thinking of forensics so many times this weekend--
"forensic investigation of sound as a vector of a coded language
that goes from the physical to the informational
and back again.
Rhythm science with rhyme time, rough trade.
Sound-- sound is a product of many different editing
environments, an end result of an interface architecture
that twists and turns and sequences
overlaid with slogans, statistics, vectors, labels,
and grids."
Another quote, "music is always a metaphor.
It's an open signifier, an invisible, utterly malleable
material.
It's not fixed or cast in stone.
Rhythm Science uses an endless recontextualizing
as a core compositional structure.
And some of this generation's most important artists
continually remind us there are innumerable ways
to arrange the mix."
The mix, the mix, I want to keep thinking about the mix.
For the most part, he says, "creativity
rests in how you recontextualize the previous expression
of others, a place where there is no such thing
as an immaculate perception."
I hope these quotes are resonating for you.
Spooky samples from Emerson's Essay, Quotation
and Originality.
"It is as difficult to appropriate the thought
of others as it is to invent."
That's Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Conceptual poetry and its avant garde traditions
need to be put into a field that includes
media studies, performance studies, translation studies.
Beyond this, it needs to be brought into conversation
with two other contemporary art forms with which it
shares so much.
Sampling and mixing, as pioneered
by hip hop and video games and other forms of online
distributed living.
In a sense, hip hop and video games
can be seen as new forms of publication,
as publishers, in which the subversive discoveries
of conceptual poetry can be broadcast to the largest
possible audience.
Sampling and mixing have a huge pedagogical potential, as well.
As a teacher, one can adopt these means
to present audio, slide, and video material
in the classroom in ways that are immensely
appealing to young people.
At another level, it's also helpful to note
that the great works of assemblage
during the modern period, like Pound's Cantos,
and Schwitters' Collages were mixes of sampled material
drawing students' attention, in the case of Pound,
to the artfulness of his sampling, that is,
luminous detail, and to the pulsating rhythms of his mix.
Likewise, by asking students to perform their own sampling
and mixing, one can empower them to think
about the media at their disposal
as the means for a far-reaching conceptual art.
With respect to video games, Johanna Drucker
has argued that their nature, as distributed tools
for investigation by role-playing agents,
makes them prime candidates for the kind of archival mining
that will produce knowledge and perspectives in the future.
This sort of knowledge needs to be
inflected by the subversive perceptual ethos
of conceptualism.
And this little section is a call
for a conceptual criticism.
Call for literary criticism that looks at poetry in relation
to the other arts of its time.
One that sees poetry not only responding to other arts,
but also taking a partnering and sometimes
a leading role in the artistic scene of a particular time
and place.
This came up more at the beginning of the conference.
In some sites, like '50s and '60s New York and California,
there's a direct collaboration.
In others, there is a participation in and a working
out of a shared aesthetics.
During those time periods, '50s and '60s,
it was still common for poets to write not only path breaking
works of poetics, which continues, but also to write
important film, art, dance, theater, and music criticism.
Likewise, practitioners of these other arts
also wrote cutting edge theory and criticism for their own art
forms, and for other art forms, especially,
as the arts began an ever increasing fusion beginning
in postwar movements like seminar culture and happenings,
and continuing in conceptualism, minimalism, punk,
performance art, video art, hip hop, and digital sampling.
One of the impediments to this aesthetic cross-fertilization
has been the academisizing of criticism,
which substitutes a certain kind of conceptual clarity and rigor
for a more generous recognition of creative participation
by practitioners in the arts.
In visual form, for example, the exciting writing
of the first 15 or 20 years of art forum
was done by artists themselves, and to a lesser extent,
by poets.
With the ascendance of a journal like October,
the art historians take over.
They have an interest in legitimating certain new art
movements within the norms of art history,
not in keeping fertile the cross-fertilization
among the arts, which is what practitioners want.
The same things could be said about the shift from
an emphasis on poetics in poetry journals in the '70s, such
as Caterpillar, IO, The World, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Montemora,
and This, to the instant hegemony of post structuralism
as a blessing and a curse.
One of the negative consequences was
that it tied poetry so deeply to language and discourse
that its life-sustaining relationships
to the other arts of the times vanished from view.
And then finally, a little personal example.
CalArts was initially dedicated to this cross-fertilization
of the arts.
When I applied for a spot in the opening
year of the school in 1970 to '71, what drew me to it
was the possibility of becoming an Institute student, which
was touted in advance as the essence
of the mission of CalArts.
An Institute student would be located outside the discipline
of the individual schools--
music, art, theater, dance, film,
and critical studies, which was where poetry was housed--
and able to draw on the resources of all of them.
I was accepted and hoped to create for myself
a career as a contemporary shaman.
Unfortunately, CalArts could not live up fully
to this promise to be the New Black Mountain
College of the '70s.
It has produced many wonderful people often dedicated
to cross-fertilization.
But institutionally, it just couldn't
support this open-ended ideal of schooling.
Instead of having access to all the schools,
I found myself frozen out of each
because I wasn't dedicated to the rigorous discipline each
was inaugurating for its students.
In the end, I had to choose a school,
so I chose critical studies, which
was where poetry and translation was
housed in the capable person of Clayton Eshleman.
For me, though, this was a return to poetry
as a discipline, and it was felt as a contraction.
As a teacher, I would hope to hold open for my students
the possibility of the mix.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, everyone.
It's really a pleasure to be here
and I'm grateful to everyone involved.
Are you ready?
Can you start it?
It'll just go on.
Implementing image.
J, Concept as Particle, I composed a list of questions
and sent them to more than 100 esteemed poets.
Then, in collaboration with molecular biologist, Brad
Davidson, I took the respondents' text
and used data analysis software, Image J,
created by the Institute of Health,
to visually assess the material.
This software is a multiple pixel intensity region
growing algorithm for surface reconstruction.
In other words, the region grows outward in 3D space
from an initial pixel known to be within the region.
In this sample text that you see right now,
the steps taken to manipulate the text
include shrinking, duplication of the binary mask, adjustment
of contrast threshold, measurements
for center of mass, and finally, analysis of particles.
I'm going to present a few of the images I came up with.
This first image that you see now
has minimal thresholding, decreasing
the binary quality of image.
This one has a bit more thresholding.
And this one has even more thresholding.
I chose the middle slide.
Outlined areas correspond to this data table.
I then overlaid the image back onto the respondent text
and selected the particle with the most mass to transcribe.
I'm going to draw an analysis here between mass and concept,
and between Bernstein's definition of conceptual poetry
and this text.
As you can see, the respondents' text is pregnant with ideas.
I'll take this definition one step further.
Conceptual poetry is, as Lee Ann Brown
calls it, a poetry that thinks with other and others'
ideas, sounds, words, structures, complex presences,
past, present and future.
Or conceptual poetry is a form of collaboration
which delivers an outcome, not necessarily material,
but one which evokes various approaches
and, potentially, breaks assumptions and extends
the borders of textuality.
Or collaborative conception, plus live delivery,
equals birth of the unthought.
And now to the questions and the findings.
I wanted to note that the speakers don't necessarily
hold the opinions, that they're reading
the opinions of the respondents who were at times irreverent.
One, what is conceptual poetry?
And a callout response, an unfortunate noun
modified by an adjective.
What poets are not conceptual?
It makes me ambient, quagmire outside of text.
For example, Kathleen Fraser's essay
on partial local coherence, "my life
is a highly conceptual work predicated
on the desanctification of the aesthetic object.
Hejinian's poems often organize around grammatical structures.
Idea has preference."
Bernadette Mayer, "how can utopia not be conceptual?
It began with Acconci and Mayer's 0 to 9.
[? Fillipo, ?] [? to borrow on ?]
Young's piece, was conceptual.
Given Dworkin's definition, I'll have
to change my bio, language beyond born."
Can poetry be non expressive?
Hannah Weiner talking to Bob Dylan on her bed, like hugging
[? a head. ?] "I'm interested in the flatness proceeding
such as lying.
No.
This depends more on the reader than the poem.
Space intentionally left blank.
Headlights and pet rocks are expressive,
if only the [? no ?] at its heart."
Is there such a thing as direct presentation of language?
"All the time.
A list of phonemes.
I can't think of such a thing.
You're reading this, aren't you?
Dictionaries, signage, a death sentence.
As I sleep, Rosmarie Waldrop's memoir of meeting Edmond Jabes
whispered into my ears.
The neo conceptualists are earnestly twisted.
Indeed, fraught with double answers and no answers.
Yeast vexes best [? porn ?] prince.
Language is always already the translation."
Intellect rather than motion?
"Queequeg rather than Ahab.
I can't separate the repressed.
Answers with no container.
Two extremes, intellect follows delusion bleeds.
Two terminological mistakes that confuse and astound me.
Disingenuous division, distinction as hypothesis,
not actuality.
I'm only interested in both and tricks."
Dismantle this line drawing.
"Draw wing.
No.
A point is that which has no part, Euclid's
first definition.
Actually, romanticism allergy is based
on a radical political impetus.
Draw this [? dis-mantle ?] line, removing first one line,
then another, on the mile of the erased de Kooning drawing.
The subject verb, direct access of to past, present,
and future."
What is the purpose of form and formlessness?
"To form a study group, dialectical envy,
to question assumptions like the square circle.
Breathing mimics this self-assertion,
the unwritten poem, black hole.
It's a good day for an existential crisis.
So as meaning shift, so do intentions,
and words are things.
Words are not things.
According to Aleister Crowley, to recharge the dark demons
that rule fully half the world.
Isn't that a theological question?
To articulate the possibility of infinity, all poems have form."
Distinguish between procedural and conceptual.
"One makes you see the hand washing.
The other makes you question the idea of the hand.
Conceptual is all desire.
According to this procedure, I'm behaving like a smart ass.
That was my concept.
What you make is where you live.
Procedural, as one kind of conceptual.
Procedural refers to the conscious,
even if it is unconscious.
Makes no claim to objectivity.
Every poem has a procedure.
A, B, C, D, E, ellipses/alphabet,
temporal distinction."
What formal restraints do you practice every day?
"Capitalism, driving, tunnels, MetroCards, shuttering,
and breaking into a sweat.
Try not to judge.
I touch only 5 to 10 tomatoes a day.
Watering incarnate laundry sells, job,
food, shoes, clothing, language to write while one son naps.
Time is my constraint."
What is the responsibility of the writer?
"To be the witness of a burning world.
Well, I hope you're well and, as a hula hooper
hoops, to stop the Republicans from stealing
the next election, to unleash the inarticulable,
the A truth in others.
Liberation to fight AIDS through direct political action,
to respond.
The self doesn't have to win.
Be awake."
Why are women virtually excluded from the UbuWeb anthology?
"Foolishness.
I'd say this is the most important question.
Does Ubu skew towards men?
Mango, milk, bucket, male revisionist history,
might have something to do with avant-garde
being a military term.
Gender being another unfortunate noun.
Why write women now?
Mayer, Retallack, Bergvall, Osman, Spahr, Mullen.
For the same reason the hostility
towards a diversity course requirement that my University
is not directed towards race and ethnic studies,
but towards gender studies.
Ties it to so many other kinds of various discrediting.
Who the fuck thinks it's OK?
Men are much more attached to clubs.
Do flap.
One might ask why the list is so [? perusal ?] Why?
There were no women in the conceptual age."
That's the end.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, I'm not going to try to summarize
the similarities of these, because I
don't think they were.
I think something very different was happening.
So I'm not going to say anything right now.
I may.
And let the panelists talk to each other first,
if you have questions for each other, and open it up.
All right.
Then let's open to the floor.
Let me talk [INAUDIBLE].
And let me see the hands of those who want to go.
Thank you very much, and I loved all the presentations.
And Graca, this is for you.
I'm interested in your downplaying, or minimizing,
or not giving so much importance to subjectivity,
at the same time, addressing emotion.
And I wonder if you want to say anything
about that because my interest is the fact that language is
driven by emotion, and yet it plays its course
with cognition, which for me is it just
happens sort of like a virus.
So if you have anything to say about how
the two work together.
Yeah.
You mean subjectivity and cognition or--
Emotion.
So subjectivity in an emotion.
I think there is no way out of it, as if--
the same way that I think there is no way out of subjectivity.
Unfortunately, probably all of us
would like to have the objective clarity.
Thank the gods, probably, the thing
goes the other way around.
I think we've had too much of clarity.
And I'm really into obscurity more and more.
And I think that there is no way of experiencing anything.
I'm sorry.
I'm very Emersonian, but I really
think of the transparent eyeball very much.
I have a question for you, though, Graca.
When you said things, you don't think
the words are just things.
Who among the speakers have said words were just things?
I mean, I'm missing something, but I
didn't hear anyone of the seven poets we had [INAUDIBLE]..
I wouldn't think-- I wouldn't say anybody said that word
[INAUDIBLE]--
It was a respondent.
--were just things.
But what I think is that when you
think of the possibility of having a word with language,
that leaves the eye, or pretends to be the eye, because I
don't believe that happens.
I'm sorry.
And I'm basically thinking of Kenneth Goldsmith.
But I don't think that will happen,
and that's why I will use the quote by Pessoa,
because the fake, the faking, the faking, and so on.
But the eye is always there.
But what I think can be very dangerous
is the fact that you kind of celebrate
this reification of language.
And in the sense you don't know--
you make of language a thing, a product,
not a process, not a project.
It's something that it's there.
And on top of everything, there's
something of an aestheticization of this reality that really
makes it very difficult for me to deal with,
the aestheticization of things, as such, as if--
of things when meaning, slash, reality.
And so I don't know, it's just I don't
think there is a poss-- even in a masquerade of unauthenticity,
neutrality is always a fallacy.
And I don't think it is possible to be neutral ever.
Do you want to answer?
No?
Anybody on the panel want to address?
[INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE] the "I" is all over.
Yeah, yeah.
But then-- and I think it's a very active use
of the I that's taking responsibility for itself.
I just wanted to add that that was an interesting statement,
because I actually find a lot of interesting resonances
between what Pessoa's project is all about,
and what Kenneth's work is doing in the sense
that there's this search for otherness within one's
own subjectivity [INAUDIBLE].
And if conceptual poetry is poetry pregnant with thought,
Pessoa was a poet that was pregnant with subjectivities.
And in order to express that, he needed
to go outside himself in very interesting ways,
and I think that Kenneth's work in many ways speaks to that.
Or inside, but in the process of going inside,
there's an outsideness to it, a foreignness to it.
I mean, some of his personas, some were peasants,
some were classicists, Bourgeois aristocrats,
some were completely avant-garde poets.
So I mean, that diversity within one project,
I think, in many ways is interesting.
I think in many ways conceptual poetry
explores that kind of foreign.
Yeah.
Very briefly.
Yes, I would definitely go for that,
but that's why I think of the--
it's not a question of being either the I or the other.
It's the idea of having the in betweenness where all of that
is present.
And I do think that is what is happening in his poetry.
But what bothers me, if you want,
from a political point of view is the idea
that you pretend on authenticity that you are not there,
that you are not taking a position.
I feel I have to answer that, because I
want to say that choice--
after all, this is one thing I tried to say in my talk.
Framing or which thing you want to do,
the choice is terribly important.
Now, the piece about the police officer--
this is the thing we had the Senator this year--
I thought-- I spent a lot of time
thinking about that last night, because when it happened,
I thought it was such a horrendous thing.
If that isn't a political text, I
don't know what is, because it brings out whether--
a lot of people said, ha, ha, because he
was a Republican senator, so ha, ha.
He's so conservative, and he was against gays,
so good thing he was caught.
But the idea that somebody in this country
can be arrested for putting their hand under the toilet
stall upward rather than downward,
so they're not taking paper off the floor
but making an advance, and that brought that out
in a very dramatic way.
If that isn't political, I don't know what is.
I thought that was much more political.
And I'm going to say one other thing,
because I was a little disturbed by some of the-- frankly,
by some of the comments at the end when we had the various--
which is a wonderful device--
of having all the people speak.
But I take it it's all your text, right?
No, it's all been the respondent's text.
Respondent's, other people's texts.
Yes.
One statement was, every poem has a procedure.
No, it doesn't.
See, this is what I get upset at things
that are sloppy in thinking.
Every poem does not have a procedure.
There are plenty of poems I've seen around that I don't think
have any pro-- they may pretend to have a procedure,
but they really don't.
So we have to be very careful about words.
And I'm going to say something about the UbuWeb
anthology and women, and I'll argue a little bit with Vanessa
just--
who can really get mad, or whatever.
I really think this is a non--
it should be by now a kind of non-issue.
It's like saying, why are there not more women engineers,
perhaps?
Although, there are more now.
Everybody doesn't want to be everything.
There are complicated sets of reasons for this.
And the idea that we're going to count heads and say, on UbuWeb,
are 47.3% women?
Or don't we have enough women?
Maybe, but in other groups, we may have more women.
And I just think it is a non-productive--
I don't want to end with that kind of notion
at this conference, because there
have been so many wonderful things really doing
rigorous thinking.
And I think it's not rigorous thinking
to start worrying whether there are more women on the UbuWeb
anthology.
Maybe they're just weren't the people
for that particular thing.
It's a particular choice that Craig and Kenny made.
We would have other anthologies that might be 80% women.
I was just at the Bard graduation and--
where I got the degree, and they have a Master's
in Curatorial Studies.
Every single person who got up for that
happened to be a woman--
or maybe didn't happen to be but was.
There's another master-- there's another Masters in Design
Studies where they were women.
The third area was environmental studies.
And of that, it was about 80% male, three or four Blacks out
of the 12 people, and it was very much--
and so it was a different thing.
Different times, different things
that people are interested in.
I don't think we can think in that thing about--
that's just my view, but I really--
it really bothers me, too, that we're still
thinking in those terms about how many percent-- would we
be happy if we could say 50% of the people in the UbuWeb
anthology were women?
I don't know.
I might not like a lot of people in the anthology, anyway.
No, that's fine.
So that's just my little spiel of the day.
Thank you.
I think it would be really great to not
be able to be having the conversation, also.
But you're the only woman, Marjorie,
who hasn't had an issue with this who I've queried on it.
There's two women out of 31 in the anthology.
And I believe in 2008--
In the one online, the-- yeah.
Yes, two out of 31.
And in 2008, I'd really like to not
be having this conversation.
And if women represented at all, I
wouldn't be having this conversation.
It's not about is it tit for tat.
We have Acconci and not Mayer, who
created the program together.
So there's a lot of women who've made important contributions
to conceptual poetry, and their work needs to be acknowledged.
That's my view.
But the text that was read actually wasn't my text,
it was a compilation of more than 50 surveys
that I received back asking questions.
Well, maybe Craig should talk about--
Craig should talk about the anthology.
I think you should say something about that.
I just wanted to say two things.
One, is that you talk about wanting to bring it out
into other disciplines, and I think that one thing that's
been really great in this conference
is a lot of things that were-- what was presented
as a kind of monolith of this is conceptual poetry,
has I think over the course of three days been like,
and maybe this other stuff, too.
And maybe this other seven.
Who are you to say what conceptual poetry is?
And if I was going to give my talk again,
I would take out the prose and just
say no, this is actually conceptual poetry.
That's right.
But I also think that if we're going to talk about other forms
being as important because the Arcades Project,
it's a great rereading.
But for me, hip hop, yeah--
punk, yes-- Kathy fucking Acker.
The woman was on trial for appropriation,
and no one's mentioned her.
And she was so important to people coming up
from my generation, as for all kinds of things.
And so I think that one of the things that has really
happened, and this is like my non-- my institutional non
critique, is that this conference has actually served
like the exact thing you'd want a conference to serve
is instead of paying homage to a monolithic notion,
we're actually dissembling and putting it
back together into something else that we don't accept
[INAUDIBLE].
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah.
I want to say two things.
One is that-- the less important one
is that I think exclude is actually--
is the wrong word there.
And that it was going to be better to look at
is the online UbuWeb anthology, if people haven't seen it.
How many [INAUDIBLE]?
31?
So it's essentially an illustrated essay,
and the Ubu web anthology is a little grandiose for what
is a provocative sketch.
I think you'll have a better--
no one was excluded or included.
Kenny and I who are working on a print anthology that's
going to be much more comprehensive,
I think, from that table of content.
So when we work it out, you're going
to have a good way to judge what kind of inclusions
and exclusions there are.
So I think that's not right.
But I think it actually doesn't matter how many women are--
it could be all women.
And that the important point behind those responses
and behind your use of the word exclusion
would still be there, actually.
If I did the Ubu anthology and they were all women,
I'd still want to be asking what I think is much more important
question about, what's the relationship of gender,
questions of gender, to the various things that
have come up about the politics-- creation,
[INAUDIBLE], procedure.
What is the-- and not just gender,
what are the various social politics around something
like conceptual writing.
And I think that's true and that's important.
[INAUDIBLE] how many of anyone.
There are several.
Right.
I mean, I can-- this is why I started my seminar by saying,
I can't answer these questions about the politics
of this writing.
But I think that those are the really important questions
that people need to start thinking about.
Sorry, I just-- I just want to--
[INAUDIBLE]
I just--
Sorry about that.
Thank you to Craig for bringing up exclusion,
because that was going to be my response when you like, hey,
I'm a gal, and I wasn't part of the survey.
And so you are sort of-- there's always
an exclusion, even when you're attempting to include.
There's, by definition, an exclusion.
And I think that Marie's question
that she brought up this morning from the Beckett, rather
than sort of questioning like, is this a girl one,
is this a boy one, I think they're sort of like larger
aesthetic political questions, like exactly what Craig
is saying in a more articulate way.
I'd also like to just respond to grasp about the thingness.
And I think Steven's point about the academic takeover
of criticism and what that has done to sort of make criticism
now much more something that's part
of the academic institution, instead of artists,
has a lot to do with why it's important
that so many of these people are teaching,
and that that is a way of sort of changing that situation.
And I think Marjorie's saying that she was concerned
about Kenny's students, like what happens to them after they
take this seminar?
I mean, that's exactly a response
to the concern about the thingness.
These students are not being taught
to produce things and products.
They are what better way to ask students, invite students,
propel students to go through the process of appropriation,
or understanding how to read a poem,
or how to make a poem, how to build it,
that actual process, as opposed to creating
the beautiful, glorified, rarified thing.
So I think it's actually really important.
Unfortunately, we didn't talk about the pedagogical impulse.
Mic?
Yeah, I think one of the great things about Craig's
introduction is that probably like most the manifestos
or [INAUDIBLE] manifestos, it's both prescriptive in a way,
and also, claims to be descriptive to describe
the field.
And so the question for me would be,
if certain women, or more women, had been included
with the description of the field that
looks like conceptual writing would be
different in significant ways.
And I don't think, being a conceptual poet,
I was gratified that from Christian
to locate myself in the bottom left.
I don't know where I am.
So at any rate, my [INAUDIBLE] to think about
whether these people qualify as creative writers,
I'm [INAUDIBLE] conceptual writers
Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino,
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Lisa Jarnot just to start out,
that some of the expression versus emotion kind of thing
wouldn't look so right, a different sense
of a body that would move to the center,
and an attempt to work maybe procedurally with that,
and so on.
Yeah, I don't think it matters in that sense how
many men, how many women.
But I wonder whether [INAUDIBLE]----
But once you start then, then I'd worry
are there enough Latinos?
Are there enough Native Americans?
And are there enough Europeans and other people?
All through the conference, my worry
is always that it's too American.
We don't talk about-- there are plenty of things going on,
comparable things in other countries,
that we talk about very little.
So once you start that and say, all right,
we better put so and so, I don't know.
Maybe all I'm saying is--
But I don't even know who's on that list.
The irony is-- I just want to say this to Laynie.
The irony is I read Craig's preface.
I've never even looked at any of those.
I mean, it's not something I do.
Because frankly, I look through them and that many of them
didn't interest me that much for whatever reasons,
and I didn't think that's what we
were doing at this conference.
I did not think this conference was based on Craig's--
forgive me but-- or Kenny-- the Ubu anthology
of conceptual poetry online.
That was never the idea, I don't think so.
Can I respond?
Yeah.
I think what would be helped to clarify
is because, Craig, you say, oh, it's not really an anthology.
Oh, it's not really the conceptual anthology.
We're going to do something else.
But actually, that's what it's called,
and that's what it is up on the web.
And when you say the conceptual poetry anthology,
as if you're saying this is conceptual poetry, it doesn't--
there's no imminent-- there's no women conceptual poets.
So I think a more specific title, like the one
you were telling me the other day on creative writing,
Against Expression, I wouldn't have those same questions.
But the term conceptual is a really big term,
and I feel like most of the writing discussed
in this conference represents one aspect of what
conceptual poetry looks like, not the whole picture.
And so I thought it was important for that
to be brought out, that there's a lot of people doing
interesting conceptual work that doesn't fit
into this definition and generated
all of this discussion are several different people who
are thinking about creating other anthologies
of conceptual poetry, which is, I think, a good thing.
So it's not a negative.
It's not-- I don't see it as a negative.
I see it as an opening--
an opening as opposed to a closing of a very big term.
I just wanted to say something about this topic of women
and inclusion or not, which is that I think
all sorts of new things, or emergent things,
tend to come out of a community, rather than an analytical kind
of procedural development of a movement,
or an enactment of an idea.
And my understanding from the conversations
and from all of the reading to come up with those seven
sentences in those bios, is that it
was an emergent movement among Kenny, it sounds
like Christian, and Craig.
And that their group may not have been diverse racially,
gender, and yet we're here at a conference that is inclusive
where the conversation has been very affable, where there has
been entry points for all different viewpoints
and for this course.
And so I think that it is possible,
and I-- there's a big core of me that's old school feminist.
But it is possible for something to start somewhere and then
open up and for it to proliferate and change,
because also now, it no longer belongs to where it emerged,
and it belongs in all of these other places.
We have an editor and founder of a feminist press in the room,
and she can do whatever she wants with this information,
if she so chooses.
We've got-- it no longer--
it's Lisa Bowden of Kore Press over at the back.
And so it no longer belongs where it started.
It's just ballooned out.
And--
[APPLAUSE]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--be diverse and I suspect that it will--
--criticism.
That was funny.
Does somebody want to talk about something else?
I just wanted to follow up on the point
that Barbara made with regard to poetry as thing.
I think the idea of a word--
of words as things.
I want to speak on behalf of words as things.
I think that if we want new meaning from words,
one of the first things we need to do is to see them as things.
And I think that words as things are non-transparent words.
And transparent words are what fill the books of accessible
poetry, yeah?
And at that level, in order to rethink meaning, in order
to expand meaning, and add to meaning, first of all,
you've got to hold onto the idea of language as a thing.
It enables you, it's a tool to move from there.
And the people who don't go with you are the people who say,
oh, it's just language.
And one's response is, that's a positive thing, yeah?
OK.
And then next?
I'm sorry, I probably didn't make myself understood.
Of course, I understand.
I totally agree with that words are things, absolutely.
What disturbs me is the fact that words
are emptied of subjectivity.
Or if you can think of a word that is emptied of humanity,
that is what is really disturbing to me.
The fact that you can think the poem as a machine,
as if for a robo future.
So you create robo poems for a robo society.
I'm sorry, that is very disturbing to me.
Jonathan?
And then-- I'm sorry, we have-- yeah, you and then--
OK.
This is just another very small point on things.
But I'm wondering if thing isn't the right word, but material,
only because of the Poundian inheritance
that the thing and no ideas but in things.
Much of my research is looking at how
Fenollosa had attempted to deconstruct
the thing as the word.
And only to have Pound reapply and distort his notions,
and to make it actually the idiomatic thing, which he never
says, leading to great and wonderful mistakes
for all time.
But at this point, I don't think that the--
maybe just material is a better word.
Yes, that's--
Less confusing.
OK.
I just want to start out by saying that this conference has
been both the most entertaining and intellectually stimulating
conference.
And I think--
I've talked to a lot of people, and I
think what you brought up about hip hop, DJing,
and video games, like go straight to the point of,
if there were more--
I mean, it's kind of embarrassing
that there's a school of 36,000 students,
and I can count only a handful of students present.
And it's really-- if they were here last night or today
for any of the readings, they would have loved it.
But they don't even know that this is going on.
And what's happening is really exciting and new,
and is mirroring what's going on in a lot of pop culture
that celebrate our generation.
So we could get that out to people.
And I think a lot of the reason why it's been so entertaining
is the--
it's been very fluid and there hasn't been a lot
of academic squabbling for me.
Because I'm not really interested in that.
But more so than just seeing the art and getting inspired by it.
So I would say that that seems to be the biggest
problem is, there's so many people-- last night there
was a DJ event, and there was maybe 150 people there
from the biggest DJs.
And what's going on and what's been here with the sound,
and what we're playing, what's going on the conceptual poetry,
is hearing exactly what DJs have been doing for 15, 20 years.
So that's-- I don't know.
If we could get that to go, I don't
know if anybody has any ideas on what to do.
So that's what I was going to say.
Media education.
Danny.
Tracie.
I'm in a job so you're going to have to say [INAUDIBLE]..
I'm just going to support that motion
by saying that it's not only important for them
to come to forums like this, but for us to intersect.
That's the whole point.
And we look at these words, or text,
or sounds, or whatever, as all the sounds
from our preferences as text.
And then from our perspective of things all being text.
And then also go there to give it the same kind of weight.
So the societal significance that make them as much
signifiers as anything else.
And that means we can like it, not like it, or whatever.
But to not think that all of those sounds are attached to
is the thing that ends up dating these kinds of movements.
And I would say--
[INAUDIBLE] going to pass it on to Kenny,
and there's been so much talk about his work
to this notion of boringness, also speaks
to your question about what students consider boring.
And what they consider interesting.
So to a certain extent, I think that critique is based on--
can I say this calmly--
short attention spans, and the lack
of profundity for them to not see
anything that's not immediately hip as a detriment that
will be that their generation that we will have to face.
So we do have to do these kinds of profound intersections.
And I-- just to problematize this
a little more because Kenny is going to talk in a second.
But to think about the notion of unboring,
boring in both senses of the word boring,
because I kept hearing boring 14 times.
I was like, it also means needling.
It also means going inside of a landscape, or inside
of a notion so that it's unboring the notion of boring,
and that notion of pushing into or invading
the body, the corpus, the sensibility,
and unboring the boringness of that, the presumption
that you can invade a sensibility.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm all for short attention spans.
And I'm all for poetry that addresses and moves fast.
And poetry of the moment.
And a reading that's not a long reading, a reading that
can be dipped into it will.
There's not a narrative, there's not a linear,
you don't have to go through it.
You can come, you can go, you can dip,
you can sample the type of reading.
And so it's skimming.
It's the way we live today.
We skim.
And this is why I was referring to John Cage as the Evelyn
Wood of the avant-garde.
I think it's a contemporary way of being.
As I said, nobody reads a newspaper,
and I think it was said it's a new way of reading.
I mean, I say you don't have to read the text, people
dip into the book.
That's another way of reading.
God, it's such a conventional notion about attention
and attention spans.
Now, I'm going to get off of this
because I could go for a while.
But Marjorie wanted to bring up the idea of flarf, which hasn't
been mentioned this weekend.
And briefly, I just wanted to kind of say that--
Some people don't know what it is.
Do you want to tell?
Oh, flarf is a movement in many ways very
similar to conceptual poetry primarily using Google as a way
to write through and to construct texts.
I wanted to really touch for a second on the differences.
And I think the results actually often
are quite similar to the types of things that we're doing.
And you could almost say that many of the text presented
today could pass at a flarf festival for flarf texts,
in fact.
The difference is, I think, in the construction.
While both deny a traditional sense
of subjectivity, traditional notion of authorship,
it's in the putting together of the text
that's quite different.
Flarf takes a much more traditional approach
to selecting the best texts and putting the best text together
in order to make a Zinger and make everybody laugh
and feel good.
As a matter of fact, contrasting this
with the methodologies of conceptual writing,
which oftentimes propose a machine,
and the results are simply accepted.
They may be edited slightly afterwards or worse work,
but not to the degree.
So I think that it's-- actually, the difference is not
in the result, but the difference is in the process.
And I believe that flarf holds very
much onto traditional notions of constructions of authorship.
And then absolutely claims it to be unoriginal.
Thank you.
Anybody want to argue with [INAUDIBLE]??
I would like to respond to that by saying--
adding, also, that you have two separate communities that
came up with very similar principles,
or concepts, of how to write, and that they're
purely the side effects of their own indigenous community
endeavor.
I mean, it seems to me that every art movement
expands beyond the inkblot of its initial grouping, right?
I mean, really, this kind of work, I suppose,
would have been born over beer with three poets in Buffalo
sitting around chatting with each other,
recognizing each other in their own practice.
It was no intention, of course, that suddenly branch out
into a whole variety of different other communities.
[INAUDIBLE] actually building this time bomb
in your own basement as a group, right?
I think the same thing is true of flarf.
They also originate with highly specific community.
And really that's, I think, the fundamental difference
in many respects is just the personalities
and idiosyncrasies that inform that practice for most
communities.
Anyone?
Rob [INAUDIBLE].
Rob?
I just wanted to go back to--
because I think it's important to--
Question this just a comment and a
thank you for this conference.
Also for me, I've been very exciting, very stimulating.
And I think I'm coming out thinking
about this notion of conceptual poetry
without a sense of one specific answer.
I didn't come in with one specific answer, either.
And I live in a very different state,
but with a similar sort of openness to what that could be.
The one thing I do feel is this question of the machine
is actually of even less interest to me now, as such.
I use machines, and most of us do all the time.
What interests me even more, and I've
seen that from the comments and interventions throughout,
is this notion of the kind of exchange
that machines facilitates, in a sense,
Charles' notion of the politics that we
bring to these machines.
And what I find--
what I have found really, really exciting
is this notion of transformations,
or transformation, or whatever we want to call them,
but that are really also taking place
in which linguistic communities, different ways of thinking
about this kind of exchange-- cultural exchange
so that the poetic does enter broader cultural field,
in general.
And that is what I leave with, if you like.
So thank you for all this.
[APPLAUSE]