Welcome back to the conceptual poetry symposium,
and this is our conceptual poetry panel.
Thanks for coming.
I'm Tenney Nathanson from the University of Arizona English
department, and it's a privilege and a great pleasure
to get to moderate the panel.
Like everybody else, I really want
to thank Gail and Frances and Renee
and all the Poetry Center staff, and especially
Marjorie for putting the whole shindig together.
It's absolutely fantastic.
A couple of technical things.
I guess we're live streaming, so when
we get to the question and answer part,
I've been asked to ask you guys to please
wait until the microphone comes to you before you
start asking your question.
And for the panelists, there are only two live mics,
so these things here are recording mics
and not what you need to speak into.
Excuse me.
So I'm going to make a sort of opening series of questions,
and also just make some kind of statement in turn,
and then we'll turn it over to everybody.
I was delighted to see the topic for Cole's session
later today on ekphrasis because it
seems to have a wonderfully strange notion of ekphrasis
as doing something that doesn't respond directly
to the painting in front of you.
And I had sent the panelists a series of questions
that they might choose to address,
but they were free as to which one
they would choose to address, and it would also
be great if they chose to address none of them.
So my ideas is I'm going to read these questions.
Especially if nobody addresses them,
then the panel is thereby more conceptual
because it gives you at least two different things
to think about.
And that'll be good.
So the questions were the topics.
The first one is called Borderline.
In this introduction to the UbuWeb anthology
of conceptual writing, Craig Dworkin
does a lot of forthright cleaving.
Poetry he says expresses--
I feel now like this is endlessly
been put into a lot of boxes here today
for this implication.
Many times I'll try and read it kind of quickly.
But "poetry expresses the emotional truth
of the self, a craft honed by especially
sensitive individuals.
It puts metaphor and image in the service of song,
or at least that's the story we've
inherited from romanticism.
But what would a non-expressive poetry look like?
A poetry of intellect rather than emotion?
One in which the substitutions at the heart of the metaphor
and image were replaced by the great presentation of language
itself--
It would be against [INAUDIBLE]----
with spontaneous overflow supplanted by a meticulous
procedure and exhaustively logical process in which
the self-regard of the poet's ego would turn back onto
the self-reflexive language of the poem itself."
And that's at the end of the quotation.
In a different moment and circumstance,
Angus Fletcher suggests oddly that in considering
and defining allegory, quote, "one cannot help wondering
if borderline cases are not going to be the norm,"
end quote, might such a sense of borderline as norm be usefully
brought to bear on the category of conceptual poetry,
and then there's something else in parenthesis.
The question of whether conceptual poetry might
necessarily be quasi allegorical,
at least in Fletcher's sense of decapitated allegory,
isn't what I'm trying to raise here,
though I think it's potentially interesting.
Next topic is called "Ragging on Wordsworth, Preaching
to the Converted, Drawing the Line."
"It somehow seems unlikely that the UbuWeb introduction
is preaching to the latter day Wordsworthians who votes.
If let's say there are no Wordsworthians present
in this room today, or are there,
are we all conceptual poets?
Is conceptual poetry really just another
name for the new American poetry and what came after?
Or if not, what sorts of work being
done by the children of the new American poetry
aren't properly considered conceptual, and what
might such putatively non-conceptual poets
learn from conceptual poetry?"
Next topic, it's called "Having a Urinal Moment."
"Plucking a urinal in a museum in 2008 presumably
wouldn't constitute quite the same gesture or speech
act as doing so in 1917, even if Duchamp hadn't done so then.
How in the land of the logo post for this, post implosion,
post everything that the provocations
which conceptual poetry can offer its others?
In the poetry world, the greater art world,
the larger culture differ from those
it could offer in 1917 or even 1977.
Does thinking about such contextual issues
offer any reliable clues as to what
sorts of conceptual gestures are now
likely to seem most urgent, most merely self-congratulatory?"
The next one is called "Pieces," and it's got an epigraph
from Robert Creeley's Pieces.
"God, I hate simplistic logic.
I like it."
Let me start again. '"God, I hate simplistic logic,
like I like it.
Who cares?
Liking is as liking does for you for me."
That's the end of the quotation.
"Nevertheless, it might be useful to be vulgar and take
the bait so that the test of poetry's work
suggests that the conceptual poems in mind
were no longer whether it could have been done better
the question of the workshop, but whether it
could conceivably have been done otherwise."
That's the end of the quotation.
"But how about, was it worth doing?
Was this one more worth doing that one?
So this is an invitation to step up to the plate,
pick a piece from the online Ubu anthology
that you have high regard for and talk about why you like it,
and also optionally pick another you don't much like and explain
why and if you like extrapolate from the piece or pieces
you discuss to say something about promising and unpromising
avenues for conceptual poetry."
And then finally one that's called No, which is actually
a pun that nobody will get.
No.
"In the US at least there's been some significant overlap
between people making conceptual art, including
conceptual poetry, and those engaged
in sustained spiritual, perhaps most often Buddhist practice.
But some of the conceptual poetry you're interested in
have a significant spiritual resonance.
Does conceptual poetry seem to you especially
to lend itself to such reverberation?
If so, how or why?"
And then the panel will not be about any of those questions
at all.
Charles is up first.
I'm just presenting this five minute presentation.
I'm not actually speaking.
And this is a problem with this thing
because if you can't read it, you won't be able to see it.
It involves reading the text, which I'm not going to speak.
So it's only five minutes.
If those of you who are on the periphery,
can you read this text from where you are?
If you have any trouble reading it, you could move.
Otherwise, just play on its own.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
"Dear Kenny G., my husband Jim and I
have enjoyed your music for many years
and are great fans of yours.
I'm writing to share a very special experience with you,
and I sincerely hope that you take this as a compliment
because that's how it is met.
Jim and I met in June of 1981.
He was 6 foot 10 inches tall, me a strapping 5 foot
2 inches tall.
I knew right then and there he was my soulmate
and we would be married someday.
Two weeks later he was seriously injured in a motorcycle
accident where he broke his neck and was left a quadriplegic.
Oh well, I teased.
God just brought you down to my level
so it wouldn't strain my neck trying to kiss you.
Our courtship was in the hospital and rehab unit,
and on December 19, 1981, we were married.
We tried to have a family, even pursued fertility specialists
to help us conceive.
Actually did get pregnant, but lost the fetus early
in the pregnancy.
We were crushed, but decided it didn't matter
if we gave birth or adopted.
We wanted a family.
We applied at a prominent agency in Seattle.
They promptly called us and said we were a perfect couple.
Good jobs, stable home, excellent references,
time to proceed with the home study and the first installment
of cash.
Since they only asked a question of general health, I said good
and didn't elaborate on Roger being confined to a wheelchair.
But when money was to change hands,
I decided I'd better let them know
before the home study began.
Upon telling the adoption representative,
there was dead silence on the phone.
I told her to be straight with me.
As you can probably guess, Kenny, our chances
were slim to none of receiving an infant to adopt.
We decided to go through the state child services division,
and that is where we met our future son, Eddie.
What a blessing.
We were finally parents.
A few years passed by, fertility procedures
changed so much in that time frame.
It was actually Eddie that asked one day
if he was going to ever have some brothers and sisters.
So we decided to head back to Seattle
to check into the new fertility procedures for us.
They had a relatively new procedure then
called ICSI for short.
It's quite an involved process, but we were prime candidates
for this procedure.
In December 1995 after a series of at home hormone injections,
monitoring and et cetera, we were now ready for our 10 day
stay in Seattle, ready to proceed with the egg
collection, fertilization, and finally the eggs
were placed inside of me praying for our miracle.
Believe it or not, Kenny G., this
is where you come into the picture.
[LAUGHTER]
You and your beautiful song Miracles
was playing during these procedures.
The doctors, nurses and medical staff, they love this song too.
And we prayed we could get another miracle in our life.
Are you ready for this, Kenny?
We conceived on the first try.
They said we were having twins.
We were thrilled, and then at five months along
I looked like I was full term.
The ultrasound showed not two but five little ones squirming
around inside of me.
We delivered five beautiful miracles on June 20, 1996,
30 weeks along in Spokane, Washington.
Their names are Charles Edward, Robin Edna, Rachel Mallory,
Cynthia Naomi, and Darlene [INAUDIBLE] Kenny.
I've wanted to share this with you for so long
and thank you for the beautiful songs you play and share
with us.
Our miracles now dance to your music,
and someday I'll tell them our special story of the Miracle
song by Kenny G. With much respect, God bless, Jerry
Bonham and family."
"Dear Kenny G., I've always tried to distance myself
from the controversy surrounding you, Mr. G. and your music,
meaning all the hits you take because your music is not
real jazz, et cetera.
Well, I've always maintained that your music is simply
pop music and that you're being labeled a jazz artist is simply
because you happen to play the sax.
No big deal.
After all, as far as I know, you have never
claimed that what you're doing is jazz.
I never had a problem with you, Kenny, until now.
Upon hearing your fake duet with the late Mr. Louis Armstrong,
I was disgusted to say the least.
The melding of the two of you was nothing short of criminal.
Louis Armstrong, the undisputed father of jazz,
one of the first documented improvisers playing
with Kenny G. Did you, Mr. G., get permission
from the late Mr. Armstrong?
Somehow it seems highly unlikely unless you, Mr. G.,
are handy with a Ouija board.
Where do you, Kenny G., get off even
contemplating such a thing?
Oh, it would be different if Mr. Armstrong were still
alive and could consent to such a thing,
but no you wait until he's dead and he
can't defend his own music.
The almighty dollar triumphs again.
What an uncaring pretentious asshole you are.
How dare you do such a thing what a wonderful world it sure
doesn't seem like it, but we have
plunderers like Slobodan Milosevic and Kenny G. running
rampant.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, after defending you for so many years from the jazz
purists, I'm through.
No more.
You're nothing but an opportunist jerk who
plays the same tired ass licks incessantly
and is a fucking grave robber to boot.
Screw you.
Richard Lewiston, Seattle, Washington."
[LAUGHTER]
I think that probably deserves applause.
[APPLAUSE]
My students when I'm teaching poetry
always complain that they hate poetry.
They hate it because they think it's hard.
They hate it because they think it's
difficult, obscurantist and hermetic.
They don't want to study it because it
doesn't make any sense.
And after trying to parse the meanings of otherwise normative
lyrical poetry, they're always disgusted
to discover that, in fact, the insights were
relatively banal and trite.
The poetry didn't communicate anything
of epistemological significance.
They already knew what these poems meant and they wondered
why the poets go to so much trouble
to disguise and encipher these messages
into these little cryptograms that they then
are forced to decipher.
I always respond by saying that poetry is not difficult.
It is not hard because if it were hard
poets would not do it.
[LAUGHTER]
Poets are the stupidest people I know,
the laziest people I know, they are the most unimaginative
people I know.
When we're teaching poetry in a creative writing workshop,
I do not tell my poetlings to write what they
know because they know nothing.
If they actually knew something of merit,
something worthwhile, something of
epistemological significance, surely they
would be in that discipline doing it.
They would be in history or in business, or in physics
or in biology, or in mathematics.
But the truth is that they're in my poetry workshop
because math was hard.
[LAUGHTER]
They've been demoted to this job.
They can't get a job as a secretary
because they can't file the work.
They procrastinate too much.
They've got better things to do.
And quite frankly, being a poet is the only job
that I can think of where we're allowed to drink on the job.
I'm sure that's why many of my students
have decided that they want to become poets.
I think that the problem with the avant-garde, at least
up until recently, certainly it's
not evident in the quality of the presentations
that we've seen delivered here today,
but I've always thought that one of the problems
of the avant-garde was that it suffered
from a lethal dose of seriousness.
That in fact it was, despite it's vaunted, statements
about the value of pleasure, la jouissance
of the readerly experience, that these pleasures were in fact
reserved primarily for the writer
who sequestered those experiences, cousined them
closely to their chest and took pride in the fact
that they could take some pleasure in owning a secret
and having hermetic mastery over a set of skills
that the reader was not allowed to actually enjoy.
And one of the great things about,
at least some recent avant-garde poetry,
is the degree to which it now makes
a claim for the value of the obvious, the painfully
transparent.
It does not want to be difficult or hard.
It does not want to suffer from this kind
of lethal dose of seriousness.
The concepts of art are easy to appreciate and understand,
and what constitutes the newness of the avant-garde
now is less to do with a kind of digital upgrade
to ideology, the kind of planned obsolescence
that we see in commodities where poetry is something that
is new and improved, twice as many adjectives, something that
constitutes a kind of upgrade to our language,
that we don't actually imagine newness in the same way
that we have in the past.
Now, I note, for example, that much discussion, certainly
in contemporary literary theory, the overuse of the word
host as a prefix, post-colonials and postmodernism,
post-feminism, et cetera, I feel a great deal
of suspicion towards this prefix now as a gesture indicating
a certain kind of novelty or advance in concept
because I don't think it signifies that at all.
To me, it's analogous to the prefix neo, which
of course does not signal newness at all,
but is really just a cipher for retro.
To say neo-futurism suggests that in fact you
have a very retro attitude, not a new attitude.
I think that when we say post, we
are not suggesting in fact that we've somehow transcended
or exceeded a prior form or paradigm,
but then in fact we are impatient to see
it transcended, but it hasn't been yet
and it really what it signifies now
is something more like more of the same, only worse.
To say something like postmodernism
is tantamount to saying more of the same, but only worse.
We tried to suggest ways in which conceptual literature
and poetry might be of value despite its purported
and vaunted valuelessness.
It seems to me that any good idea is valuable at the moment
that it spawns new ideas; that we look at the work that
in fact creates discussion, creates
provocation, that inspires in us a desire
to run away and join the circus, to inspire us
a desire to write.
And it's those ideas that create ideas
that constitute the most productive aspects
of this kind of work.
In effect, the good idea is the one that can be most imitated,
the one that generates the most subsequent discussion,
the one that lends itself to a kind of mutagenic radiation.
It can fit in all kinds of different contexts
and be appropriated in a whole variety of different milieus,
to a whole variety of competing purposes,
and that it's those ideas and concepts that we now
regard as the ones that are in fact the most inspiring,
the ones that constitute I think the foundation of this kind
of conceptual literature.
I think that deserves applause.
[APPLAUSE]
OK, I have a kind of a talky kind of talk, death knell
seriousness.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's called Hard To Hear, Black Performativity
Through Sonic Dissonance in the Topical Example
Of Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Thank you.
Think a little [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah, it's--
--a little curve.
So it's [? even ?] nice Canadians.
OK, well, I'm going to read the whole thing.
It's not too long, I hope.
I'm honored to be part of this august panel,
scholars I respect, and my friends.
I have to say all this stuff.
And I want to thank, of course, Gail and Frances and Marjorie
for letting me participate in this wonderful weekend.
It was a daunting task to think about a topic that
might be of interest to such a well-informed group
of colleagues, but I do hope that my few comments will
at least lead to further discussion, if not new news,
or boring boring.
This comment is part of a larger idea
I'm working on regarding Black sound use
and cultural interpretation.
The last time I saw Kenny, Charles, Caroline, Marjorie,
and Christian together was that my first and only
MLA Conference in Philly in 2006.
Marjorie spearheaded the poetics and sound theme of that MLA.
And I felt that after the post traumatic effects
of a recent dissertation defense,
as if I had died and gone to heaven at the MLA.
And I was also told that it was an incredibly tough conference
act to follow.
I think the person who told me that meant the other MLAs,
but I also think that being on this panel
is certainly tougher than being an observer at the conference.
During my visit to Arizona, I've been intrigued
by the talks I've heard so far and really look forward
to more insights from Charles's Negative Confessions,
a recantorium exemplified in the Solomonic repudiation
of an aspect of the self, the true self in exchange
for a more generous social standing--
which I guess I'm questioning with this talk on, right?
Or at least a broader acceptance among the mundane
of the Marjorie's elegant reflections
on the normatively of language experimentation.
Also gave me entrée into the boundary pushing of associative
wordplay that we have each engaged in since we could
absorb abstract sound and meaning,
even possibly pre-birth.
Craig's wrangling of the ethical implication of popular access
also gives us pause, and Caroline's particularization
of utterances affirms cultural distinctions and distortions
without privileging one over the other.
Language gives us a sense of society and the belonging
to a group, and group exclusion determines
the type of language evidence, as we construct and hear.
Language as utterance and description, sound, and text,
the poetics of sound, is of interest to me as,
obviously, as a practitioner.
I thought about the confluence of sound texts observances
in modern life in contemporary contexts,
and I thought I'd like to add to the idea as a performative text
of controversial commentary of right
and what it might mean in the context of both proto
and post racial discourses embodied
by the flurry around the Obama campaign.
It was an extraordinary opportunity, in my opinion,
to consider the poetics of utterances,
and with this audience to consider
how these utterances perform.
After all, how often do we come across this above board,
underground, over the top generation of sound and meaning
in the news in a cultural context
and in the environment of multiple social registers?
I do hope that this is a location where
in discussing poetics, concept, and otherness
we can have a conversation based on a commonly
known textual template.
I want to focus these notes on the politics of undertone
of sonic meaning rather than the emphasis of vocabulary
and statement, the meaning of the sonic performance
as a script.
This will inescapably lead to references to the descriptive,
but I think, in many instances, we
have a sense of what the public Jeremiah Wright means,
literally, the heat that comes from what has now been uttered
and what the sounds indicate, the comfort and discomfort they
carry depending on register.
So I'm going to have to turn my back
and plug this in really quick just
to show you a couple of clips.
Let's see, skip ahead a little bit and just play something.
How do I do it?
[INAUDIBLE]
Maybe I can do it from here, actually.
I can take that out.
Did you get the thing for this one?
Yeah, I can it switch it out.
OK, should I--
Yeah, just plug it in.
Sorry.
Thank you.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, great.
This is my [INAUDIBLE],, my wonderful typing, [? Kenny? ?]
See how I type.
Looks a lot like your typing.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, hope this works.
All right, I want to show you a couple of clips,
and I'll talk about them in a minute.
[INAUDIBLE] Yay.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- At [INAUDIBLE] Paul says the spirit help with our infirmity,
which mean the spirit comes together and takes on the yoke.
In other words, the Holy Ghost is feeling your drive.
The Holy Ghost is feeling your temper.
The Holy Ghost is--
This is not Jeremiah Wright, but--
- --feeling your energy, and he didn't leave you by yourself.
But the Holy Ghost is yoking with you,
and what he's saying is, I'm not going to take it by myself.
But if you will understand it, and all you got to do
is will it, and I will help you through.
But you can't be caught between two opinions, leaving
and coming back.
But you got to make up your mind.
Lord, I'll be here.
I'll stand with you until you work it out,
because the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, gets sat on.
I feel like preaching in here.
Give somebody a high five, and say
when I need to do the right thing here,
I need the Holy Ghost to sit on me.
When my flesh is at the other level, sit on me.
When that one looks too good, and I can't get around it.
Ah!
Sit on--"
[END PLAYBACK]
All right, I'm going to say more about that.
That was not actually meant to be funny.
But I want to play it in the context of this clip.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- passes a three strike law, and then want
us to sing God Bless America?
No, no, no, not God bless America, God damn America!
It's in the Bible.
You're killing innocent people.
God damn America.
Passes a three strike law--
[END PLAYBACK]
I'm going to put that back in in a second, but actually can
I play the--
here's the [? tip, ?] lovely [? tip. ?] Can I play something
else that's on my iTunes here?
Do I have to plug--
Yeah.
OK, great, thank you.
We kind of had it worked out, but I'm a little nervous here.
OK, there's a couple of things I wanted
to say about this combination of clips.
Use the mic.
Oh, I'm sorry.
There's a couple of things--
that would help-- that I wanted to say
about this combination of clips that, hopefully,
relate to the context in which we're speaking of poetics.
Let's see, these performances underscore
what in performance studies is called spontaneous communitas.
It is a type of inspired feeling and pervasive performance
prompted by the collective spirituality of a group.
That's kind of towards one of your questions.
Part of the intimidation with Wright
is that he articulated a sense of anger,
humor, and clear cultural divisions that, for some, are
not singular but are, in the mind of these people,
indicative of Black rebellion.
What form does this rebellion take?
That the verbal retort of generationally
festered cursing or marking speaks to a deep-seated ideas
of post-slavery revenge.
The utterance alludes to these things
because of the non-western sensibility
of the non-sequiturs between words.
Wright is a modified version of an African based glossolalia
that speaks to dark vengeful African spirituality.
It is a fundamental distrust of collective Black communitas
that is the heart of the resentment of Wright's
utterances.
A more explicit aspect of this glossolalia
is presented in those clips.
And this cannot be considered outside of the development
of Black Christianity in the United States.
I think I'm going to skip ahead, and I
think something you know about anti-slavery laws and stuff.
But I also wanted to complement this
with just a couple of short excerpts
that I want you to relate to sonically.
One might be a little bit familiar.
I hope you can hear it.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
(SINGING) go, go, go.
[END PLAYBACK]
So all right, and then there's another one
I want you to hear that may not be as well known to you.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
This is for the sonic quality here.
(SINGING) It's all right.
I feel it.
It's all right.
I'm feel it.
It's all right.
I'm feel it.
It's all right.
I'm feel it.
It's all right.
I'm feel it.
Music in my heart has kept me through all of the tainting
the world has put me through.
It's all right.
I'm feel it.
This feeling that you get can change thee.
The power of the room will always see you through.
It's all right.
I'm feel it.
Nothings block your way 'cause this is your day.
Stand up and be free.
You only got to say, it's all right.
I feel it.
[END PLAYBACK]
OK, so those two excerpts, one was from James Brown,
Give It Up, Turn It Loose.
The other one was, It's All Right,
I Feel It by Jocelyn Brown.
With the Browns, the utterance unencumbered by meeting
is more explicit.
This sound work appropriately, for my purposes,
Give It Up, Turn It Loose, segues
between Jones and Wright, and not only articulates
the explicit musicality of the performative utterances
of Jones, Wright, and others, but also speaks
to meaning unmoored from vocabulary.
It is interesting to consider whether Jocelyn Brown's
utterances also convey a masculinist tonality rather
than a variation of Black female utterances being ascribed
to her voice.
If the vocabulary isn't prioritized here,
then what are they saying that's not music?
It's an utterance of identity that
is a post African resonance of an African-American speech act.
In The Preacherly Text, African-American Poetry
and Vernacular Performance, Marcellus Blount
writes, "Black utterance like other counter discourses
mask this own continuity as a way of veiling the challenges
to the legitimacy of dominant political institutions
and cultural traditions."
In theorizing about African-American poetry,
critics might be guided by what Richard [? Terdiman ?]
describes in a different context as the capacity of counter
discourses to situate, to relativize the authority
of stability of a dominant system of utterances,
which cannot even countenance their existence as a way
of enacting a new realm of subjectivity.
So I'm interested in this sound of non-sequiturs.
I'm just going to skip ahead because I
know I'm running out of time.
What I hope these few comments may offer,
as we potentially hear Jeremiah Wright's remarks
over and over again in the upcoming campaign season
is, the opportunity for sonic dissonance
to be manipulated exclusively as a confrontational discourse
when we see their application in other realms
of Black holy identity utterances,
as well as other Black sounds susceptible to outsider
interpretations.
And here, I'm particularly talking
about the grain of the voice, and how
that particular sound and in Jocelyn Brown's voice
and others, is articulated.
It is my hope that we can apply poetic tools
to parse the distinction between internal speech
that politically confronts because
of a vocabulary and those that culturally "confront"
in quotes, because of a sound variety that is vocabularized
as confrontation.
As in hip hop sampling, the articulation
of sonic dissonance can be used to create contrast
with other sounds outside of the assumptions of valuations
of standard utterances of these sounds.
We, as poets and scholars, are uniquely
able to make these distinctions in sounds and meanings.
[APPLAUSE]
I wanted to-- I knew that following
on from my talk this morning I wanted
to go back to someone whose work I admire
and that has been undoubtedly an influence
on my way of thinking about writing,
although he's not a writer himself.
And I've just plucked two slides that I realized-- there's
another one I wish I had.
I'm sure you know the work.
So this is just this one introduction.
It's work by Félix González-Torres,
Cuban-American artist who died very prematurely of AIDS in New
York.
And I say this because his illness and his lover's illness
were very much part of the work.
Although you wouldn't necessarily know it,
he said he was inspired by Christian Boltanski,
or the much more minimal than Boltanski and at times
also quite kitsch in his output.
If I'm not mistaken, and I can't remember the exact term,
but I think he called his work emotional minimalism.
And if it wasn't emotional minimalism,
it's something that had to do with bringing up
emotion and bringing up feeling as part of this extremely
pared down structure.
So it's not necessarily the candy
eating pieces that I wanted to talk
about here with the implication of collective feeding,
as well as collective pleasure, but those cited--
OK.
Those cited biographies, you call them portraits.
So why does it have to do this?
OK, so what you'll see--
you see it there although it's a bit smaller.
Thank you.
Starting with this one, he would take private commissions
for some of these portraits, interview the clients
so that they would get dates and their biographies,
chosen dates out of their lives, and then you
would get those facts to tease out.
And then he would go away and supplement--
[LAUGHTER]
I was wondering what you were laughing because--
Like you weren't being funny.
Yeah, really, really funny.
[LAUGHTER]
So he would supplement these personal information,
these personal dates, with more collective,
or public, let's say, dates.
And then he would put these together.
They didn't have the final choice on the dates.
So basically, and then you also have
those very public ones in which, again, the same system,
very, very minimal way of--
this is an AIDS tribute, as you can see,
and very, very minimal use of language and of dates.
What I like about this work is the way the private, perhaps
less this one, that the private becomes part of--
is acknowledged in its collective narrative
and done with very, very sparse, sparse means.
So I just wanted to bring that up here.
There is another type of work of his
that I very much like, as well, which he called The Stacks.
And I'm sure, again, you know these pieces.
The one that I was thinking of particularly
is The Stacks of White Paper.
I'm thinking of that one because it is called Passport.
And I just-- again, this idea of taking away
a white sheet of paper where the only connection that you have
with language is in the title.
You could forget the title once you've taken away the sheet.
But he would still--
these stacks were also created with standard industrial paper.
So these are paper.
It will disappear, will quickly degrade.
There was always a sense, even when he was traveling,
he was looking for a standard sized stacks
and was very conscious about the fact that they would degrade.
What interests me about that, again,
is this idea of the dispersed archive, dispersed
in personal lives.
Some information disappears.
Some will remain.
And you just have it for as long as, basically,
you can carry that history.
So I just wanted to bring his work to the table.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm glad that both the collective spirituality
and Tracie's and the collective pleasure that you mentioned
also came up because I'm talking about something
that's somewhat related, at least in the notion
of collectivity.
I wanted to start by addressing the others in the title
Conceptual Poetry and Its Others.
"I hear the word as implying that conceptual poetry has
allies or counterparts in its projects,
or that there are other contemporary modes of poetry
that share some of the same goals
and interests as conceptual poetry.
Principle among those interests is the role of the subject."
Craig Dworkin addresses it in his introduction to the UbuWeb
Conceptual Poetry Anthology with this line as,
"clearly the chorus."
There should be a quiz on this.
[LAUGHTER]
We'll all have it memorized.
It is mention of expressive poetry with the opening line,
"poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self."
Self here is for me a more problematic term
than expresses, and many of conceptual poetry,
as others, are also interested in replacing
the assumption of a consistent sovereign I
with a differently nuanced understanding of point
of view framing and voice.
In particular, a number of writers
have approached the problem by constructing a speaking
position that is broadly dispersed,
creating a situation similar to that described by distributed
cognition, which downplays the importance
of individual experience and its claim to universality in favor
of a model of shared cognition in which experience
is recognized as gathered across both communities and time.
And it's also a model, a neuroscientific model,
that incorporates the object as part of the cognitive system.
And I was thinking how well much of what's being done here,
such as Kenny's work, which uses computers, or Christian's,
which uses the DNA.
There's all sorts of objects that are taking
part in the thinking pattern.
So there's no pretense to all the thought going on up here.
Instead, there's a recognition with a distributed cognitive
model that cognition is always a shared and, to some degree,
collective experience.
One example of this in contemporary poetry--
and I'm choosing it simply because it's one
that I really enjoy--
is poets who are using history in ways that bring that
to the center of their work.
I'm going to just choose three quick examples,
and I chose them, one, because she's here.
Another one because she was supposed to be
here and suddenly couldn't be.
And a third because she might just as well have been here
and, for me, she indicates how broadly spread the others
of conceptual poetry are.
Extremely different but quite numerous.
So the first one is Caroline Bergvall's, Shorter Chaucer
Tales.
She not only chose a root text noted for its poly-vocality,
but launched off from it with vocabulary
from different languages, some living, some revived,
some invented to create a stance from which she could strangify
certain contemporary social issues,
placing them in a constantly growing frame that
demands historical accounting.
Two, Susan Howe's, Scare Quotes I + II Almost all
of Susan's work would make an equally good example,
but Scare Quotes is particularly apt
because of its use of collage, which pulls dimension as a lens
into the center.
And though she distinguishes her own experience
through the use of the authorial eye,
it is not privileged but is presented
among many others, all of which are given equal weight
and together constitute the voice of the text, which
is quite different from Susan's own.
And three is Thalia Field's, ULULU.
Channeled through a fictional character, point of view
is refracted through the prism of the imaginary
and by presenting her in all her permutations
Thalia redivides and multiplies it until the media
itself, film, theater, extrapolation, censorship
ends up doing the talking.
The I that appears relatively frequently in the text
is positive as both a construct and a function
rather than a stable entity.
Work such as this has nothing to do with the selflessness
that Tenney refers to in his question about Buddhism.
Their ultimate selflessness comes from an overflow of self
that generates past counting.
Both expressive and emotional, they
do not express the emotions of a single consolidated subject.
Instead, they refuse the easy invention
of a self that amounts to self-centeredness to create
a more intricate, as well as more generous and more accurate
position from which language happens.
But this approach does have implications
for the direct presentation of language
because the fluid distribution of subjectivity
transfers authority to language itself.
Language speaks the field through which
the eye wanders unanchored.
Research-based work, in general, tends toward both distributed
subjectivity and foregrounded language because the subject is
no longer the subject, i.e.
the subject matter is no longer the speaking subject
and his or her emotions recollected.
Craig asks, what would a non-expressive poetry look
like?
A poetry of intellect rather than emotion.
What I hear in his statement is not an either or proposition
but a legitimate concern about poetry
that is driven by emotion only and the role
that such poetry plays in the anti-intellectualism that
has been growing in this country for decades.
Intellectual exploration has been, in part,
replaced by a passion for judgment,
and that's what I see in Craig's addressing in his comment
that the test of poetry is no longer whether it could have
been done better, but whether it could have been done otherwise.
It's a much harder question, one that demands that, finally, we
agree to encounter a work on its own terms, which
means entering them ourselves with our own terms left behind.
That's the generosity to which conceptual poetry leads us.
[APPLAUSE]
All right, so I don't have anything as formal or clever
as anyone else, but I just wanted
to raise an early and general warning,
and this is purely selfish, as you'll see.
But one of today's questions, aren't we all conceptual poets,
reminded me of a slightly hurt and slightly defensive
and slightly non-understanding response
that you used to hear about language poetry.
Well, I use language in my poem.
Aren't I a language poet?
And it got me thinking that the term--
I just want us to remember that the term conceptual poetry
shouldn't lead us into the kind of confusions
that Wittgenstein called grammatical errors,
where just because of the way our grammar
works we have this word conceptual poetry.
And so since it plugs into sentences
in the way there is a table plugs in,
we hear it and we say, there is conceptual poetry and think,
oh, there's some thing that is conceptual poetry.
And then we have to fight about whether something is or isn't--
is the chair a table because I could put food?
Then like Wittgenstein worried about as philosophers,
we get all muddled.
We get all angry.
Our brows are furrowed.
We fight with each other with fire pokers.
It's awful.
So I just want to say the selfish part of this
is having colleagues and students then come
for decades when we could have been doing
real criticism on individual poems or individual poets,
and instead have endless essays, what is language poetry?
Or I know you.
I think you're a language poet.
And I would just, as a scholar, like to say, let's avoid that.
Let's not define and bicker about
whether something is or isn't conceptual poetry,
and either ignore stuff you don't like,
or do good work on stuff that you do like.
And maybe we could skip that whole first decade of--
[LAUGHTER]
--worry about this as critics and get to the good readings
that we're finally getting about previous generations.
So that's all.
[APPLAUSE]
So we have about half an hour, and we're open for questions.
What is conceptual poetry?
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE],, could you repeat the question
for the online people?
Oh, what-- hey, guess, what is conceptual poetry?
I won't say what the speech act was.
Oh, I just wondered if any one of you
wanted to take up Tenney's question,
let's see, I'm maybe not phrasing it right,
about could it have been done otherwise?
And you said, or should it have been-- what did you say?
Should it have been done at all?
Yeah, I was just--
Do you want to talk about that?
No, I don't.
[LAUGHTER]
I'd love to make a comment on it.
Since nobody mentioned it.
Christian was going to do it and then decided
to do something better instead.
I just-- when I was reading through the anthology
just quickly online, there are some things
that I really like, and I was wondering if other people had
particular favorites and why.
That's all.
I wanted to come back to this idea about judgment on that,
because I thought there's--
and it's the workshop model is to judge these poems
and to say, effectively, if I had done this,
what would I have done?
And so I think that tendency to judge
is another refuge for the little me, as it's sometimes termed.
And so I-- well, I also have my response
about things that move me more or that engage me more.
I was a little worried about judgment
coming back in the backdoor from that
and actually violating the spirit of that suggestion
that we ask instead, could this have been done otherwise,
which focuses us much more on the mechanics of it,
the intricacies of it, what it actually
is, rather than is it good.
Do you want to comment on anything on that?
Yeah, rather than actually interact with the technology,
I elected to extemporize.
But I do think that the work that's,
for example, in that anthology, is interesting,
in part because of the kind of provocations
it instills in certain kinds of writers,
especially those kinds of young writers
who go into a creative writing workshop expecting
to have their own practice otherwise validated,
that the kind of writer who believes they have a lightning
bolt on their forehead and the job of the workshop
is pretty much to weed out everybody
who isn't Harry Potter, right?
When, really, I think the job of the workshop
is a kind of hothouse activity for a certain experimental
practice, or it is supposed to be probative,
trying to generate new ideas.
In the job of science, for example, nowadays
is not so much to validate a prior paradigm
as to increase the number of problems and anomalies
to study, to try and impose upon the prior paradigm
a whole series of disruptions and subversions
or interruptions that make it now possible to conceive
something new.
And the work that we see showcased on UbuWeb, I think,
has gone a long way to doing that.
Whether it should have been done,
I think is verified by the desire of subsequent writers
to engage with it.
Does it constitute something that
instills in us a desire to run away and join the circus
and become poets?
Do we decide that we will pursue this activity
or that we will act actively against it?
What constitutes its merit?
I think has a lot to do with the fact
that it constitutes a repeatable gesture that people want
to see repeated, and that it also
constitutes a gesture that instills in others a desire
to advance that program.
It's a generative activity.
I know the work that shouldn't have been done
is the kind of work that instills in me no desire
to continue reading it or no desire to actually
engage with it, subsequently.
Or it doesn't raise any new problems.
It doesn't teach me anything I didn't already know.
And I really feel that I'm most interested in that kind
of work, which induces in me a sense
of enigmatic bewilderment.
I know that I'm probably on the right track
if I don't understand the work to begin with.
The job of the critic, I think, is
to confront those kinds of enigmas
and make them intelligible.
Typically, though, for most critics,
all they really need to do or want to do
is in fact to reassert what they already know in the classroom,
rather than raise issues and problems and anomalies
for students, to showcase certain kinds of limited cases
of these concepts, to showcase a whole variety of milieus
for writing that are outside their standard paradigms.
For me, I would say that, if I want to find a poem,
I don't go to poetry to find it now.
You find the poetry elsewhere, probably, in our modern life.
I'm interested to contrast Christian's statement right now
with his initial comment, which, on the face of it,
would be quite different.
And think about the concept of difficulty
as the way it's been discussed here and is often discussed,
as indeed, the issues of invention and innovation,
which often have these negative connotations to them which
trouble me.
And I think Tracie makes a fundamental contribution for me
in this respect.
Difficulty, in my understanding, is usually social difficulty
and cultural difficulty.
I know very often with my own work
just as a practical experience with translators, which
is interesting, that they very rarely
have a problem understanding syntactic
or what, in a very conventional sense,
would seem to be difficult.
What they don't understand are my cultural references
and where I'm coming from, the nature of the humor and so on,
which is very hard to explain.
You say, I looked it up in your dictionary.
I can't find it.
And this kind of cultural difficulty
is enacted in the right question,
and that's why I had to do-- in order to really understand
where the difficulty is, it isn't
just a question of understanding the context of rage, anger,
repression, and expression, and how that works
in a communal circumstance.
That's an easy thing to say.
I think what-- it's the painful thing to say,
but it's also how has to do with particular kinds of sounds,
which you also have to have as it's
overlaid within that context.
I'm writing a book, of which this recantorium probably
be the last piece called, The Attack of the Difficult Poems,
and it's actually something I've been working on for some years.
And it comprises many essays, including
one that Craig published, which is
a composite of a number of things in his new book
from Roof, which is a terrific book.
And I recommend that people get a hold
of that collection of essays.
The question, for example, of what Tan Lin calls ambience,
in a way that relates to some of the things that are being said
here, that he's interested in a surface that has kind
of an ambient listening thinking of Brian Eno,
rather than a kind of high modernist difficulty.
Those interest me in terms of textures.
What I would be concerned about is
if one takes this one kind of difficulty or another
and has some kind of genius.
It takes it out of a kind of historical and social context
of what those difficulties mean because,
as my interests in disciplinary and bachelor machines
are, very often, one person's difficulty is another person's
pleasure.
And so, even if it's set in the spirit of liberation,
I'm always wary of saying this is really painful.
You can't understand it.
You don't like-- I've gotten that all my life.
Not only is this no good, nobody could like this.
And I say, well, you know, I actually
get pleasure from what I read.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, I don't get pleasure from everything
I read, and furthermore, the idea that you should get
pleasure from reading as opposed to have
other kinds of reactions that would be important to you
would be a ridiculous, in the world of the equinox health
club where I go and the people seem to be suffering,
I have a hard time doing that.
And they all say, no, you got to do it.
You got to have all of this pain in order
to get this other thing on the other side.
I just do it because I'm told I have to do it,
so I'm like the bad sports student.
But within the realm of poetry, you
can't even have what is considered
to be a basic conception that you might cook something.
The process of cooking, it might take a long time,
but in the end, it might be fun and might be enjoyable.
You might learn something.
So I would just emphasize that these kinds of terms
in poetics, it's kind of my--
I always go back to that.
Poetics, unlike philosophy, is almost always hyperbolic,
situational, and one sided.
If somebody says I'm against subjectivity,
they are not against subjectivity.
They're against the way subjectivity
has been foisted on them and scleroticized and reified,
and perhaps, is suggesting another kind.
You can't be for something--
I'm against emotion.
I'm for the intellect.
These are absurd binary oppositions,
but the reason that they exist and they're crucial in poetry
is that poetry is situational ethics and a dialogue.
And unless you understand the context
in which those utterances appear,
[INAUDIBLE] Tracie's situating a very important American
political context, you can't understand
what the meaning is because meaning is always social.
Meaning is always political, and it's always site specific.
And the difficulty of the 1960s, and how difficulty
or non-difficulty or ambiance worked in the 60s,
cannot be the same in 2008 because we read it differently.
And poems, written in a particular time,
take on their meaning through those kinds of particulars.
And even the refusal of the historical is historical.
Can I put in for one second.
I just want to takes some run with that
and go back toward Craig and ask something like the following.
If, when you say you hate expression,
you don't hate expression, and so on--
Craig, could you also announce that book for me, the book
from Roof?
What's the name?
The Consequence of Innovation, 21st Century Poetics
Sorry.
Sorry about that.
If you'd like to order at home, it's $19.95 plus tax.
[LAUGHTER]
It is The Consequence of Innovation, 21st Century
Poetics from Roof Books.
So what I'm trying to ask is this,
if you lay out that dichotomy in provocative terms
in the introduction, and presumably, you're
not in some literal way addressing it
to those who would very obviously fall
on the other side of the spectrum, which
is kind of the audience, that poll that you invoked,
those who have sort of done something very simplistic
to American poetry that--
If in some way it's an intervention addressed
to the other people in this room, what's
the force of that intervention or what's the force of making
that binary distinction to this group of people,
I guess is what I would try to ask.
Right, let me say first that there is the--
the little introductory essay returns to words
with actually the Wordsworth--
the Wordsworth quote is already interesting even in its model,
that I think is kind of silly, about the spontaneous overflow
of emotion.
But it's recollected in tranquility.
And it was very hard to parse exactly what he's saying.
But his final phrase is that this emotion that I've
schematically poses, the thing I don't want to foisted on me,
but it takes place in the mind, he says at the end.
So I must say that I wanted to complicate that binary even
within the argument there.
But the argument that's there--
And I think one of the things I'd
want to say about that little web collection, which,
the name is a little grandiose, the UbuWeb anthology,
because it's not really as much an anthology in the way that--
in the American Tree, which was mentioned earlier,
is an anthology.
And it's not comprehensive.
It's not representative.
It's more like an illustrated argument,
and Christian picked up on this.
There are certain very sketchy provocations there.
And in some ways the argument that I
want to make that I think is different than the discussion
we're having today-- which is a good thing,
and this actually goes back to answering your question
about the relationship of conceptual poetry
to broad poetic practices today.
What I really wanted to argue there
was that poems often have affinities
to things that are not poems, and those affinities
are much closer than--
this goes back to this Wittgensteinian era,
that we had this category called poetry, which
is hopelessly huge and encompasses, I think,
actually contradictory things.
And they don't all need to be thought of together.
And a poem might be just as likely
to have a close cousin in a film or in a piece of sculpture
or in writing from some other realm
than it's ever going to have something else that also
happens to be called a poem.
But we shouldn't get confused by this category
of poetry would be the argument I'd want to make.
I'm sorry.
And [INAUDIBLE] Wordsworth seemed
like a safe enough person, in terms of reputation,
that I wasn't going to harm him by having
him be the straw figure there.
I don't particularly have anything against him either.
I want to address your Buddhism question, since you raise it,
and it relates to that.
The question that Tenney asked about Buddhism
is something that's quite significant.
Marjorie and I had the opportunity
to be in China just about a year ago,
and it's a lot of possible interest
in the relation of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.
And it became very apparent to me
that, of course, from a Chinese point of view,
the Buddhism that was in American culture
had nothing to do with Buddhism because it's an American
Buddhism, and its assemblage.
But it does relate to John Cage.
It does relate to Jackson Mac Low.
It does relate to Mac Low, does relate to [? T.D. ?] Suzuki.
And in that context, the significance for poetry--
and remember I think a new American poetry is
fundamentally indebted to the idea of a non-goal driven
understanding of what you're doing,
non- [? procreative, ?] perhaps, non-purposeful.
So that the meaning doesn't have to actually-- so that you're
in the process, that the process is significant,
that the meaning can't be extracted,
but also that it's a non-teleological view of life,
that what's happening right now is what's important.
It's not the career that I have, and so on.
So in the context of the Cold War in the 50s,
it's just fundamentally important,
it's impossible, really, to get beyond that.
Now that, for me, I won't speak for anybody else,
but my generation coming up with that,
is fundamental to my poetics because I'm
completely indebted to it, as I am to feminism and the Civil
Rights movement to understand the very nature of the ground
where I enter into writing.
[LAUGHTER]
Why don't you go back up, thinking
about what Tracie and Charles was
saying about the epistemology and sound.
And what I really liked when Tracie presented
the piece was the part where I feel like I was watching
a kind of patient moment with Jones,
with the being written by a God moment.
And when you said, that's actually not
supposed to be funny.
And yet, people felt very happy laughing at it,
just as they felt very happy laughing at Kenny's piece,
whereas, I felt that wasn't actually
supposed to be funny either.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's the same thing because you're
playing with notions of epistemology,
and you're playing with notions of belief and disbelief
and betrayal by a god and not betrayal by god.
And what's the point at which, I guess, some of it-- and this
goes to the thing of like does it
work, which is maybe a better question than is it good?
Does it work is, does it for me, does it push me
past the point of comfort?
Or is it too easy to slide into, let's laugh at the people
who like Kenny G, which I think is a very easy stance
to take, especially here, especially now.
And I'm really interested in people
talking about where they find themselves
or how they push themselves to the border of that discomfort.
Well, if I-- gracias, thank you.
Thanks, I would say that there's a couple of things
that complicate that scenario.
One is that there was like three people who were saying things
that had a humorous undertone, and then
it kind of like-- so they were building upon each other
and then all of a sudden I'm turning a totally different
corner.
And there is a weird way in which to address that
performative, and I think the response is to write
in the-- preferencing Jones, right, with Jones,
it does seem like I'm making--
one can see that I'm--
one can interpret that as a dichotomy.
Now, there's an interesting thing
that I didn't get into that I just wanted to note
is that Bishop Noel Jones also happens
to be the twin brother of Grace Jones.
[LAUGHTER]
So there's a whole other familial performativity
that's, in some ways, culturally Caribbean, right,
because this is a Haitian thing.
But it's also just, it's pan-African.
And when we were talking, I think--
who was talking about Fred Moten at lunch?
Steve.
That this notion of what we lose when
we become so transpersonal or transcultural,
it's like this cultural specificity.
And the location of Black Holy Spirit,
of that being incorporated, is totally pan-African,
and it's an echo that we don't often make associations
with because of the assimilative nature
of African-American culture into Americanness.
So I want to make sure that in this context that we're talking
about, African and Africanism that is specifically
African-American, even though in this particular presentation
it's by somebody who's African-American,
whose family is in the Caribbean.
The utterance that is pan-African
is dovetailing with an accent that is African-American,
not necessarily what we would consider a Caribbean affect.
So just to make that little note.
But the idea of humor, I think, is
that the out-of-control, funny, wild, black person
is another way of sort of pushing away
the cultural confrontation of that grain of the voice, which
in maybe other years European-American context
is heard as hostile when it's just
a vocalization of African utterances,
pan-African utterances that are generally more West African.
And there's a lot to be said for that
that I couldn't go into in that short amount of time.
But the advantage that we have, we think about Caroline's work
and other theorists is that we have the opportunity
to particularize sound on such a small level
that we can make the distinctions
that other kind of cultural theorists
don't make because they don't hear sound
as precisely and in such distinctions as we made.
And that's why I wanted to talk about Wright,
so that we don't throw the baby with the bathwater, that he's
neither a buffoon nor just an angry Black man who
might pull out a gun.
He's using a particular African-American pan-African
sound system that's not connected
to either one of those things.
It's connected to its own self-identity.
That was a really long answer.
Sorry.
I wanted to come back to your question of Buddhism,
and specifically, the point you brought up,
Charles, of the teleological poem
because I wonder to what extent that is a Western problem,
or particularly, American problem
in the sense that I feel that-- and I
think that Christian's comments also spoke to this-- the fact
that when you're trying to teach, say,
in the classroom, that that's precisely what students are
looking for is the telos is the point.
Why am I reading this, and what am I supposed to get out of it,
when poetry lingers as an enigma many times.
I feel that's why Plato kind of kicked them out
of the Republic.
They're going to confuse people.
And they're going to want to go join the circus
rather than go to jury duty.
So that essentially creates, I think,
a conflict in terms of how we do interpret subjectivity.
Is subjectivity and cognition essentially collective,
where we have to incorporate this, perhaps, enigmatic
sense of otherness to define what we or what we are
or what we're not?
Or is that essentially a problem of poetry
regardless of cultural content?
I think, Christian's use of the word enigma
is what sort of sparked my response initially to that,
and enigma itself, or ambiguity, is an interesting measure
of what some people find pleasurable or not.
But it isn't an absolute quality.
It has to do with your own particular cultural and social
circumstance and what's allowed and not allowed.
And for the kind of identification
which, by the way, hermetic, if we
go back to what the meaning of or even open poetry
closed portion of the medieval period,
hermetic was often a necessary thing
for groups that would have been not
able to continue living if they expressed in a more open way
their views.
So they're able to express affiliation
through the hermetic.
It isn't a conspiracy of the elitists to exclude,
although there's an interesting area of closed groups.
For example, the group in San Francisco around Jack Spicer,
a very interesting group of people,
where part of their closedness in their magic workshop
had to do with the gay subculture, which
was not possible to exist in the open culture.
You have to read it through that.
And that becomes a very powerful talisman for poetic meaning.
Hart Crane, because I'm seeing you next to Brian,
Brian's just wonderful book about Hart Crane,
the cultural meanings that can still
be read when Hart Crane is smashed last year in the New
York Times by a neoconservative, mainstream critic.
When you wonder, how is that possible?
He's an American icon.
It's like saying you don't like cherry pie or something,
I mean, Hart Crane.
But it is possible because Hart still
signifies, in this way, that's not [INAUDIBLE]..
But that's, in a way, the meaning of Hart Crane,
is in part-- and I think Brian does an incredible job in
After His Lights in articulating those things.
Is it American?
Sure.
I think the same kinds of issues exist elsewhere,
but we're in the US, and we have these issues.
And I think there's the question of difficulty, which
in a teacher you can dispel often
within a few hours, a few hours, which is, you think that this
is what you do in a poem.
But actually, if you treat a poem as an ambient environment
that you move around in, if you don't try to figure it out,
if you retype it, if you memorize it and recite it,
the most old fashioned thing, if you try to imitate it,
you may not have that difficulty.
If-- it's like, I always use the example it's like trying
to operate a Windows environment with the DOS program,
and you get really frustrated because you don't-- no, no,
you use the mouse.
It can't be done with the--
you don't type D-I-R, you actually click on the thing.
Poetry is a clickable environment,
and you have to learn to treat it as an environment.
That isn't that hard a thing.
So that level of difficulty is not
like the level of difficulty of learning calculus.
It's actually-- but the Puritan ethic,
let's call it, that lies behind the idea
that meanings should be able to be recuperated
and extracted and transferred in relatively fixed ways,
has a very deep philosophical and the recantorium,
I try to articulate what that is,
and of course, it does have to do with Plato,
has an idea that meaning is an ideal that
exists outside of the social and cultural ambiance in which it
exists.
And if that's what you think, that it always
relates to some ideal, then of course, poets are sophists.
This is for Cole and Charles and Tracie and/or anybody.
About the cognition and the distributive, communitive model
and the challenges that that presents in a fact
that cognition is sort of like a non-conscious thing that
happens within us, and how concept can actually fluidly do
embeddings and mobius actions with it,
and how it's challenged by cognition
and the distributive-- the environment
of cognition that's not just between the two
parts of our mind and that is also outside of us,
how those two interact and challenge one another.
Yeah, I think too, that much of our cognition
is actually quite conscious, if we stop
and, well, I see you shaking your head.
Obviously, much of it is not too,
but I think it's a matter also of awareness.
And if we stop and just think about it
with a slightly different paradigm
and think, OK, how is my thinking actually
part of a field?
What else contributes to this thing that I think is my idea?
I think we can easily make conscious
some of the networking that goes on
with the smallest decisions or the smallest kinds of thought.
When it comes to an artistic practice,
I think it gets much thicker because then we're always
dealing not only with an immediate environment
but one that spans time.
And we're bringing things forward
in a continual kind of basis that
makes it much more complicated.
The connection to the conceptual, I don't--
I think there's maybe too easy a seeming link between thinking
about cognitive patterns and conceptual work
because it seems to focus on the brain.
But what interests me in this case
is the actual process, the idea of working
not only with a kind of community of exchange,
which we certainly see going on, but also a community that
includes inanimate objects, that includes very direct feedback
kinds of loops.
That sometimes the person ends up
being a very small part of the whole system
that that's happening.
And so, obviously, the eye becomes something
that has multiple possibilities for perspective,
and we end up with a much more intricate, complex object
that is the poem.
Charles, you want to talk to that?
Can I?
Yeah, just wanted to pursue a little bit this idea
of the collective in relation to subjectivity and thinking
about the local, these ideals of expressiveness contrast
structure.
And I was thinking about Wordsworth,
who wrote while walking, you know, was a walking poet.
And these early years also informed
his initial pro-French revolution interest,
and his politics changed later on.
So this idea of a poet, who is physically engaged in nature,
develops poetry and also has a very engaged continental,
political idealism or interest in what's going on.
And it brings me back to this idea of what do we do today
with notions of activism, with notions of witnessing,
how we take part as, not only poets, but also citizens
with our art pieces.
And again, this idea of the difficulty of identity,
that if you, in relation to expressiveness,
you find yourself having to say I am, for example,
and so-and-so.
If you think of structure in the way
that when you're trying to discuss it,
in the way that I think so many of us
know so much work that deals with it in that way,
you are thinking much about the markers and signals that
might identify points of conflict
rather than place you in a biographical--
expressively biographical positioning.
So in a way, you then set up a event or a proposition
rather than a solution even in the work.
And that's really what I was bringing up González-Torres
but also thinking about Wordsworth's strategy
of walking, his politics at that point and his poetry.
The politics of Wordsworth's subjectivity, but taken
in conjunction with lyrical ballads, and in particular,
and the introduction to it, which
seems like a manifesto for an avant garde.
And it's the beginning of something
that seems to me the rhetoric of this conference
is attempting to revive.
I don't know.
It isn't a tradition.
It seemed to me that Wordsworth's taking
the formal structures of the ballot and intervening in them,
setting up a ballot, and then saying you're reading a ballot,
and then I'm not finishing it.
And in that process doing something different, which
is engaging the subjectivity of readers with people
who, socially at that time, in small rural communities,
are being institutionalized because they're marginal.
Yeah, and it seems to me that collection
is a highly politicized document which is using and changing
known forms in order to make a political argument
through new ways of getting poetry
to speak to subjectivities and collective subjectivities
at that.
Which is a coming back to, maybe,
the question that I have about that tongue in cheek or retro
avant garde rhetoric around conceptual writing and the idea
of--
it seems to me that the writing that is thought to precede it
was extraordinarily careful about the language
of the avant garde, tiptoed around it, seeked to avoid it,
to be avant garde, maybe, be new,
but not to use the same language.
And indeed, while wanting to protect the idea
or investigate whether the idea of an avant garde
is even possible anymore, it seems to me
a kind of conventional wisdom in many areas
of art practice in the culture.
There's a very easy, and how tongue in cheek,
I want to know, is the revived rhetoric
of the avant garde in which the idea of conceptual writing
comes?
Christian?
I know that there's always objection to the use
of the word avant garde by contemporary poets,
and I continue to mobilize that term because even
the avant garde itself, as a concept,
is subject to avant garde innovation.
That it is likewise undergoing a whole series of anomalous limit
cases, and that what we, of course, think
of as the avant garde does not apply
to our contemporary context.
Right now, there is no linear model of history
to which a visionary personality could stand at the forefront
and lead the way into a future of dynastic progress.
That is not our model of history.
Now it's all fractured into these rhizomatic networks
that are all stabilized in this weird spatial domain.
And really, the avant garde constitutes
those little probative gestures, those little pseudopods
that are struck out in any number of diverse directions,
all of which are proposing to increase the amount of anomaly.
Do we expand the boundaries of the unknown in whatever
direction looks appropriate?
It is impossible for any person, I think, to actually stake
a claim for any specific model of innovation,
so long as it doesn't merely become a digital upgrade
to prior forms, right?
It's not supposed to be poetry 2.0, right, slightly faster
to the max, right?
It's supposed to be better than that, I suppose.
And this kind of context here I think
is attempting to suggest that even the avant garde,
the concept itself, is likewise subject to this kind of meta
level analysis that is itself avant garde.
That it constitutes an attempt to bring those into new limit
cases of understanding.
Obviously, something like Kenny's claim,
but it's not new, right?
And it's distressing, that we have
to drag poets kicking and screaming from the workshop
into a milieu where Duchamp is just simply
the normative air you breathe.
Why is it the case in the visual arts,
with all of their numerous miscegenations
and mutagenic interactions that we don't have that
as a normative cause, that we don't simply
respond to those precedents set in the world of art.
I mean, artists, right now, have nothing to learn from poets.
They have nothing to learn from poets.
It used to be, though, that if you referred
to an aesthetic movement, there would typically
be a relatively multifaceted aesthetic engagement with it.
There was poets and painters doing surrealism.
There was poets and painters doing symbolism, yeah.
I just have to--
I strongly disagree with you.
[LAUGHTER]
That an artist don't have anything to learn from poets.
I think the art world is admired in its own commercial
production of the poetry world in terms
of its social organization, in terms
of the circulation of ideas, in terms
of its regard for verbal language and understanding
the difference between verbal and visual language
has an enormous contribution to make,
not greater than other areas, but certainly equal to.
OK.
[LAUGHTER]