Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Problems of Thought
New by Tom Clark: Problems of Thought: Paradoxical Essays (Skanky/Effing, 2009).A selection:
Problems of Thought
Often has it been remarked that no one ever did something and regretted it later without also having to admit there had been a point of return, perceptible had only one been paying attention. Responsive as a small dog loyal to any passing whimsical attraction, however, one was too busy to take any notice. One could have stopped. Thought could have been summoned. Rescue could have been effected. But such are the powers of distraction in this world that though one might easily have turned back in time to save oneself from disaster, this never happened. Thus things came to be as they stand at present.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Call For Papers: John Clarke
Michael Boughn is seeking articles on poet-scholar John Clarke. Anyone interested should contact Boughn at mboughn at gmail dot com. This promises to be an important project and I look forward to seeing how it develops:
John Clarke (1933-1992) was an important poet and scholar who was perhaps the most significant student of Charles Olson. Although relatively unknown outside a small circle of attentive writers, Clarke’s influence was remarkably significant. His two last books—From Feathers to Iron, a book on poetics, and In the Analogy, an incomplete epic consisting of some 200 sonnets—were the most important—and successful—attempts to further the work initiated by Olson.
I’m proposing to collect a variety of responses to Clarke and his work. It wouldn’t be strictly speaking a festschrift or homage. It could include everything from personal reminiscences to poetic responses to critical assessments. I leave it to the contributors to decide how they best want to respond to the invitation and to Jack's memory.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Some Notes Toward an Essay on Poetry and Publics
I’ve spent the last few years thinking about publics, and how poetry participates in them. A public, of course, is a complicated notion, and it differs, as Michael Warner brilliantly observes, from the rhetorical notion of audience. A public is active and passive; it is simultaneously present and remote; it participates as a social entity despite its ghostly vanishing points. If in the eighteenth century (Habermas’ starting point for his description of the structural formation of the bourgeois public sphere), a circulation of texts made the rational-critical deliberations of the period available to an extensive network of people, in our time published words compete with images, memes, brand logos, screen interfaces, avatars, iPods, Blackberries, and other “devices” that intensify communication, and thereby transpose private identity into public confirmations. (In other words, the private relies on a circulation of public images and contexts for a construction of individual legitimacy—we relate ourselves to others in diverse situations based on prior identifications.) While the notion of the public came into being with print and helped to insert a wedge in western political ideology, introducing social relations between the court, markets, and family, today's politics, the ubiquitous assertions of economic exchange and value, and private “life” all seem to have merged into a kind of amorphous shape. At times we participate as public citizens, concerned, perhaps, over some scrap of the mediated surface of things. We observe events associated with political scandal; discuss the horrors of some far-off war; imagine the significance of congressional debate; participate in civic courtesies; and contribute to the enduring market corruption of our privacy. Brand identity, professional regimens, erotic preferences, creative urgencies—all at some point arrive within a complex weave of public awareness and private desire, both categories increasingly tethered by the technological capacities of systemic over-extension.
Warner provides a much more thorough consideration of my brief sketch in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). In relation to this, I have been thinking about poetry and its public work. Of course, I’ve heard the arguments against this: poetry has no audience; the lyric is private song overheard by strangers; poetry doesn’t matter; poetry possesses little public significance; poetry does not communicate—period. Part of this resistance in the poetic imaginary to publics is based in its own history of development. For it has been a private art, one that circulated, in the Renaissance, often in manuscript form, among courtly coteries. And yet by the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, poetry entered public circulation in newspapers, magazines, and journals. Poetry then found a popular reading audience just as it was beginning to be theorized by romanticism as a medium for the inspired and isolated genius. One of the tensions introduced by Wordsworth and Coleridge was the understanding of poetry as something essentially private, or to be kept in the company of the poet’s community of admirers. Yet the market pressures for legitimacy and survival corrupted the poet’s aloof distance. Publication, anthologization, awards, and public recognition bestowed the necessary legitimacy on the poet to enable his craft to survive as public artifact despite the fact that the public was never poetry’s audience, at least in the version enacted by the romantics. None of this discloses any harm to the critical theories and practices of those writers: it complicates the afterlife of the poem, and its entry to social bodies that extend beyond the poet and his intentions, and that associate in more complex relation to public realms that function with increased patterns of projection.
As many have noted, our moment has witnessed what some compare to the technological explosion introduced by Gutenberg: the Web has displaced previous notions of textual circulation with temporal modes that are unpredictable and unstable, and yet these modes provide access to new material and new readers. How should poetry be crafted in such an age? Who does the poet address? This strange entity known as “the reader” occupies an odd space in the technologized situations of contemporary public and poetic address. In many ways, “the reader” is a figment of the poet’s imagination. And yet, the reader is real, too, in most circumstances. Increasingly, too, the reader participates also as a “viewer” or a witness, a casual scanner of screens or a loosely attentive voyeur. In this sense of the fragmented roles of poetic consumption, the audience for poetry matters less and less, even if an increased exposure to poetry invites new critical investigations to be put forward. The advantages of rhetorical theory seem ill equipped to handle this problem completely. If an audience of thoughtful and attentive readers hardly matters, to what exactly do poets give their attention? “The reader” is a fictive entity projected by writers in the hopes that their art might meet some recognition. An author acts upon some other or coordinates a new opportunity of exchange in a social imaginary increasingly limited by the failure of a functional public sphere (always an ideal). “The reader,” or the audience, certainly has little importance for a poet who desires to engage the world through writing. The promise of disclosure compels writing as much as the potential admiration of an audience of readers. And yet, we want more. Our words should matter. And in some contexts they do.
What is it to imagine a public? While there are certainly far too many poets (and fiction writers and specialists in twentieth century literature), there are few opportunities for enacting one’s public performance as a possibility for good. Poets are creatures of the pack: they associate in communities, move toward groups who share a common ground and assumptions of language, lyricism, politics, or whatever. The community is a limited, self-reinforcing entity that, under contemporary conditions, generates a kind of seeing blindness. Poets act as if their words and performances matter. They reinforce each other’s efforts with encouraging words. They keep in circulation a common identity around which many join in opposition to other coteries they see infringing on larger cultural markets. Poetry is largely a communal practice with disciplined expectations as well as prejudices that reinforce the group’s ability to succeed in hostile and saturated cultural markets.
So what would it take to reinvest in poetry as public art? How might poetry be re-imagined beyond this anxious situation—somewhere between the courtly privacies it cultivates and the popular magazine-ese of consumer culture? This is the dilemma. Part of the problem remains uniquely American, because America has hated forever anything with a mind compelled by nonconformist principals (though mass culture is quick and expert at flipping "nonconformism" in all spheres as a means of extending and systematizing conformity). But the reason a public matters is because somewhere between the communal factions and the popular expectations of mass culture, the negotiations of human life in words and images and acts continue as a serious consideration. The generic or formal concerns of poetry do not matter as much as the understanding of how a public can matter to the strategic formation and delivery of poems into public contexts. A public must be challenged, yes; it must also be closely observed and guarded within the poetic act.
Warner provides a much more thorough consideration of my brief sketch in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). In relation to this, I have been thinking about poetry and its public work. Of course, I’ve heard the arguments against this: poetry has no audience; the lyric is private song overheard by strangers; poetry doesn’t matter; poetry possesses little public significance; poetry does not communicate—period. Part of this resistance in the poetic imaginary to publics is based in its own history of development. For it has been a private art, one that circulated, in the Renaissance, often in manuscript form, among courtly coteries. And yet by the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, poetry entered public circulation in newspapers, magazines, and journals. Poetry then found a popular reading audience just as it was beginning to be theorized by romanticism as a medium for the inspired and isolated genius. One of the tensions introduced by Wordsworth and Coleridge was the understanding of poetry as something essentially private, or to be kept in the company of the poet’s community of admirers. Yet the market pressures for legitimacy and survival corrupted the poet’s aloof distance. Publication, anthologization, awards, and public recognition bestowed the necessary legitimacy on the poet to enable his craft to survive as public artifact despite the fact that the public was never poetry’s audience, at least in the version enacted by the romantics. None of this discloses any harm to the critical theories and practices of those writers: it complicates the afterlife of the poem, and its entry to social bodies that extend beyond the poet and his intentions, and that associate in more complex relation to public realms that function with increased patterns of projection.
As many have noted, our moment has witnessed what some compare to the technological explosion introduced by Gutenberg: the Web has displaced previous notions of textual circulation with temporal modes that are unpredictable and unstable, and yet these modes provide access to new material and new readers. How should poetry be crafted in such an age? Who does the poet address? This strange entity known as “the reader” occupies an odd space in the technologized situations of contemporary public and poetic address. In many ways, “the reader” is a figment of the poet’s imagination. And yet, the reader is real, too, in most circumstances. Increasingly, too, the reader participates also as a “viewer” or a witness, a casual scanner of screens or a loosely attentive voyeur. In this sense of the fragmented roles of poetic consumption, the audience for poetry matters less and less, even if an increased exposure to poetry invites new critical investigations to be put forward. The advantages of rhetorical theory seem ill equipped to handle this problem completely. If an audience of thoughtful and attentive readers hardly matters, to what exactly do poets give their attention? “The reader” is a fictive entity projected by writers in the hopes that their art might meet some recognition. An author acts upon some other or coordinates a new opportunity of exchange in a social imaginary increasingly limited by the failure of a functional public sphere (always an ideal). “The reader,” or the audience, certainly has little importance for a poet who desires to engage the world through writing. The promise of disclosure compels writing as much as the potential admiration of an audience of readers. And yet, we want more. Our words should matter. And in some contexts they do.
What is it to imagine a public? While there are certainly far too many poets (and fiction writers and specialists in twentieth century literature), there are few opportunities for enacting one’s public performance as a possibility for good. Poets are creatures of the pack: they associate in communities, move toward groups who share a common ground and assumptions of language, lyricism, politics, or whatever. The community is a limited, self-reinforcing entity that, under contemporary conditions, generates a kind of seeing blindness. Poets act as if their words and performances matter. They reinforce each other’s efforts with encouraging words. They keep in circulation a common identity around which many join in opposition to other coteries they see infringing on larger cultural markets. Poetry is largely a communal practice with disciplined expectations as well as prejudices that reinforce the group’s ability to succeed in hostile and saturated cultural markets.
So what would it take to reinvest in poetry as public art? How might poetry be re-imagined beyond this anxious situation—somewhere between the courtly privacies it cultivates and the popular magazine-ese of consumer culture? This is the dilemma. Part of the problem remains uniquely American, because America has hated forever anything with a mind compelled by nonconformist principals (though mass culture is quick and expert at flipping "nonconformism" in all spheres as a means of extending and systematizing conformity). But the reason a public matters is because somewhere between the communal factions and the popular expectations of mass culture, the negotiations of human life in words and images and acts continue as a serious consideration. The generic or formal concerns of poetry do not matter as much as the understanding of how a public can matter to the strategic formation and delivery of poems into public contexts. A public must be challenged, yes; it must also be closely observed and guarded within the poetic act.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Linh Dinh Reads in Austin
Poet, fiction writer, photographer and translator Linh Dinh visits Austin. He will read work and speak to resource contraction and collapse with poets Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen.Very rare. Very special. You'd be silly to miss it.
Please bring your favorite beverage. We will have food and, if it is cool enough, a fire in the fire place...
When: Tuesday October 27 @ 7 PM
(reading will begin just after 8 PM)
Where: Possum Casa de Nguyen Smith
If you are on Facebook, the event page is here.
Monday, October 05, 2009
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