Thursday, July 09, 2009

The Emperor and the Slave

I woke up yesterday to an anxious bout of altitude weirdness here in Boulder. A couple of bottles of water revived my senses somewhat, and I took off on foot to find a bookstore, hoping, against all reason, to locate a volume of Quintilian, a rhetorician of the Roman Empire under Vespasian, Titus and others (he retired once Domitian came to power). And if not Q, perhaps a little Apuleius, another rhetorician and novelist of Empire. They interest me because both looked for ways to use words in a period of increasing decay and decadence. Quintilian, the educator, stressed moral instruction under Empire while Apuleius by stealth challenged and contradicted the assumptions and expectations of life in the culturally fragmented North Africa of his birth (he shares a North African origin with Augustine, Origin, Terullian, and others, too).

Instead I settled for the Emperor and the Slave—Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (Penguin 2005) and Epictetus’s Enchiridion (Dover 2004). I've been thinking that a dose of Stoicism might do me some good—particularly in online conversations and exchanges. I’m keen also on the ancient ideas of ethics and moral instruction. This fall I’ll teach a freshman composition class for the first time in several years, and the course is organized around Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, a book that talks about the bamboozlement of the food industry by corporate interests and government support for it. I keep thinking that if so much in our own moment of fragmented and fading empire has been corrupted from the ground up—from the most basic necessities of life—food and water—all the way up to ginormous Wall Street huckster / ponzi kickbackery schemes and wholsesale swindling of global resources and wealth, where does one begin as a teacher or as a writer to speak in whatever form one chooses? Or in whatever form the situation or the environment requires? My goal here over the next long while—along with others—is to investigate contemporary morals within various contexts, beginning with the ancients who knew so much or looked upon themselves with such dignity.

An example from Marcus Aurelius has been helpful these last few days. He writes:

Catulus the Stoic counseled me never to make light of a friend’s rebuke, even when unreasonable, but to do my best to restore myself to his good graces; to speak up readily in commendation of my instructors, as we read in the memoirs of Domitius and Athenodotus….

I look forward to revisiting the Emperor—but also the slave—Epictetus. Quintilian demands a re-visitation, too. As a contribution to a notion of slowing down, it is my earnest hope to settle my thoughts within a more rigorous and encouraging context. This is one way to apprehend the present condition of things, too.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Community Reports Vol. 1

Brooks Johnson, a poet and visual artist in Chicago, sent the following report yesterday about art and community-formation that he's involved in. I like the provisional nature of what he describes.

It's important to share stories about what's going on in our diverse locations, and I encourage others to share reports, notes, or comments with me here. Eventually I hope to have a Slow Poetry web site operating with a public forum aspect where these kinds of experiences can be more fully discussed.

Here's what Brooks had to say:

I think that this space of mine--its called Dr. Who's Werehouse of Ideas--has a lot to do with some of the issues yr tapping into for the slopo thing. The house opens itself out into many different directions as well. I've been thinking about it as a community center, a gallery, venue, piece of conceptual art (maybe in the sense of the spiral jetty or something). It's all pretty organic and free-flowing. I'm trying to resist exerting too much control or governance on the thing, I'm more interested in the ways in which this thing is going to grow and mutate. For now, it feels alive, so I'm going to keep on observing the Dao. People come in and with them their ideas and energy, this has its bearing on the community, it alters and adapts, etc.

We are going to start classes here the coming week. Spanish, gardening, a poetry workshop, yoga, and west african music (as some possible ideas). The basic premise is--as was the Dill Pickle's charter--that no one can possibly know everything about a given subject, but a lot of people know something; ergo, we all ought to share what we know. This notion of open-source that you talk about plays in too. My joint is but one in a whole matrix of alternative spaces, and that there is this sort of vague program in place as to how to go about creating these temporary (autonymous) zones and make them thrive in their brief lives. This place may only last as long as the summer (I hope not, but its definitely a possibility) and hopefully others will take note of the minor ways in which I've altered 'the program' and borrow from that in the creation of thier spaces.

I've already written too much and not said enough...I know yr pretty busy...but I just want to say a couple more things. I think one really important aspect of the thinking with the slopo thing is that you make the distinction that this is not something you've invented so much as something you've noticed as an emerging direction in human thought. Much the same way that Bey talks about TAZs. As far as I can observe, we are in the beginning stages of another larger-scale youth movement. Hopefully (if I'm not simply being overly optimistic and imagining things) we can do it right this time. I think that alot of the ideas yr putting forth resonate with how creatively minded kids are thinking outside of institutional contexts.

Also, my friend and I just got a copy of The Crew Change from some gypseys that crashed on our porch the other night. Its the bible of train hopping--how to get where yr going, what and who to watch out for etc. Its a pretty amazing document, photo copied and passed from traveler to traveler. My roommate Wolfman America and I have been (since yesterday, anyway) loosly entertaining the idea of a quick jaunt somewhere to test the waters. How would you feel if we showed up in Boulder next week and talked with yr class in person?  

Rainy here for the fourth.
Hope yrs is more BBQ infused.

Brooks

Boulder Bound

Hoa and I leave in a few hours for the Jack Kerouac Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program at Naropa. We're bringing the kids, too. I posted my syllabus here a few weeks back, and I may post a portion of my "lecture" at this blog in a few days. Others teaching and speaking during this final week include: Michelle Ellsworth, Brian Evenson, Simone Forti, CS Giscombe, Joanna Howard, Allan Kornblum, Dan Machlin, Max Regan, Ed Roberson, Alberto Ruy Sanchez, Mary Tasillo, Steven Taylor, Wang Ping and others.

Friday, July 03, 2009

Thanks to "Grumpy Old Dude"

Slow Poetry is not a "school." Nothing will come of it--ever--in the sense that what matters matters. Slow Poetry is far behind the present--far ahead of me. I try to make myself capable of a slow moment--a slow day--dig? People will meet. And eat. And converse freely. And go home. That's my vision.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Some Thoughts

The conversation going on in the comments field to my “ConPo” post is exactly what we need more of: discussions, opinions, positions, ideas, responses, pissed off jabs, etc from many different people who all take poetry seriously. It’s difficult to stick one’s neck out, particularly into the digital fields.

I’m particularly humbled and challenged by the words of some younger poets who have stated compelling positions on the flabby, forty-something, angst-ridden grandstanders of po-movements that occupy so much contemporary bandwidth. Brooks, Dan, Ry, Iain, and other twenty-somethings have contributed some insightful and important comments, and I deeply appreciate your words here.

Slow Poetry doesn’t have any answers, though it does wildly into the dark. And as such, it should be critiqued, investigated, and even satirized by sincerely engaged folks willing to look at it eye-to-eye. Slow Poetry should be a punching bag—or a comfy pillow—whatever it needs to be to get us all into a place of perceptive accuracy. Thank you all for engaging in all earnest with this conversation. F-ConPo represents such a sad, sad state of things---a Disney Land for the willing-to-be-bemused (aka the befuddled and manipulative, the easily-entertained-by the “ironic t-shirt”). There is not going to be a future for poetry unless we all (anyone willing to risk a sincere word) make it up as we go.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Con-Po

Flarfists and Conceptual Poets make claims about how digital technology has changed our lives, and they argue about how Flarf and Conceptual Poetry (F-ConPo) exploits this newly transformed era. And yet, I fail to see how what they're doing supports their claims. Why is googling a poem any different from walking around a city and capturing images, found texts, overheard conversations, etc, in a notebook and then later re-organizing this material into a poem?

More importantly, if F-ConPo is so interested in the influence of digital technology on composition, how do their efforts interface with other disciplines and efforts made by scholars to understand these new environments? Gregory Ulmer, for instance, and many others working in rhetoric, composition, and invention have devoted critical and scholarly work in efforts to understand the effects of digital technology on composition and literacy--or electracy, as Ulmer puts it--describing the effect of reading and writing in digital contexts. You'd think that F-ConPo would go further to describe their project and to show what their manipulations of digital environments might contribute to an already established body of knowledge.

As much as I admire Goldsmith's archival work at Ubu (and I think digital technology is suited extremely well for archival purposes), the following, posted today at the Poetry Foundation, is just childish when viewed in the context of Ulmer's--and others'--work:

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Much of this is class-A, car salesman b. s. Notice how Goldsmith defines the terms and doesn't leave room for other options or responses. "Why use your words when you can use someone else's?" As if "self-expression" remains the only goal in these contexts, a weird assumption many would refute outright.* The lack of care given to the articulation of these arguments closes conversation to others who might have something besides self-expression in mind as a goal for poetry. Perhaps the self might be put to the service of others in public efforts to negotiate contested political or social spaces. Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater comes to mind as just such a public and social art that negates the self-expressivity of the artist in order to address an audience and the shared concerns of a living environment composed of living people, printed words, and digital documentation (Toscano's project can be viewed through these different media and proposes a much more radical and satisfying approach to the complex and multidimensional spaces we inhabit collectively).

The assumption that words "are your own" is naive, too. I wonder who, writing anything worth paying attention to, really believes words are their own today? Why would F-ConPo want to include those people in its audience? We can't speak to everyone, so define and delineate an audience. The issue of property and ownership has been vetted for more than a century thanks to Marx--in that context at least, and Kenneth Burke has much to say, too, about property--where it begins and ends.

Anyway, a lot of these claims are bogus--probably all of them. And the fusion of the avant-garde of the past with the technology of the present doesn't contribute anything new, though it does, as Goldsmith says, "expand" the field. But how much more expansion can anyone take? Hasn't the last year shown anyone paying attention that globalism and expansion are over? Dead? Done? No doubt there will be new metaphors to describe how we are being fucked over by powerful systems (see Matthew Taiibi's recent article on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone for recent examples), but expansion won't be one of them. All Goldsmith seems to be saying here is that poetry will continue doing what it's been doing but we'll get digital and google up information and write blogs. Well, uh, no kidding? Just like everyone else.

Until F-ConPo can articulate something that distinguishes what it does from others, I wonder who would possibly listen? At best, such efforts create a distracting show, while at worst, they eat up a lot of bandwidth and natural resources in order to promote a group of people who don't really seem to care about poetry, but about the social atmosphere and its manipulations--the market. A market based on an old model of globalization. Anyway, it's cute that Poetry Magazine let the unicorns enter the current issue. It's all simulacra now, of course--words pretending to be poems written by poets who pretend to be savvy about digital contexts for their compositions while ignoring ongoing conversations in other fields that might actually help define useful terms and strategies for poetry. Like so much in America, F-ConPo is an invention of a market for people looking for an easy tonic. The marketing plan is semi-genius, and has been successful, particularly as so many grad students get their rocks off on F-ConPo. Anyhoo, it's interesting to watch the anxiety level over Slow Poetry among the F-ConPo folk, and I wonder what this anxiousness says about their "projects," particularly as they seem to have little to say about poems.

*Indeed, I find it odd that F-ConPo actually amounts to just another expressivist program of writing, albeit sifted through machines a little. It's like they're into self-expression, but they want others to do the expressing for them in an ultimately narcissistic gesture on the order of hey, everyone, look at me!

Friday, June 26, 2009

Zizek Excess

I stumbled on these excess notes from a reading of Zizek a couple of summer's back. Hegel annoys me. Lenin ditto. SZ's excessive ferment is almost unbearable. But like a train wreck it's difficult for me not to look. Anyway, these notes I think were made as a reading into the text, or made as a parallel supplement---a gathering of prods and reminders of some of the potentially useful aspects in Zizek who, in many ways, reminds me of an extremely uncondensed Ed Dorn. For what it's worth:

SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Parallax View
NOTES 3.6: “THE OBSCENE KNOT OF IDEOLOGY, AND HOW TO UNTIE IT”


The Academic Rumpspringa, or, The Parallax of Power and Resistance

Conditions govern decisions

“choice is always a metachoice, a choice of the modality of the choice itself”

Meet enemy on your ground—not at G8 summits

SZ via Critchley is skeptical of the Third Way Left: “a ‘revolt’ which poses no effective threat, since it endorses in advance the logic of hysterical provocation, bombarding the Power with ‘impossible’ demands, demands which are not meant to be met”

SZ proposes Badiou’s solution against “Critchley’s call for modest local ‘practical’ action,” which is: “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

“The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate,’ to mask the Nothingness of what goes on” (334).

OUGHT AND MUST

“The deadlock of ‘resistance’ brings us back to the topic of parallax: all is needed is a slight shift in our perspective, and all the activity of ‘resistance,’ of bombarding those in power with impossible ‘subversive’ (ecological, feminist, antiracist, antiglobalist…) demands, looks like an internal process of feeding the machine of power, providing the material to keep it in motion.”

“the public Law and its superego supplement are not two different parts of the legal edifice, they are one and the same ‘content’—with a slight shift in perspective, the dignified and impersonal Law looks like an obscene machine of jouissance.”

Paradox in “constitutive excess of representation over represented:” “At level of the Law, state Power merely represents the interest, and so on, of its subjects; it serves them, is answerable to them, and is itself subject to their control; at the level of the superego underside, however, the public message of responsibility, and so forth, is supplemented by the obscene message of the unconditional exercise of Power…. the law can sustain its authority only if the subjects hear in it the echo of the obscene unconditional self-assertion” (336-7)

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Slow Poetry at Big Bridge

Ron Silliman, Mark Woods, Kasey Mohammad, and others have announced the Slow Poetry Feature at Big Bridge. There also is an anxious spoof of my introduction, as many know. I hesitate to announce the feature myself because Big Bridge is still under construction. As soon as the entirety of the magazine is available for public viewing I'll have more to say. In the meantime, I feel that the work in the Slow Poetry feature contributes a significant conversation to contemporary poetics.

Midsummer


On the longest day we play
into the night and the heat

inside us dissipates
into cool water the green

spring water covers
our feet the children splash

profoundly on the other side
of any stupid knowing

but the rush of sensation renews
as if having dreamed

and then waking suddenly
to find relief in the habits of place

we see other versions
of how we do what we do

in the counting of years
by features filled in by light

a young man behind me
I only dimly recognize

who we are and wander
the trails of memory

midsummer begins
a shortening of days