AWP Chicago 2012: Where I'll Be

  

 I’ll be participating in the following events at AWP this coming week in Chicago. I hope to see you at any of them, or any of the number of other panels and readings that I’ll be attending.

Route 66 Off-Site Reading
Friday, March 2, 2012
3:30pm until 5:30pm
Buzz Café, 905 S. Lombard Ave., Oak Park, IL. 60304
  
This reading, coordinated with thanks to Grant Matthew Jenkins, features experimental/conceptual poets from states along Route 66. Get your kicks at 3:30pm!

Tentative lineup:
Grant Matthew Jenkins
Claudia Nogueira
K. Lorraine Graham
Mark Wallace
Bob Archambeau
Sloan Davis
Susan Briante
Farid Matuk
Greg Kinzer
Joseph Harrington
Simone Muench
Hadara Bar-Nadav
William J Harris
Dennis Etzel Jr.

To get there by subway:
Take the Blue line to Austin-Blue
Walk to 905 S Lombard Ave, Oak Park, IL 60304
1. Head west on Garfield St toward S Taylor Ave 0.1 mi
2. Turn right onto S Lombard Ave 0.1 mi
905 S Lombard Ave, Oak Park, IL 60304

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Saturday, 9:00 A.M.-10:15 A.M.
S117. Building and Surviving an Innovative Writing Program
(K. Lorraine Graham, John Pluecker, Anna Joy Springer, Janet Sarbanes, Mark Wallace)
Crystal Room, Palmer House Hilton, 3rd Floor

Participating in an interdisciplinary writing program committed to innovative pedagogies is exhilarating and confusing, especially if it’s a new program and you are a professor building the curriculum or a student in the inaugural class. A recent graduate, a current student, two tenured faculty members, and an adjunct professor discuss their experiences with innovative writing programs: the three-year old MFA at UCSD, the established MFA at Cal Arts, and the growing undergraduate BA at CSU San Marcos.

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Stop the Sentence: A Night of (Inter) Active Readings
Saturday, March 3, 2012
7:00pm until 12:00am
at Outer Space Studio
1474 N Milwaukee Ave.

FEATURE READINGS BY:
7:30 Matthew Klane
8:30 Cara Benson
9:30 Michelle Naka Pierce
10:30 Ronaldo Wilson
11:30 Tracie Morris

WITH READINGS, PRESENTATIONS & PERFORMANCES BY:

7:45 AWP SHOW AND TELL
Teresa Carmody, Feng Sun Chen, Gloria Frym, BJ Love, Mark Wallace

8:45 O.P.P./OTHER PEOPLE'S POETRY
Claire Donato, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Luis Humberto Valadez
Catherine Wagner, Tyrone Williams, Tim Yu
& a tribute to Akliah Oliver with a video by Ed Bowes & Anne Waldman

9:45 TAG TEAM READING
cris cheek, Laura Goldstein, MC Hyland, Tim/Trace Peterson, Michelle Taransky, Edwin Torres, Christine Wertheim

10:45 INSTANT READING
David Emanuel, Jennifer Karmin, Edwin Perry, Jai Arun Ravine,
Adam Roberts, Kenyatta Rogers

+ + PLUS + + AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
That means you!

Venue logistics --
doors open 6:45pm
in the Wicker Park neighborhood
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading} is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. The series was founded in 2005 by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin.

 

&Now Literary Festival 2011: Tomorrowland Forever, at UC San Diego Oct 13-15

The complete program for the &Now Literary Festival in San Diego is now available here. An event like this doesn't happen often in San Diego, and is not to be missed.

Area college students should bring their I.D. and can attend the conference free of charge.

&Now Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever!

OCT. 13 – 15, 2011 @ UCSD

&NOW is a festival of fiction, poetry, and staged play readings; literary rituals, performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and multimedia projects; and intergenre literary work of all kinds, including criti-fictional presentations and creatively critical papers.

Friday, April 9: Panel on Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents

Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents
Arielle Greenberg, Craig Santos Perez, Michael Theune, Megan Volpert, Mark Wallace
Friday, April 9
9 - 10:15 a.m.
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level, Room 201
700 14th Street
Denver, CO

Recent years in poetry and poetics have seem numerous attempts to break out of, blur, or undermine distinctions between ideas of “mainstream” and “avant garde” poetics, a distinction that from the 1950s well into the 90s often dominated discussions about new directions in contemporary poetry. Yet after as much as fifteen years of attempts to move beyond this often unnecessarily limited distinction, it’s important also to move beyond assertions that the distinction has collapsed or is irrelevant. Instead, it now seems time to evaluate the specific attempts that writers and anthologists have made to create a hybrid poetics.

Are we really living in an era when the mainstream/avant garde distinction no longer has value and significant common ground has been found among poetic approaches long considered opposites? Or has this new era simply adjusted, replaced, or perhaps only re-named this older boundary? Do the terms “avant garde” and “mainstream” still have any contemporary value or have they become the marks of a bygone age? If, as Hegel suggested, any synthesis of earlier ideas is always followed by a new antithesis that challenges it, what future poetic ideas will challenge any common ground that actually has been achieved or has been claimed as achieved?

This panel will feature diverse answers to these and related questions that have intrigued writers, editors, and anthologists involved in the issue. Are boundary-crossing, hybrid aesthetics a moderate, moderating force that smooths distinctions in a homogenizing and perhaps bland way, or one that allows for radical conjunctions not dreamed of in earlier generations of the “poetry wars”? Have anthologies promoting the collapse of the mainstream/avant garde distinction created genuine bridges across aesthetics or simply new poetic coteries? Do we now have no camps, new camps, more camps than ever? Have a variety of aesthetics really been included in the hybrid approach or have they instead been offered only  token inclusion? Is the attempt to eliminate or downplay coterie inevitably a good idea, or is the often intense argument and difference between coteries a crucial source of vitality in new directions for poetry? What fringes and margins remain, if any?

To what extent has the debate been framed too often as simply a problem within American poetry and thus remains wedded to a nationalist vision? What role do poetries in different languages, multiple languages, and translation play in complicating the notions of what it means to cross boundaries, whether aesthetic, linguistic, or cultural? What roles do race, class, or gender issues play in this new environment? When if ever are there reasons to assert the importance of maintaining or recognizing boundaries? What aesthetic, cultural, or ideological boundaries remain most relevant?


For the opening portion of my paper, see my previous blog post.

Also, you don't want to miss the following two AWP offsite readings.

PRESS: A Cross-Cultural Literary Anthology

PRESS: A Cross-Cultural Literary Anthology, is now online as the current issue of Wheelhouse Magazine Online. It commemorates the PRESS: Activism and the Avant-Garde conference that I was part of at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, in May 2008, and features work by many of the great writers invited to that event.

My own work in the anthology is not the fairly long poem I read at the conference, a piece from The End of America, Book 2, which was certainly more directly related to the concerns of the event. But the anthology does contain several pieces from my collection Party In My Body, which as of yet has never appeared as a book.

Great thanks to David Wolach and Elizabeth Williamson for their hard work on the conference, and to all the other students and professors who participated in ensuring that the conference was fascinating and worthwhile for all involved.

Beyond Avant Garde/Mainstream and Back Again

Based partly on the discussions about third-way and hybrid poetics that we had on this blog some weeks back, Michael Theune have been playing around with some ideas for conversing at more length in a public forum on the issues involved. Perhaps a panel at AWP or other conference, perhaps a one-day or even weekend conference if we could find a location and the resources.

Below are the ideas we have at this point for a potential event of this kind. Both of us would appreciate hearing any thoughts you may have. Additions, questions, problems, annoyances, accusations of heedless arrogance or willful ideological bias are all encouraged.

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Recent years in poetry and poetics have seem numerous attempts to break out of, blur, or undermine distinctions between ideas of “mainstream” and “avant garde” poetics, a distinction that from the 1950s well into the 90s often dominated discussions about new directions in contemporary poetry. Yet after as much as fifteen years of attempts to move beyond this often unnecessarily limited distinction, it’s important also to move beyond assertions that the distinction has collapsed or is irrelevant. Instead, it now seems time to evaluate the specific attempts that writers and anthologists have made to create a hybrid poetics. Are we really living in an era when the mainstream/avant garde distinction no longer has value and significant common ground has been found among poetic approaches long considered opposites? Or has this new era simply adjusted, replaced, or perhaps only re-named this older boundary? Do the terms “avant garde” and “mainstream” still have any contemporary value or have they become the marks of a bygone age? If, as Hegel suggested, any synthesis of earlier ideas is always followed by a new antithesis that challenges it, what future poetic ideas will challenge any common ground that actually has been achieved or has been claimed as achieved?

This panel will feature diverse answers to these and related questions that have intrigued writers, editors, and anthologists involved in the issue. Are boundary-crossing, hybrid aesthetics a moderate, moderating force that smooths distinctions in a homogenizing and perhaps bland way, or one that allows for radical conjunctions not dreamed of in earlier generations of the “poetry wars”? Have anthologies promoting the collapse of the mainstream/avant garde distinction created genuine bridges across aesthetics or simply new poetic coteries? Do we now have no camps, new camps, more camps than ever? Have a variety of aesthetics really been included in the hybrid approach or have they instead been offered only token inclusion? Is the attempt to eliminate or downplay coterie inevitably a good idea, or is the often intense argument and difference between coteries a crucial source of vitality in new directions for poetry? What fringes and margins remain, if any? To what extent has the debate been framed too often as simply a problem within American poetry and thus remains wedded to a nationalist vision? What role do poetries in different languages, multiple languages, and translation play in complicating the notions of what it means to cross boundaries, whether aesthetic, linguistic, or cultural? What roles do race, class, or gender issues play in this new environment? When if ever are there reasons to assert the importance of maintaining or recognizing boundaries? What aesthetic, cultural, or ideological boundaries remain most relevant?

The End of America

As part of the Positions Colloquium in Vancouver last August, the colloquium organizers published a limited edition collection of poetics statements from those of us who had gathered. We were asked also to provide a brief excerpt of the work we would be presenting. Since that collection was a conference-only publication that may no longer be available (and since I’ve had a busy past week), I thought I’d just put my piece from the collection up here. I hope the statements by the other writers will be available again in printed form at some point.

The colloquium was the inaugural reading for the long poem, The End of America, that I’ve been working on since September 2006 (the start of my second year living in California). If anybody would like an e-mail copy of the 17-single spaced pages that make up Book One of the poem and are excerpted from below, let me know. I think it’s ready to be seen at this point. And also, anybody who would like a free copy of my most recently published book of poems, Felonies of Illusion, for potentially writing a review, please let me know that too.

Oh, and re the photo above: the country around here really does look like that, from some angles. From other angles it looks like a parking lot.

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from The End of America, Book One

So many people searching
for the end of America: from here
it’s not much, white jeep
cutting tracks through sand, black-suited surfer
fighting into the water, surfboard raised high,
runners, walkers of dogs and babies, blinking lights on the turret
of the Encinas Power Station, a constantly changing
breeze through the palms. Coast Highway slow through town.
Cars, which can’t imagine traveling. Beach fires prohibited
except in marked pits, a note to the crucial
need to fear fire. I grab one more instance
of love and rage, impotent and powerful
by turns, looking for more
than I already know. The end of the land, instant myth,
becomes a place to look from, or look away, to walk,
to head on out. All those poets
who seemed certain what they wanted, the ocean
a source of world, result of cosmos,
mystery under the crest of a wave.
Too much is not forgotten but never known,
history no more than the present webbing
distortion of what’s temporarily remembered. Money back,
no cash down, no payments this year, good annual rates.


A roadmap has a poetics also, on some level a conscious one. But the degree to which the poetics of the roadmap seems a cultural given makes a self-consciously explored geographical poetics necessary, not so much a response to prevailing hierarchies as a reshaping of them.

I’ve taken a few positions in my life—sometimes even insightful ones—but more often positions have taken me. Rarely has that been more true than in writing The End of America, a project that has helped me explore what it’s like to live in a place I never expected to live. Anyone who knows me well can attest that my sense of self is greatly shaped by my east coast urban experience. Like many poets I’ve often needed money, and when after many years of searching I was offered a position I could stand to take, I took it, but since my options weren’t multiple it’s not so clear who did the taking. And so this east coast poet found himself in North County San Diego, miles of strip malls proliferating among the dry natural beauty of hills and mountains over which no one has been able to build a railroad. People vote 60% percent Republican here. The local papers argue that George W. Bush’s problem is that his overspending desire to democratize the world makes him too liberal. Luckily so many people live here these days that 40% non-Republicans adds up to several million. Still, I work at a college in hill country and live two blocks from the ocean in a suburbanized beach village around which houses sprawl in every direction except into the water. It’s from conditions like these that The End of America began.

Actually the project wasn’t even my idea. I was talking, as I do often, to poet K. Lorraine Graham about my exhaustion from new conditions at work and not having energy for writing. She suggested that I should just write down what I see. And so The End of America began, a few lines every few days. A geography, not a landscape, in the sense that a geography includes how culture and economics and power interact with the natural world. Not a catalog, though it catalogs at times, and not a view from outside, but one that’s inside and outside both, alienated in a home that isn’t home.

The title has two meanings. I literally live about 1000 feet from where America, at least in one direction, ends. Beyond it is water. Of course many of us are keenly aware of the difference between America and The United States of America. And not only, I hope, because America as a geographical location includes many peoples, cultures, nations, islands and even several continents. For myself at least, and maybe others, the mythical ghost of America as a place where justice and freedom are possible haunts me long after the corpse has been buried. The project struggles with a concept: the end of America, one that many people assert, or want, even as the United States and Canada and Mexico and much else remain operating entities. Sometimes I think I’m working out a dystopic response to Whitman, wrestling with his vision of a free America in the original Leaves of Grass while trying to critique the grandiosity with which he wanted the United States to swallow the world.

There are four books so far, each getting along towards whatever completeness they’re going to have, and each with a different way of exploring the relation between aesthetics and meaning. I’m not sure yet whether there will be further books. An idea that wasn’t my idea, defined by a position that may have taken me more than I took it. That defines fairly neatly some of the problems faced by those of us who, as poets, recognize that the world’s condition is not one we have chosen and one which we often struggle against, but one that we nonetheless live within while simultaneously working through a poetics of what might otherwise exist. Our writing is our first example of what this other place might be.

Anticipation is Sweet: the MLA Pre-Season

I won’t be at MLA this year, and I won’t feel sorry to miss it either. Of course being in the Bay Area over the holiday season can be nice, and I’ll be sorry not to see a number of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, but there will be other occasions for that. As for the rest of MLA? I’ll be happy to be far away from it.

For those who are going, particularly those looking for jobs, the MLA Pre-Season is now officially underway. I date the official Pre-Season not from the moment of beginning to send out letters in late September (that’s still just warm-ups) but from the time when phone calls for interviews actually start, at which point people can legitimately begin waiting for phone calls about interviews, although they have likely been waiting for some time already. There is also much sending of last minute dossiers and writing samples, followed by actually getting phone calls and setting up interview times... well, maybe. And there’s also hearing news about other people getting interviews or not getting interviews. The MLA Pre-Season Information Mill is fantastic for encouraging those special feelings of low self-worth, financial desperation and competitive rage.

If little in the world of literature is quite as annoying as actually being at MLA, the MLA Pre-Season comes close. Ah, the anticipation before the event itself is sweet, like the aroma of hemlock before one takes that heady first sip.

In my experience, MLA job interview phone calls can start right after Thanksgiving and can continue right on up to the week before Christmas, which this year will be Friday December 19. Maybe once I had a call in the weekend of Christmas itself, a last minute, harried call from a school whose interview process was quickly heading out of control. Those phone calls are fun. Being phoned by people who don’t sound like they know what they’re doing is a very important MLA Pre-Season experience.

Sooner or later, many people have a MLA Pre-Season Horror Story, or at least a Great Tale of Confusion and Annoyance. Like, for instance, a search committee making calls not just to you and your official references, but to random other people as well, picked for reasons that are unclear and before you’ve even been interviewed.

On one occasion, sitting in my office between classes, I received a phone call from a professor at a university I’ve now forgotten. Thinking this was a set-up call for an interview, I talked to her for awhile. She really liked my job letter, she said, and was interested in discussing my teaching with me. We had a nice chat. But no, she wasn’t calling to set up an interview, nor did the school she worked for ever call me after that. What was she doing, I’ve often wondered since. MLA Pre-Season underground Subvert The Search Committee activities? Or was she just bored and looking for people to talk to?

Sooner or later though—I mean sometimes, for some people—one actually does get a few interviews set up. Some years I had none, some years three, five, one, eight, an average of about 2.7 interviews a year over a ten-year period. And then, the interview arranged, it’s homework scramble time. What school is this? Who works there? What kind of program do they have? Where on the map is it located? How much does it cost to live there? What do people there do for fun on a Saturday night? Then the taking of notes, the printing out of sample syllabi, the listing of names of writers and books to mention and not mention.

One can do the homework and be prepared, at least in some ways, but speculating is pointless. Why were they calling, really? How high up am I on that pre-season list that may or may not exist? Am I the token experimental poet (note: insert your own token status here) candidate, the interview-a writer-like-this-so we-can-say-we-did candidate? Does it actually matter if I make a good impression or do they already know who they want? If I appear like I know what I’m doing, will I look insufficiently malleable, insufficiently prepared to be told what to do by current faculty members? No matter how much speculating you do, you’ll never have answers to any of these questions.

Of course, the fact that speculating is pointless hardly makes it less inevitable. Guessing is a direct function of Job Search Committee Secrecy, that moment in the Job Committee and in the department when everybody agrees that nobody outside the department can be told what’s going on until the official moment for telling. The candidate probably knows that every department is different, that departments are political, that people disagree and sometimes deeply don’t like each other, that some of them certainly have Axes-to-Grind or Agendas-to-Pursue. But what the specific fabric is of those long term festering problems is something the candidate is likely never to know, not before the interview, not during, and not after. Unless the candidate gets hired of course, in which case those problems will come to the door soon enough.

No, the best thing the candidate can do in the MLA Pre-Season is take the necessary official steps, study up, and try not to worry about it too constantly. Or if not worrying too constantly proves impossible, take up some bad habit that can lead to temporary stress relief: bickering with friends and loved ones, criticizing other people pleasurably and needlessly, issuing Pompous Moral Judgments about the nature of the profession, the country, or the world, all of it perhaps over one too many drinks, or many too many, amid peals of overly frenetic laughter that suggest that nothing you’re saying is really funny. Or try to channel it more healthily if you can: run more often, do more Yoga, drink more smoothies, finally get that psychotherapy you’ve been putting off for years.

I haven’t looked much at the job listings in Creative Writing this year, but given the financial state of the country at the moment, I can’t imagine it’s all that great a year to be out on the San Francisco pavement, hat in hand, carrying a placard reading “Will Teach Poem Writing for Food.” The Cal State system, one of the more consistent sources of Creative Writing positions in recent years, including my own, is having a financial crisis and isn’t hiring, and many other state systems are probably in a similar condition. I wonder, when it gets right down to it, how many advertised jobs will ultimately have their funding withdrawn. And it’s hard to know anything about the relation between this year and years to come. The good news is students always want more Creative Writing classes. The bad news may be that class sizes in Creative Writing are small, which takes away in some cases from the cash cow it might otherwise be.

To those of you currently on the market, my best wishes go with you, just like people wished me well, repeatedly, during my ten years of MLA Pre-Season. Of course, if wishes were horses... and so forth and so on. Remember, part of the point of wishing you well is that I can’t be of much actual help.

And remember too that if nothing pans out this MLA season, there is always the MLA Post-Season, the late coming spring jobs and etc. Don’t think about the Post-Season too much though, because then you may realize that the MLA Season, all told, really runs September to May, and you may at that point start telling yourself things like MLA = Life. It could be a Borges story: “The world is nothing more than an infinite MLA.” No, don’t think like that. It’s not true and it can’t help. I know from experience.

LA-Lit Clouds Conference: Where I'll Be This Weekend

If you're anywhere near Los Angeles, come out and join us for what should be a series of entertaining and insightful events. If you're going to be somewhere else, I hope that'll be interesting too.

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from the conference website:

LA-Lit: Clouds

form-body-surface-material-method-growth-sound-mass-condensation
atmospheric-nebulae-clarity-reveals-recreation-currents-groundless-texture
connectivity-dense-manifest-rhythm-decenter-collaborate-surprise-confer-disperse

LA-Lit: Clouds :: November 21+22, 2008
at Betalevel and Center for the Arts Eagle Rock

Come celebrate LA-Lit’s three year anniversary on Friday November 21 at Betalevel and on Saturday November 22 at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock. For over three years, LA-Lit has developed a new space for the literary culture of Los Angeles to develop and exhibit itself. Reflecting the shifting nature of Los Angeles, LA-Lit has conducted well over thirty interviews with poets and writers who have lived in LA all their lives as well as writers who have visited LA for only a few days. Please join us for LA-Lit: Clouds :: a two day conference in Los Angeles connecting the decentered literary culture of LA in an effort to investigate its current manifestations and to develop a sense of LA’s inherent literary spontaneity.

LA-Lit: Clouds :: Schedule
Friday November 21:
8:00pm-11:00pm:
Perform and Celebrate at Betalevel
Stan Apps, Teresa Carmody, Amarnath Ravva, Lisa Samuels, Christine Wertheim

Saturday November 22:
Confer at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock
12:00pm-1:30pm
form-body-surface-material-method-growth-sound-mass
condensation-structure-elements-foreground-background
Panelists: Stan Apps, Guy Bennett, Christine Wertheim, Ara Shirinyan

2:00pm-3:30pm
atmospheric-nebulae-clarity-reveals-recreation-currents
groundless-textured-visible-droplets-interstellar-crystalline
Panelists: Will Alexander, Teresa Carmody, Amarnath Ravva, Mark Wallace

4:30pm-6:00pm
Perform at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock
Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Will Alexander, Guy Bennett, K. Lorraine Graham, Sawako Nakayasu, Ara Shirinyan, Mark Wallace

Betalevel – in the alley behind 963 N. Hill St, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Center for the Arts Eagle Rock – 2225 Colorado Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90041

Untitled Speculations: Where I'll Be This Weekend

(text taken from the conference website)



Untitled: Speculations on the Expanded Field of Writing

REDCAT and CalArts present the fifth annual series of experimental writing conferences at REDCAT, Untitled: Speculations on the Expanded Field of Writing is a two-day conversation about writing which, in some manner, exceeds the printed page. While familiar with visual artworks constituted as a set of instructions, secrets written by visitors in a book, or one artist erasing of another artist's work, is discussed how to be equivalent in the literary world. The conference is October 24-25, 2008.

Untitled is a common name of contemporary art works and also refers to the incipient moment of a new text or idea. It was chosen to convey a sense of openness and process. A variety of writers and artists will discuss the use of language and words and/or their object status, the book and the letter, the question of the "emptiness" vs. the fullness of language as a poetic medium, the pictorial versus the narrative, the incorporation of extra-linguistic symbols and signs (maps, diagrams, formulas, etc.), the question of conceptual writing and words off the page -- performed, cited, projected, incanted or invoked.

Among the participants is Kenny Goldsmith, an "uncreative" writer who labels himself the most boring writer in the world. He writes books that include everything he said for a week (Soliloquy, 2001), every move his body made during a thirteen-hour period (Fidget, 1999), and a year of transcribed weather reports (The Weather, 2005).

Artist Young-Hae Chang is part of a corporate web art group known as Heavy Industries, whose short Flash texts have mesmerized the art world with their combination of graphic boldness and acute commentary on culture, politics and commerce, yielding a new kind of literary cinema.

Currently teaching in the Writing Program at CalArts, and another participant, Salvador Plascencia's first novel, The People of Paper, takes place in the Chicano Diaspora. Reflecting on the nature of literary characters, some of his people are literally made of paper, and others get paper cuts from them.

The conference will include two panels on the topic of Litterality, and examine how writers use what we normally consider non-linguistic elements, such as symbols, diagrams, maps, or scores placed in the context of writing. Also explored are invented writing systems, and what it might mean to think about the book as an object rather than as a collection of words or sentences.

As in the art world, many kinds of appropriation have been undertaken by experimental writers in the last several years. The panel on Appropriation and Citation will look at these practices, asking questions about whose work and what material gets appropriated, cited or resurrected, who owns texts, and if there is a difference between appropriation and citation.

A panel on The Meaninglessness or -fulness of Language will examine language as a vehicle of meaning. Rather than look at what texts say, it asks if language simply taken on its own is empty, saturated with meaning, both, or something else.

The fifth panel on The Concept of Conceptual Writing, looks at the use of writing not to convey meaning or tell stories but to convey concepts, asking how this might be similar, or not, to the work of conceptual artists in the visual arena.

In addition to the five panels, there will be two evening readings. The participants in the conference are Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Latasha Diggs, Johanna Drucker, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Grenier, Douglas Kearney, Steve McCaffery, Julie Patton, Salvador Plascencia, Jessica Smith, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Taylor, Shanxing Wang and Heriberto Yepez. This event is organized by Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim of the Writing Program at CalArts, and funded by The Annenberg Foundation.

Conference Schedule:

Friday, October 24
12.30 p.m.
Opening Addresses

1.00-3.00 p.m.
Litterality 1
Writing is not speech, it is letters on a page. What do we make of the inclusion in writing of non-alphabetic signs, symbols, diagrams; writing as map or score; invented writing notations; or the book as object?

Panelists will includes Johanna Drucker, Salvador Plascencia, Latasha Diggs, Shanxing Wang

3.30-5.00 p.m.
The Meaninglessness or -fulness of Language
As a vehicle, is language empty, saturated with meaning, both, or something else?

Panelists will include Jessica Smith, Bob Grenier, Christine Wertheim

5.00-6.00 p.m
Drinks at REDCAT with participants and audience

8.30-10.30 p.m.
Evening Readings/Performances
TBD

Saturday, October 25
10.30 a.m-12.00 p.m.
Appropriation and Citation
Whose work and what material gets appropriated, cited and resurrected? Who owns texts? Is there a difference between appropriation and citation?

Panelists will include Steve McCaffery, Doug Kearney, Kenneth Goldsmith

12.30-2.00 p.m
Litterality 2
Writing is not speech, it is letters on a page. What do we make of the inclusion in writing of non-alphabetic signs, symbols, diagrams; writing as map or score; invented writing notations; or the book as object?

Panelists will include Brian Kim Stephans, Julie Patton, Vincent Dachy

Break

3.30-5.00 p.m.
The Concept of Conceptual Writing.
What is the relation between conceptual writing and the trajectory of conceptual art?

Panelists will include Stephanie Taylor, Heriberto Yepez, Young-Hae Chang+Marc Voge

5.00-6.00 p.m.
Summary Discussion with all panelists

8.30-10.30 p.m.
Evening Readings/Performances
TBD

Organized by Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener from CalArts’ MFA Writing Program.

Colin Smith's 8x8x7

At the Vancouver Positions Colloquium, it was great to see some old friends and acquaintances and to hear new work by writers whom I have known a long time. And it was nice to meet people whose work I have long known but whom I have never met, like Fred Wah, who continues to have a broad influence on the poetry of the Vancouver area and beyond. In a few cases though, not only was I hearing new work or meeting a writer I had never met before, I was meeting writers I had never even heard of before. One of those writers, Colin Smith, gave one of the most powerful readings of the colloquium, and I immediately picked up a copy of his book published by Krupskaya, 8x8x7. The book is every bit as powerful as his reading and I hope more people will find out about it and read it and buy it.

Smith’s book, and his reading, certainly shared in the tenor of the conference, and in the traditions of Vancouver avant poetries, in a focus both on global power structures and the most immediate details of the here and now and how connections between the two might be traced. He shares a Vancouver poetics also in the biting, ironic wit and rapid fire politicized quips that mark so many (thought not all) of the male poets I admire from that region (the female poets share it too, although they’re more likely to risk sincerity or aestheticism without sacrificing a keen politicized edge). But Smith’s work is marked by personal and painful immediacy, one that can sometimes be difficult to include in a poetics interested in understanding and critiquing large scale economic realities. Which is to say that his work often details, very affectingly, the fact of how these economic realities really do hurt individuals, and how it feels to be hurt.

Smith had perhaps the single best quip of a quip-filled colloquium. “Ready!——Fire!——Aim!” from 8x8x7's opening poem, “Just,” left the audience with one of those groaning laughs of recognition that continue to reverberate long afterwards. I’m still teasing out all the contexts to which such a phrase is too perfectly applicable. At the same time, the fact of his own obvious pain was apparent in his reading and can be found throughout the poems. This pain is both physical (chronic problems with his spine, he told me if I’m remembering correctly, can make it difficult for him to walk or stand for too long a period of time) and a function of being poor in the center of an economic boom which is making a few people rich and disenfranchising many others. “How can you say I’m committing a crime?/ I’m/ just/ sitting here,” he concludes at the end of “Just,” exposing readers to the ongoing history (one that in Vancouver lately has been amped up as the 2010 Olympics approaches) of making it a criminal act for people to have nowhere to go. Although he was a Vancouver resident for many years, he now lives in Winnipeg, a city where for the moment he seems to have found it more possible to survive.

8x8x7 consists of a number of poetic sequences of various lengths, many about 8-10 pages of accumulated reflections, critiques, one-liners, outbursts, and howls of recognition. From “Leper Hockey Punchline”:

The soup that thinks outside the can.

SPECIAL
HD/HBGER
FF&ldr
3.99

Eat crap, die, and leave
a luminescent biohazard of a corpse.

He lifts his spirits by reading Madame Bovary
while listening to Joy Division.

Would I think thrice
before donating Charles Dickens books
to people in prison?

War and unemployment
are the energies
of our economy. Cold and Hungry Please
Spare Anything

“Symptoms of vomiting and nausea”
“Alleged photos of torture”
Ask about our ‘hit the ceiling’ guarantee!

You are automatically entered.


The development of each poem isn’t so much narrative as associational, yet the overall affect paints a thorough picture of an individual subject to economic and social forces vastly beyond his control, forces that claim to be impersonal even as they wrench from those subject to them the most personal confessions, doubts and failings. Smith doesn’t reveal any of this through a conventional telling of his own tale, but through the way the snippets converge and diverge in a sort of globalist pointillism. His poems don’t so much map an overarching schema of social and economic landscapes, as for instance Jeff Derksen’s work (itself also very impressive but in a much different way) does, but bring us right to the points of contention, the sore spots, the sites of emotional anguish. Even as Smith’s poems remain really very funny, there’s the same sense of unbearable pain that one gets from Jack Spicer poems, a feeling of being overwhelmed, just from listening, by the suffering in the poem. But the irony and humor of many lines is not a distancing or muffling of anger, or even a way of making it more palatable, so much as it is an act of momentary relief from a tension that just keeps building. These are poems that can do things that political theory, for all its value, usually can’t: tell us what it feels like, all over one’s body, to be losing out in the midst of an economy that claims to be booming.

Oddly enough perhaps, there’s something intensely energizing about 8x8x7, just as there is about Smith himself, with his humor, generosity, and really just friendliness and willingness to converse. The poems in the book never completely give in or give up even as they acknowledge the many moments when giving up seems the only sensible reaction. There’s a sense of fight in these poems that I can’t help but admire—a fact which the cover art of the book, a montage by Frank Mueller of some of the boxing scenes in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, both points to and ironizes. A fight which shows the ridiculousness and often hopelessness of fighting, yet continues to strike back with whatever power it has, and does so with insight, hilarity, and a willingness to open its own most vulnerable conditions. From the book’s final poem, "Goodbye (Riddance)":

Because the closest to a safe home
I’ve ever known
was a psychiatric hospital I lived in
for 6 months when I was 14.

Chronic pain abstracts you
from yourself while making it impossible
to abstract chronic pain.

Sanction, endure, render.

Truth... grace... beauty... I dunno,
what do you think you get for them?

Smith’s book is hardly a self-congratulatory attempt at fighting the good fight. But it shows very well the degree to which the desire for self-determination and self-respect is perhaps the most essential power to tap into when struggling against forces and individuals who would take those things away from people.

Vancouver Positions Colloquium: Tom Orange photo sets

That's Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand, being as usual casually remarkable, and the rest of Tom's very thorough photo set on the Vancouver Positions Colloquium can be found on his blog or by going directly to the complete photo set.

Vancouver and the Positions Colloquium: Where I’ll Be And Why

My last blog post for a bit as I get ready to head for eight days nights in Vancouver, five of which will be spent at the Positions Colloquium, a schedule for which I’ve linked to here. I won’t be back until the Sunday night of the Sunday night of the year, with classes starting the next day.

A month or so ago, Ron Silliman blogged about the many literary conferences and festivals happening this summer, and how he saw in them some basic blueprint about the main current directions in alternative poetries (not so interested in a nomenclature debate right now, thanks). His schematic for looking at the conferences was full of generalizations (some at least partly illuminating), as perhaps is befitting of the Gateway Drug aspects that his blog often takes on, but he also raised the worthwhile question of exactly what the point of these conferences is and why they take what shape they take.

Of course, trying to define what actually happens at a conference by some definition found in poetics or other theories is bound to generalize. Even talk about “a community of interests” is too general and on some level an obfuscation. Conferences happen because particular people make the effort to make them happen, and because those people are able to access resources that can help such events happen (and the degree of available resources certainly varies). Then (in most cases) they have to issue invitations or calls for proposals, and writers have to decide whether they can accept those invitations or come up with a proposal. Then, when decisions about participants have been made, schedules of events and writers are published. Following that, others who have not been invited, but who may feel interested in the writers or events, make plans to attend also. Those others may wish that they had been invited (feelings on the subject can be complicated, to put it mildly) or just feel interested in being there to see what’s going to happen. All these decisions are certainly based in standards of ideology and taste but don’t necessarily result from those standards in any one-dimensional way, and what actually happens when the conference gets going certainly doesn’t. The unexpected and the random remain features of every conference. Of course, the more narrowly defined the subject matter of a conference is, the more narrowly defined the potential participants are. This summer’s flarf festival, for instance, implied by its title a fairly definite sense of potential participants. Not so the conceptual poetry conference though, despite what might seem at a quick glance a similarly narrow focus, because what the idea of conceptual poetry includes turns out to be much broader and more debatable.

All that said, for me the Positions Colloquium expresses as significant a sense of the writers to whom my own work is most immediately connected as I could probably imagine. There are many writers to whose work I feel a close connection who won’t be there, of course, just as there are many other kinds of writers whose work I like who won’t be there either. But those kinds of limitations seem to me only obvious even as the specifics of some of them are always likely to be vexed. Still, who actually will be there is a set of people that it makes me happy to be part of.

The actual work of the writers in question varies quite widely. What I think is shared is not so much answers as issues and questions. Finding the right balance of similarity and difference of concerns at a conference can be tricky. Invite a wildly divergent set of people and they may find it difficult to be able to talk to each other about any issue in any depth, although the advantage is that people will learn at least a bit about things they didn’t already know. Invite a more close knit group and the already developed conversation between them will certainly be more in-depth, at the same time that differing perspectives might be overly neglected.

Here are some of the issues that I think connect the Position Colloquium writers.

One is the interrelation between aesthetics and culture. Aesthetic decisions always take place in culturally specific contexts, and use culturally specific techniques. But culture is not simply the ground for aesthetics, because aesthetics themselves are crucial to what culture is. But that’s only a bare starting point for the issues in question. How is one’s literary aesthetics interrelated with the culture(s) one is part of?

Another issue that connects most of these writers is some concern with globalist political and economic issues. Along with the local specificity of aesthetic and cultural forms and contents comes the issue of how these specifics relate to overarching world scale concerns with capitalism, war, poverty, nationalism, The Spectacle. The Local Picture and The Global Picture and the connections and tensions between them.

In relation to these questions, the status of poetry as a political act related to other political acts will certainly be an issue. Some writers at the conference are likely to think of their work, in writing and otherwise, as direct political engagement. Others will be more concerned with exploring theories of politics or of working with ambiguities and complexities whose elaboration may involve attempts at understanding only tenuously tied to specific immediate action.

Also, identity. The identity that is imposed on one from without which one decides to take on, or not, in various degrees. Not only essentialist identities or constructed identities or fragmented identities but identities that are always in play in the act of working with anyone. Identities as an example of specific negotiation with others. The value of groups and the limits of groups.

Also, issues of transparency and mediation, the visceral and the theoretical. Writing about how one feels or thinks while being aware that feelings and thoughts themselves are always partly social constructs. Maybe I really can say what I mean, but maybe what I mean is caught up in a history of learning to mean and what it means to learn to mean. Are emotional power and honesty in one’s writing and a complex understanding of emotion necessarily opposites? What if at their best they go hand in hand?

Skepticism and awareness of limitations. The recognition that everything is not possible. A concern about the value of the simple righteous statement, or perhaps the sense that the simple righteous statement may be the right thing to do sometimes. More importantly though, an awareness of contextual limits, of thinking through what is or is not possible to do and where and why.

Humor, playfulness, pleasure, parody, satire. Are these the opposite of serious literary work or an often essential feature of it? To what extent is laughter a necessity? If literature is a kind of game, aren’t parts of it fun? Aren’t fun and pleasure also social concepts that need considering?

These issues, and many others, not to mention performances, visual poems, casual conversations, friendship and a good old time, are some of the reasons I’m pleased to be part of these events.

Any thoughts on what you go to conferences for, or what you like or dislike about them? I’ll be on e-mail only intermittently (at best) until August 25 but I’ll put your comments through just as soon as I get them.

on the road again

And don't think for a second that I'm not loving it.

This will be my last blog post for awhile. My apologies if you write me or leave a blog comment and it takes me a bit of time to get to it. I'll be checking e-mail every so often though.

First stop, Press: A Cross-Cultural Literary Conference at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where I'll be giving a reading on Saturday night and participating in a panel on Sunday on "Globalism In Literature and Globalization: Postcolonialism and Emergent Languages."

Then on Monday it's off to Seattle for more fun and a reading Wednesday night in the snuggery (aka the back room) of the College Inn for the new Seattle area Subterranean Yak poetry series. Any yeti who's any yeti will be there, so if you're in the area come on out.

Until we meet again, enjoy your subversions.

AWP is where it's at!

“Are you going to AWP?”

Rod Smith tells me that Kevin Thurston tells him that for writers, this question has become “the new hello.”

I’ve certainly been asked it somewhere between ten and twenty times in the last two weeks.

Actually I’ve never been to AWP, maybe partly because I’ve been to MLA a dozen times, peddling what scant resources I can offer in as many directions as I can and being so worn out afterwards that the idea of going to another professional conference is about as fascinating as dental surgery. Maybe someday I will go, but not this year.

Among those writers going to AWP, and among those not going, there turn out to be many concerns about AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the standards of the profession at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the quality of the official AWP panels.

Some writers are concerned about the ideology of the official AWP panels.

Some writers are concerned about how the problem of professionalism, as evidenced by AWP, changes what writing is, who writers are and what they do.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship between “experimental” or “avant garde” writers and AWP.

Some writers are concerned about who’s more “inside” and “outside” at AWP and they’re concerned about what “inside” and “outside” mean.

Some writers are concerned about who gets the opportunities that AWP has to offer and who does not get those opportunities.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship of the writers at AWP to the academic world.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship between AWP and larger U.S. institutional systems of power.

Some writers are concerned about whether enough of their friends will be there to make AWP fun.

Some writers are concerned about whether there will be enough interesting writers there to balance out the dull, pompous stuffed-shirts who are legendary at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the importance of being seen at AWP.

Some writers, if they are also publishers, are concerned about getting word out that their books are available at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about letting others know that they have a reading or panel event scheduled at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about letting others know that they have a reading or other event scheduled not at AWP but at the time and in the proximity of AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the distinction between “I’m going to AWP” and “I thought I’d go to AWP this year because it’s in New York.”

Some writers are concerned that other writers care about AWP too much.

Some writers are concerned that other writers don’t understand how much power AWP really has.

All of these, in greater or lesser degree perhaps, are legitimate concerns.

Are you concerned about AWP and what are those concerns? I mean, since so many writers are concerned about it anyway, we might as well discuss what we’re concerned about.