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I was going to start serializing a piece called the Poverty of Poetry (well, when I say serialize I mean burden blogger with my lunchtime notes towards an essay of such a title). Somehow, it isn’t in me today. Watch this space, though, it will come. Because there are many Povery’s of .. I’m sure someone has already written something with the same title. The title does have an interesting history, actually. Marx wrote a paper (which I downloaded on Kazaa Lite!) entitled “The poverty of philosophy” in response to Proudhon’s “The philosophy of poverty” . I haven’t read either piece (though I instinctively side with “Property is theft” etc) so I can’t be much help on the contents. Nevertheless, Marx’s title is crafted in direct opposition to Proudhon, thus “The Poverty of..” carries an oppositional sense. The poverty of poetry is simply an argument against typical “colonizing” measures of poetry. By this I mean that poetry tends to appropriate vocabularies or even describe other disciplines but rarely attempts to enter the practice itself. Stein did manage this to an extent with her use of grammar as a poetic response to Cubism. An example I came across recently is a piece by Christina Kubisch in which she takes lines from 18th and 19th century poetry that highlight the effect of silence and prints them onto translucent glass. The glass was then placed in the desolate enclaves in a dilapidated castle and above it is a kind of ultra-violet light that makes the words visible – kind of like those watermark readers they use to prevent counterfeiting. The light also highlights the decaying walls around them. This to me is poetry occupying a vital space. It emphasizes not just silence, which is the theme of her piece, but also the context of reading and the space in which we occupy to read. There is also the comment about decay and sound etc. In short, this is a beautiful poetry that the page cannot do. Perhaps my aspirations for poetry are too architectural, that I want poems not just boxed in books and memory but in every movement around us. I want the failing car to sputter poems. For poems to act in the shaping of buildings and streets, the hum from which is also poetry. My phone rings poems.. I don’t have to dial them up, they are in the dialing.. I leave you today on that.

I encountered quite a big glitch in my Mina Loy paper last night so I spent my trip to work making even more notes and annotations to the Love Songs. The papers main contention is that the concepts of noise and audition inform the Love Songs and that to consider them in purely literary terms is only a half-seeing approach. So I’ve gone through and demonstrated how sound works in terms of content (that is, the images and events that take place in the poem), but now I’m looking at sound/ noise itself. I’ve limited myself somewhat by trying to see her noise in terms of Russoloian language noise – that is, the noise of consonants. I think consonantal noise is present, but there is more that is harder to quantify, such as the short /i/ sound. She certainly never goes the direction of Stein with an ever present sonority, but still what are those rattlings and shaking tin walls? Why are they there??? I’ll work it out, I’m sure. Otherwise… Office poetry is a beating keyboard and the monotonous hum of hard-drives etc. He’s taken good songs, that’s all Dub dubbing Eto What are you watching Laugh phone ring Noise Jyu ichi nin

This’ll have to be brief if anything is capitalized or punctuated it’s because my hands were working well or word did it for me I am super rushed but wanted to get some things down before I don't smile So ive been traveling with doug messerlis big fat anthology all week cuz I couldn't stand going without poetry any longer this is my fear of academia all over again you no longer read works but dissect them like frog in 9th grade science class poor things I don't think things will be that way once I get out of this miserable job and actually have time to do something when im not in a rush or half asleep Well, for the bfb big fat book ohh a comma thanks hands the bfb ive been reading mr charles olsen ive read him before but anyway what struck me is how much of a modernist he still was of course the localism of this place called glouchester not England I presume thanks for the caps word removes him a bit but not much what was on my mind this morning was his use of myth I was once a great myth-man my dog rip was called bucephalus after alexanders horse and even my son is amateras after Japanese myth is myth an exclusion western myths are themselves known to have been appropriated from the Indian and Persian but his references to man I can’t remember which myth,, whatever, I felt was rather exclusive limiting his poetry somewhat from the global not that one would write to be global necessarily but is it important??? Also sometimes olsen is compared to pound and these writers LOVE to discuss his visits to st. elizabeths etc etc but really I think there is one very crucial difference.. olsen is not musical I may be wrong since ive only read several selections of his but I have barely detected an ear he tells wonderfully embellished stories and has some great lines like:

it is not bad to be pissed off

Anyhow im outta time

I couldn’t take another day of it poemless and theoretical deluged by the theory of practice so this mornging I emptied my bag of Capra’s The Web of Life , Creeley’s Windows, and even the copy of Sawako’s Hockey Love Letters (That’s where I put it!) and put in the great tome Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century. I even went to the effort to take along an aging Nono tape and earphones to prevent myself from listening in on other people’s conversations and sounds. Once I got a seat on the unusually busy post-Obon Yamanote-line, there was no question, open to John Taggart. I ‘discovered’ Taggart a few months ago when in a similar mood I pulled out Poems for the Millennium 2 before bed. I was so enthralled – the poem in PotM 2 read like the poets rendition of In C – I even read it to my wife, who, as usual was uncaptivated but flattered that I thought she might like to hear it. Taggart is an extraordinary poet. One of the few modern poets who has really attempted to reach music but hasn’t shied away from actual feeling as well. In fact, he is able to use these generalisable abstract words, like “pain”, without bathos. Ah, great, some of his poetry is available on the web! Here is an excerpt from the Slow Song for Mark Rothko (the poem anthologized in PotM2):

To breathe and stretch one's arms again to breathe through the mouth to breathe to breathe through the mouth to utter in the most quiet way not to whisper not to whisper to breathe through the mouth in the most quiet way to breathe to sing to breathe to sing to breathe to sing the most quiet way. To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness radiantia radiantia singing light in darkness. To sing as the host sings in his house.

The repitition recalls Stein somewhat, though it is more deliberately musical. I read that Terry Riley was very much influenced by Stein, thus the connection is hardly surprising. Still, as I was saying, a poem in which the wonderfully sensitive line “to light the most quiet light in darkness” can become part of this musically minimalist framework bespeaks the strength of writing. Damn out of time..

Ok. I WILL do this today, finally, a Friday. It’s just been a very very busy week AGAIN. In the poetry world, it seems Mr Silliman has had yet another pointless spat with another poet. This time it involves some pseudo-movement called New Brutalism – is this the Bruitists? Seems like this fella got under Silliman’s wick for saying L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry favors theory over emotion. Woo! Am I alone in thinking that this debate is pointless? Since I’m not shy of crudity, who the fuck cares? It seems that the general characteristic separating poets and other artists is that the exhuming and constant revision – rather like Freudian mourning, going over a lost object – is the poor lot of these full-blooded literary types, whereas artists are generally happy to let the critics wrangle while they move on and develop new ideas, sometimes correcting the critics in their folly. I wonder if this is in any way related to a question posed several months ago asking why artists go through phases (like Picasso’s Blue Phase) while poets are generally considered more singularly. It is partly for this reason that I dread becoming involved in such a musty literary world. My other reasons being: • Dread of national poetry and stigmatization (I still get shudders hearing Charles Bernstein say “I prefer ‘Walter Benjamin’ [Anglicized pronunciation] the American way since he was so poorly treated by his own country” .. even when he says “American poet” blurrgh!). To be called an “American/Canadian/Finnish/ British etc” poet is the greatest insult. • Being in any way aligned with these so-called defenders of young poets like Jim Behrle, Jo Massey etc. Please Jim, don't defend me against Darth Silliman. I don’t know these guys, so I may be being unfair, but I’m not impressed by their public gestures. It seems to me like it may be time for another Futurism – at least the energy.

I can’t remember what it was that I wanted to add to the last blog. Perhaps why identity is an issue in the first place?? That seems highly uninteresting though.. hmm. It’s worth asking anyway. Basically, I’m not sure exactly why it became necessary to remove the artist from the production of the work. I assume some of it has to do with the popular conception of the artist somehow expressing his/ her woes through art. It is really highly offensive to suggest that a piece of art really ‘expresses’ anything. If it does then it is bound to be rather poor. One always needs some amount of distance to do any piece of art. Art is not necessarily representation (as Mr. Warhol taught us it is also reproduction), but does work with symbols. Now it would be rather absurd to say that the ‘symbols’ actually had a corollary in the ‘real world’ (absurd but not unheard of); symbols are, the world.. that is to say that they exist not in relation to things but in relation to themselves and context etc. Thus art is a manipulation of symbols, when art becomes expressive, that is when someone creates with the intention of expressing what is after all, symbolic, the result is almost always poor.. I realize this is a silly argument, I’m just entertaining ideas. In fact I understand the phenomenon differently. To create simply requires a psychological distance otherwise the piece becomes overcharges with mass generalizations. Such is the result of most teenage art and writing, as well as Harold Pinter’s poetry. (Sadly, even intelligent artists think of poetry as this odd empty vessel into which the excrement of their ‘emotions’ can be dumped.). Er. Yes, so, this may be one reason. The other may be partly psychological. Most people have come to understand that the self is a unity of convenience, that is, “I” is a multiplicity. “I” is another as Rimbaud said. Taking the “I” out a work presumably allows the other into it. I’m not sure to what extent the above psychological conditions link to sociological conditions -- i.e. these are post-modern, fragmented times, fragmented by capitalistic schizophrenic pluralism – for artists. This seems to me always a half-truth and an approach only beleaguered Marxists would take. Capitalism thrives, it is true, through the appearance of unity to cover its monstrous chaos, a chaos that could lead us to believe that the ‘I’ is even more fragmented. I think in this respect capitalism is not new. Every ‘order’ is the semblance of unity. The difference is that now the chaos is on a global scale.. Where writers especially, are falling short these days, incidentally, is the failure to recognize internationalism. Though not a writer, I was quite amused at a PhD. Student’s resume that stated something along the lines of :”Because my university is near to the Canadian border, I am also aware of Canadian poetries, such as Steve McCaffery and Christian Bok.” Whooo! I guess it’s thinking like this that earns a 4 GPA!

Hoax’s and authorship In a recent correspondence between Kent Johnson and Brian Kim Steffens (among others) about Conceptual Literature the issue of authorship viz-a-viz Yasusada came up, for me unexpectedly. I have always maintained support for Johnson, even though the implication could be that he is the author, and Yasusada (who doesn’t exist) because of the various challenges it presents to the areas of authenticity and the unified literary persona. I should unpack these ideas a bit before going on. It is assumed in literature that the art object is an expression of, or is in some way related to, the authenticity of feeling or intellection on the part of the artist. Of course, in the 20th Century people like Duchamps & MacLow attempted to remove themselves from the production of art objects, though certainly failed in removing themselves from the ‘signified’ piece. That is, Duchamp ‘made’ the Standard Stoppages without taking part in their making (though people debate this), but we still know the piece as his and not “No Man’s” (No Man is still a very powerful image and theme). With the cult of personality being all pervasive, even in these post-Pollack days, the Duchamp is A Duchamp. The authenticity of the piece is never doubted. If you see the Standard Stoppages at the Tate in London, the friendly placard will inform you of Duchamp’s intentions, so too in other exhibits will you learn about his alter-ego Rose Selavy. In the case of a hoax, if ‘hoax’ can be used even if authenticity is never uncovered, we have a different ‘take’ on the same idea. The artist has given up hope of removing him/herself from the production of the work since, as we know, it is impossible, and instead has taken his/herself out of the reception of the work. This is a very important move in my opinion. In the case of Yasusada, moreover, the whole façade goes further than former models in actually subverting culturally held beliefs in relation to authorship and also to the cultural “other”. (I might add at this point that this particular hoax has induced in me a certain amount of shadenfreude, a pleasure that for some is guilty, especially from Ron Silliman’s initial response to Yasusada. Now that Mr. Silliman has his own blog, presumably scared off the POETICS List since his early misguided Leninist war mongering after the World Trade Center fell, I can get regular doses of this less acceptable pleasure.) Well, the lunch break is over, so I’ll have to continue this Monday.. It’s back to Noise and Loy for the weekend.

I take most of it back. Creeley isn’t so bad. I’ve made my way to some of the later poems and have been more impressed. Poems like this one, Window, irked me somewhat: The window had /been half /opened and the /door also /opened, and the /world then/ invited, waited/ and we /entered One of my objections to the poem is simply that he is still harping on about that old poets malaise, the world and me, subject – object, as though they aren’t problematic. From my own point of view, these aren’t really problems at all they just don’t exist. This is a poetry that is still relying too much on the eye and as a friend mentioned just yesterday, to privilege a sense is anti-thetical to world making, it is an abstraction of the world which in no way tries to enter it.. Before I digress, I’d also like to include a poem I liked. Was it thunk suck of sound an insistent outside into the patient abstract waited was lost in such simple flesh ou sont les motherand father so tall the green hills echoed .. That’s as much as I’ll quote since I’m at work. Obviously, what I like about this is the sound. There’s also the suggestion here that sound can potentially “suck” one into “simple flesh”, though that may be a complete misreading. There is still that “insistent outside” that irked me about “Window”..The poem is actually dedicated to Jasper Johns, who I know little about. The poem probably functions on quite another level for someone who knows about Johns. In fact, I think I’ll print out a little about him before leaving the office today and see what all I can find out.

Ah! Back and with a new name; hope you like it. I’m kind of browsing through a number of books right now. My mood is so changeable, sticking to one or two just isn’t feasible. Rob Creeley’s Windows has got to be the biggest disappointment of them all though. I very much like the poem of his, Anger, anthologized in Poems for the Millennium 2, but I have read little else with a pulse. In fact, I started reading the book earlier this year and started actually ‘correcting’ whole stanzas. I’d never done this before (good exercise though) and eventually got frustrated.. So what’s the problem? His rhythms can be interesting at times, granted; it’s the content. Dedications, death, the small things in life, etc etc. He no longer has faith in other ways of seeing (as Anger most definitely did with anger compared to trucks smashing into a wall – this is from a faint memory), he just wants us to see as everybody assumes to see.. On the topic of Mr. Creeley, any idea why has received so much recognition from the experimental writers? Oppen wrote very similar, though less musical, poetry and even lived the ideal life of dropping out of poetry to exile himself in Mexico during the McCarthy years.. O.K. I’m not a big Objectivist fan, Oppen and to some extent Olsen are a little too frontiersman for me.. and WCW, who seems to be their predecessor, well, when I was at university, his step-shapes poems fascinated my eye but eluded my ear, but his verse always paled next to Pound’s, and froze next to Schwitters’ & Stein’s. Now, I was going to make the link with the above, but avoided it to prevent too much vitriol against Oppen, Creeley etc. One of the things that bugs me about many of the above is their trite Americanism; nationalism is a virus among poets even today. Hear Bernstein talk about American Poets, for example, college courses dedicated to American poetry. Goodness, you’d a thought that they’re still wearing Quaker hats! WCW wrote this stinker called “In the American Grain”, that arouses quite a lot of anger (there’s that truck crashing again) in me. It’s not that poetry isn’t local - it is always local and we can’t help composing in space (and time) – but such ideas are not just wrought in locality but in ideality (I only half intend these asinine assonances). Many of us would discount religion and God because it presupposes a force and resignation beyond the human and worldly, why make the exception for a country. Belief in a country is the same to me as belief in God… We’ll that’s the end of my vitriolic (sorry) lunch break. I promise something more positive tomorrow.

levity is a levitation leech.

I’m reading Doug Kahn’s Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts right now to get a better idea of how to approach my application paper. As I go along, it occurs to me how radically different new approaches to the body and cognition can actually change the way we think about sound in the arts. Kahn’s assumption is that the world is “out there” and we just happen to fall into it, thus sound is all pervasive. Autopoiesis (or perhaps I should call it the Santiago theory) teaches us that the world isn’t exactly out there, at least not in any ordinary sense, rather that we “bring it forth.” I understand this to mean that we create the world in response to what is actually there (the world is there) and as an organism with a nervous system and sense generally we are constantly ‘bringing forth’ – never brought forth. Sound then is always interpreted – perhaps the word “interpret” is incorrect, but anyway… So where does that get us? In theory it brings us back to selectivity, though selectivity not based on taste so much as biological structure.. In practice, we would have to consider that mimetic attempts at sound are never mimetic, so Marinetti’s “Rattatat Tat” machine guns could be a pervasively glottal “u=u=u=u=u=u,” point one. The interesting point is that, having similar structural similarities, we may all understand the different versions of machine gun fire as machine gun fire. I would say the other point is that because we can broadly assimilate onomatapoeic sounds, that there is a possibility for metaphor in sound. Suppose my, imagined, piece called “beer belly” started with a succession of flatulent sounds and continued to ASCII: “plezur plezur : ?? Well, ahem. Anyhow, sound artists actually already know this on one level. Kenny Goldsmith is doing it all the time, but as far as I know, people don’t get it.. Well, that’s all I’m doing for now. Hmm. I’m more than a little dissatisfied by this actually. If theory does nothing but explain what has already been done, then it is utterly useless. It has to always point to what has been done and what can be done. This is just explanatory. If you think otherwise, let me know

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Miscellany While I’m still finishing off the one essay/review – which, as I said before, I may post on the North American Center for Interdisciplinary Poetics until I can find a print home for it – I’ve got to move onto the next one. So at the moment, I’m just doing my homework, so to speak… Well, this afternoon I re-read Steve McCaffery’s Introduction to Parapoetics. It’s an important step in adumbrating a trajectory of possibility within poetry/poetics. The gist of the article is of a (para-) poetics resisting specialization in any discipline, probing, I think he says, the fungibility and centrifugality of specialized discourse. Said more simply, it will investigate the ruptures within the study of a single discipline. Instead, for example, looking at poetry within the context of poetic history or even literary history, parapoetics looks to the interstices. Hmm. Still not so simple is it? Anyhow, I’ve framed it to look like a discipline in itself – perhaps for the English department – but I think the general idea is intended to impact practice as much as study. Every artist is to some extent be concerned with context, historical, temporal, special etc. The context an artist identifies often contributes to the work in varying degree. Ezra Pound’s appropriation of Calvacanti and the Troubadors is an act of contextualizing, for example. It seems a parapoetics is a kind of contextualizing that goes outside of discipline and outside of the concerns considered relevant to a particular practice. It allows questions such as, how does architectural space impact writing or vice versa? And we can construct non-reductive answers creatively as well as academically, perhaps. Well, I’m outta time…

I only have 20 mins left today, but at least I’m getting something up. This blog was supposed be regular, however after last month’s madness I haven’t has the energy.. I’m hard at work finishing off the Architectural Body review. Not having written an essay in 5 years, it has proven to be a challenge. Of course, there was an abrupt learning curve involved too. It wasn’t until midway through that I bothered looking at autopoiesis.. only to find that it is more influential than I had imagined. Well, it’s going to be at lest a 4,000 worder, not including notes. I wonder where I can actually publish this? After all this work, I may have to settle for a posting on the North American Center for Interdisciplinary Poetics (http://www.poetics.yorku.ca/)where it will have to compete with Karen Mac Cormack’s piece on the same topic. Though I think mine is more carefully considered!, There is a lot of thinking through that needs to be done on architectural bodies, procedural poetics, etc. A fully embodied mind is totally revolutionary and needs to be brought into discourses as wide as political theory, sociology, and well, science from whence it comes. So much of human thought works on binaries and the shades therein. This theory precludes binarism in a linear sense. Once I’ve finished this review I want to go back to work thinking it through with my own practice.. yes, my real writing has suffered over the last 6 weeks..

Politics - I can’t continue this blog without discussing politics. Although any artistic act is a political act, I am not quite capable of sublimating my own anger and hostilities through art alone. Anarchists optimistically see every turn of dissent as an opportunity for ‘revolution.’ The discussions going on in the Anarchist Research Listserv of which I’m a part, tend to highlight this fact. In every, glint of anti-governmental sentiment they see chances to persuade, chances that soon the world will look toward Anarchism for guidance on what to do next. While I loosely align my own politics with anarchist thought, I find this optimism somewhat blind to a deeply dark era I’m afraid we’re entering. Anarchism does, however, offer some generally useful ideas vis-à-vis the war and politics. I’ll bullet point a few of them here: • The State Anarchists are famously anti-statist – silly to say really because anti-statism largely defines Anarchism – and would see this war on both sides as an ideological construct. If one could stand outside of the inter-state feuds and resolutions, indeed if we could see this situation outside of the law, we may gain a more acute insight into the functioning and manipulation at work. We should not see this war as illegal – illegal is not a moral or ethical standpoint and is only valuable if you want to give up thinking. We should not see George Bush as a villain, nor Saddam Hussein – to villainize either one is to be blind to the larger construct in which they are toys. This construct? The State. Don’t forget that Hegel postulated that the state is the synthesis of the Geist, and that by his own dialectical reasoning this postulation is illogical. If we were to accept dialectics, we would want to look for an antithesis to the state. As we know, in its megalomaniacical desire to maintain its synthetic status the State attempts to quash it’s antithesis: the people in it. By our physical disposition, we are diverse, contrary to the aim of the State. Patriotism is the name given to the adhesive used to gloss diversity. • Party Politics Well it goes without saying that party politics are irrelevant. I find it fairly naïve that Americans believe the root cause of the war is the stolen 2000 election. Yes, Bush and co. did not get the presidency legitimately, but would the Democrats behaved any differently? Probably not, though the rhetoric would have had palliative effect, Republican-speak is just too coarse to stomach. • Religion is a sensitive issue for Anarchists. Tolstoy was a Christian, and there have been Christian (and perhaps other sects) Anarchist movements. Most Anarchists are atheists because religion requires your supplication to one master or another (God, priest, or cleric). The War on terrorism was not drawn up to be a religious war, I don’t think that even the idiots in the Whitehouse or Parliament had that in mind. Nevertheless, the war is a religious war, Islam versus secularism (secularism doe not imply godlessness, but God outside of politics), and this means that this war is extremely complicated. Muslims can be secularists as much as Christians can favor theocracy. Therefore, what we have is a war being fought on 5 fronts, between the secular and religious in Islamic and Western counties, and the war itself. In America, where this war has been raging for longer than Americans would like to recognize, theocracy is winning. Were theocracy losing, politicians would not need to voice their belief in God and most Americans would not prefer a Female president to an atheist. Anarchists should not forget to keep one eye on ideals and the other on practicality. I agree with the above critiques, but think that we also need to engage with the politics as they are being fought now. This war is not the fault of even a group of people but an entire system. We should ask what changes could be made to the system? One change necessary for the US and GB is to institute a proportional voting system, like the sort used in Germany. This would reduce the chance of unilateral decisions being made in the name of a minority. It would also allow a greater number of political voices to enter into public debate. This is important for anarchists as well because the further the mainstream politics are from Anarchism, the fewer people will know anarchism for what it really is. Oops. I’m writing into office hours..

March was a terrible month, sorry for not posting much. I should have more time from now on.. In January (or Feb?) I was trying to work out what Cubism in poetry actually meant. I heard some comment to the effect that one had to realize the relationship between geometry and grammar to be able to write a cubist poem.. It finally dawned on me as I read, half-asleep, a WC Williams essay on Stein. What Stein arguably does is to ‘skirt’ around an idea grammatically, thus creating a kind of multiple perspective a la Cubism. Take this example from my favorite complete Stein poem “If I told him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him. I liked the sound of this so much I never took the time to think about it in the terms I should have! I do not think Stein took a scientific approach to this though, I am sure sound dictated the structure to no insignificant end. The argument with which I have still to take issue, or even look at, is that poetry exists on a different plane to the plastic arts and it is therefore more essential for the words to create an emotional or stylistic parallel.. To say another way, poetry is processed intellectually, and should therefore create a kind of intellectual plane.. I guess similar to the Stein example above. She could have simply described an object from multiple perspectives, like describing a Picasso painting, the argument may run, but instead she addresses Cubism on a level more appropriate to the medium, grammar being the parallel to geometry. This argument works in this case, I think. Using a descriptive method for Cubist poetry would have been boring for a start! I think the problematic comes when we think about the present day. Artists doing anything interesting or worth considering these days are not concerned with taboos (directly) – and those that are interested in taboo breaking we consider adolescent (Tracy Emin) or living in a society that still requires this type of expression (many of the works at the recent Under Construction rightfully fall under this category) -- but are dealing with “the future.” The future is science and the rethinking of what it is to be human. Nietzsche again demonstrated his prescience when he proclaimed that due to the death of god, we would have to make our morality anew. He predicted it would take 200 years before we could work ourselves out.. It will probably take much longer. I digress! Ermm. The problem is how does poetry approach science? The answer lies in how art has approached science. Artist use experiments, though not experiments in form (the visual arts have been there) but in communication and in environment.. What will happen to the viewer if I place this here? Very basically. Poetry now needs to be more conscious of it’s environment and words in the environment.. for a start. If many phonemes have a morphemic quality, sound itself is not just music, but meaning…I am out of time.. Later.

Architectural Body, Autopoiesis, and Language – I’m still trying to think through the review I’m writing of the Architectural Body. By focusing the review so much on poetry and poetics, I’m not entirely addressing the book itself, but on what I see as an extension of the ideas in the book. The problem is that by veering away from the main point, I’m finding myself on uncertain territory that may require me to make some assumptions that may or may not be correct. Here, briefly are the problems: • Gins says very little about language or writing in the book. She says something along the lines of “Those who rely on language alone are leaving out various scales of action’ (this quote is highly inaccurate, actually). The question is, so where or what is language? As I see it, she is drawing on the ideas of Maturana, who sees language as something as part of the environment. Thus, language is “out there” and “in here” as is our environment. Now the question, so what? • Well, if this is the case and we want to write poetry that does critique or effect some kind of change, then the poetry implied, would be a total poetry. A poetry that does not just describe or highlight, but that interacts with other scales of action. An example of this kind of poetry can be found in The Architectural Body when the artists ask us to explore the texture of the book itself. A poetry that stimulates not just a mental action but a physical action.. When avant-garde poets say they are making the reader aware of the process of reading, it seems A/G are saying they actually are making the reader aware of a process of reading.. there are other scales of action! When we read, there are children screaming (at least at my house), my toes scratch against the soles of my shoes, etc. To be aware of these things off the page is to really be aware of the process of reading. Processes are very complex things. • Somehow we’ve come to accept discreet boundaries between experiences. Perhaps this is in part the fault of language (here we are again!). But here I need to expand.. these boundaries are ostensibly useful, but then again they reinforce the idea that our experiences can be isolated. Anyone who has conducted a psychology test can tell you that it is impossible to create flawless conditions that would truly verify the data..ermm.. Now, how proscriptive do I want to be with all this? Not at all. What I want to do is suggest a possible direction..

Consistency and didacticism. I think that I am being slightly too didactic in approach to in working out syncretic arts. I don’t really want to be proscriptive towards any art. Were I to do that, I would become what, in effect, I oppose. I’m going to take this opportunity to list a) what I want syncretic arts to do b) why syncretic arts are necessary c) alternatives to syncretic arts that are still syncretic. List a). I want syncretic arts to: • Erase the boundaries between various art forms as a tactic to repudiate specialization • Operate on a level of flux and continued change • Not be a tradition • Be a mode of communication that is not only concerned with communication, but with investigation unrestricted by genre List b) Syncretic Arts are necessary because: • In a world of increasing specialization, Marx was right in identifying reification and fetishism. Syncretic arts oppose specialization. • They create possibilities for “expression” of which individual arts are not or may not be capable. • Artists and poets would be forced to look for genuinely new vocabularies* List c) Alternatives would be: • Traditional art forms (verse poems/ paintings/ etc) that incorporate ideas from other fields (this has been done quite a lot): i.e. Xenakis, Duchamps, etc *I just added this after reading Ron Silliman’s blog. (www.ronsilliman.blogspot.com). Snoring my way through the same ol’ Freudian terminology makes me mistrust the author. I’d much prefer a physical explanation of the so-called unconscious than this annoying claptrap going on in poetics. This is coming across as intensely personal so let me add some conjecture vis-à-vis the unconscious.. or automatic writing. One of the things mentioned in a post there from Nick Piombino refers to “free association”. Piombino associate this process with the unconscious, he says that free association is a collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious. One problem with this is that, even if we accept this bipartite division, what is to say that the act of becoming conscious isn’t itself a collaboration of the unconscious? Thus, consciousness itself is never fully conscious. So let’s be generous with our interpretation of this and say he means free association is ‘tilted’ towards even murkier realms that are not allowed to be conscious. My point here is that the positing of an unconscious is unnecessary. David Hume talks about contiguity and ?? (can’t remember the other term), and notes that when he goes far away from his home, his impressions of home become less and less distinct, but as he nears home his impressions become stronger and he may even have a sense of nostalgia. The most physical expression of this phenomena is that of electrical or neuron patterns responding to external criteria, thus activating a previously inactive part of his mind. Now why not assume that that which we call unconscious is just that, a reactivation of familiar neural patterns in response to external criteria? Why not assume that language itself is external? This can be made even more complex when we look at a phenomena termed “intentionality”. Basically, this is when we choose what we want to be aware of. It is an organizing principle of consciousness, more or less. The idea assumes, as far as I understand it, that we are aware of much more than we know, it is a matter of our choosing what we want to see hear taste etc. This would mean that much of what is termed the world is unconscious. Etc.. I want to just add here that the explicit project of Madeline Gins and Arakawa can be viewed as extremely useful in regard to this idea. That they want to reconfigure awareness, though a kind of environmental awareness is important. Anyway, I’m out of time. More inanities tomorrow, perhaps.

Combinatorial Arts. By this I mean to suggest when possible a deformation of traditional demarcations or boundaries between the Arts, but also a kind of dialogue that has appeared at various times throughout history, most notably in the early C20th. Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism (Russian & Italian), Vorticism, etc all shared a tendency to allow for “readings” done in one field, say painting, be reinterpreted in another. Certainly in the popular imagination painting and sculpture were the memorable products of these movements. I will be bold and arrogant here and say fuck popular conceptions. A paper on music theory I’m reading at the moment suggests that often the mediocre is often the most memorable.. and popular culture is certainly mediocre. That is not to say that the works appreciated are not good works, actually. I do believe, nonetheless, that popular explanation of the works, which has thus made them comprehensible, has also killed them. To return to the theme, often these dialogic works (I’m reappropriating Bakhtin’s term for wholly other purposes), were still distinguishable as genres. A surrealist poem was recognizable as a poem etc. While I still favor this dialogism, I also favor the type that renders genre impossible. Conceptual artists were highly successful at this, though as far as I am aware they still tried to explain their work in relation to historical precedent. Because they have done that it will always be problematic to look to conceptual artists as predecessors. The Poetry Plastique exhibition held in NY last year seems to contain, save some egregious inclusions like Rob Creely, much of the type of work of which I’m speaking. Still, the question, “so what of poetry?” is nagging me. To answer this, I will answer a the question, why combinatorial arts/poetry? Firstly, for aesthetic reasons. Much as I love John Donne through Roethke, I don’t want to read a 21st century rendition! Another reason is political. Suffice it to say that the nature of capitalism and communism is specialization, and we become specialized to the extent of reification. In this field, look at poets who look at past poets who were also looking back! Mine is a call for poets (primarily, as musicians and artist are less guilty of this than them), to look left and right before they cross the road, instead of over their shoulder. That is look around! If poetry is really a human art, then why are poets simply responding to issues such as cloning with Ethical concerns? Is poetry now just the editorial? Poets, clones will be made, regardless of the amount of ink you pound out of your breast. Even Star Wars offers us an ethic! That is not to say that poetry has to engage only cloning, but that it needs to become playful again with what is going on in other practices, not only the arts or philosophy. Personally, I think that poetry can deal with these issues much more effectively than Science Fiction.. Finally, I want to reject, very flatly (pun intended) the assumptions of language poetry and post-modern linguistic theory, that language makes us. Yes language is important, and the manipulation of it is crucial to the production of good writing, but do we really want to waste our time defamiliarizing it for the purposes of deconstruction and self-reconstruction? Biological bases for cognition are becoming more convincing, poets as well as theorists need to take these seriously or run the risk of no longer being taken seriously. I don’t want to deny the importance of language, that it plays a part in cognition, but that it is not all. So what of poetry?? Well, I don’t see mainstream poetry dying, unless, that is, there is a revolution in education. But for the avant garde, which is the most worldly arena of the arts, there needs to be a let up in specialization. A dialogue might really begin between artists in all disciplines, and the concerns and practice might be carried over to poetry. Today, I don’t see poetry engaging on the same level as the arts. Many arts are takng risks combining forms, sculpture/photography/ etc, with ideas in science, medicine, philosophy etc. One key point here is that the arts have flattened practices to an equivalent plane. They come together to give something of a view or even world view, there is no separate practice. When poets come together to put songs to poems or poems to songs I can’t do anything but cringe. Why not poems that become songs, that become more than poems with music? This is not new.. musicians are still doing this (Paul Lansky).. I’m out of time and steam!