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!

Demos, Bodies, & Marxists. The Demos over the weekend were totally inspiring, aside from the poor show yet again here in Japan. That so many people would pour out into the streets goes to show the intensity of feeling surrounding this war. Unfortunately, not only has the hawkish American administration gone out of control, but the real differential between the needs of individuals and the drive of government lays bare and very few people are willing to exploit it. What I mean is that these governing bodies (or affiliates of, like the UN) have little regard for what people need or want (by their very nature they never could) and act on one hand as symbols of some god-like battle. America vs. France, the UN vs. America, North Korea vs South Korea. On the other hand, the outcome of these squabbles is very real, and actual death, destruction, and domination result from this monotony of political maneuvering. I think the realization of this is for this reason that people were protesting yesterday. Nevertheless, that what we’re watching is a simulation, a façade of experience, is never taken to what to me seems a logical conclusion: a removal of the façade. Part of the reason I believe is that we continue to live under the domination of the symbols themselves and the resulting confusions, e.g America/ Americans/ George Bush, are tantamount to a continual conceptual misrepresentation of geography with identity. It seems that post-modernists would like us to believe that because we, “live under the domination of symbols” that the subversion of these symbols, the subversion of a language that shapes , would be a kind of answer or counter. This idea can be traced back to the Marxist superstructure and the complex rule it places over, ultimately, consciousness. By placing language at the top of the throne, pomo is also building on the “blank-slate” theory, that we are born tabla rasa and can be filled by language, the environment etc. While I am now entering a subject I admittedly know little about, it seems worthwhile to day that biology is also participating in our responses to the world.. language, in my view, being a response. Thus, subversion of symbols is not all, but a subversion of biology, which is now happening in the fields of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, etc. And on this, I am at an impasse. Nothing will stop these fields from developing, aside from, perhaps, a severely devastating war. And these fields can be used in the acquisition of power.. and as we should know by now, you can’t end power, only have it manifested in different structures.

War. From Tokyo the war with Iraq seems much more distant than the threats and actions of North Korea. Nevertheless, I think that most Japanese people are opposed to the war. It is unfortunate that because of the general apathy of the society here, the views of Japanese rarely enter a world stage. What has shocked me, vis-à-vis the debate on the war is this assumption in some quarters that poetry and art are somehow separable from politics. If you don’t believe me, check out this link: http://opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110003029 I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear this from a politician, or my mother, or any of the chattering classes, but a poet! Someone who reads poetry! I guess the question has to be asked to Mr. Kimball, what art actually relates to, if not the world? Is it a self-referential system, concerned with beauty, form, etc? Is it even a form of self-expression? If so which self are you expressing? The one you wake up to? If you look to Mr. Kimball’s magazine site, you may find some of the answers. They are against “mediocrity” (yes, aren’t we all), and “staunch defender[s] of high culture” (cough). Instead of engaging with these problematic terms, I will understand them as someone who wouldn’t find them problematic. High culture must refer to a Canon, the most recent additions being TS Elliot, Ted Hughes (perhaps), John Betjelman, etc. and can be defined in opposition to, I’m guessing, those who haven’t really contributed to a continuity in the “tradition” of art music, and poetry. Thus, he claims this separation by dismissing the political actions of poets who have entered his exalted chamber. Ah yes, the article makes all the more sense. I wonder if he is aware of how unstable his argument is? Moreover, I wonder if he is aware of the irony of a magazine calling itself “New Criterion” that represents nothing but the old? Now, I will return to real mediocrity..

Interesting discussion on the poetics list at the moment about Cubism. The thread began after a query as to whether there was such a thing as Cubist poetry or Cubist poets and transformed into a discussion on a Korean poet/artist Yi Sang who described himself as Cubist. He apparently used mathematics and a shifting perspective of an object in his poems. It was further mentioned that these methods were used to “run systems down into decay and collage” . My reaction to this, thus far has been “ah! Another predecessor!

John Ashbery. After a weekend spent with all I could get my hands on (from anthologies), I know little more than I did before. His poems, at least the more resistive ones, seem to follow themes. The first section of Rain, for example, I read pivoting off of “livid” both color and emotion. His lines are admittedly awesome, very tight collections.. but doing something quite different from Pound wringing lilies from on egg corn. There is often little to wring. This is not a criticism. One aspect of a lot of avant-garde poetry of the last 50 years, with Stein and Dadaists protruding through this conceptual curtain, is this creation of poems that don’t have a center that can be read (i.e. a center of meaning). Rather there is a kind of collage that follows a pun or some other theme (I’m grossly simplifying here). Some find this writing akin to finding shapes in the clouds, and mean this as a form of opprobrium. Of course, this is a totally unacceptable criticism, quite simply because they are not clouds! Jackson McLow once said no matter how hard he tried to take himself out of the piece he was writing, he never could. No matter how aleatoric and random the piece was, he was still “in” it. Now, the argument that these “cloud” poems invite the reader to become part of the process of writing is true, but tired. There can’t be a poet out there who hasn’t heard that one! Poems such as these do also invite the reader to reassess the production of meaning (though this may not be so new either). Anyhow, the point is, the author is there, and the poems should be a creative investigation into communication. Clouds are there as part of the process of nature, these poems are there to invite readers to look at processes themselves. The criticism I do have of this kind of poetry is several-fold. One criticism available for some of poets is that there is an over reliance on centripetal forces (as identified by Voloshinov) in language. That is, dictionaries, thesaurus’, and obviously Standard English (though the last point may reflect more in the way of class and ethnic background of certain writers). Rae Armantrout, and perhaps some of the language school, fails to see language operating dialogically (c.f. the Boston Review). Another is that poets have not yet taken a look to see what is beyond the parameters of their discipline. Poets, following in the trend of whichever stage of capitalism we are in now, may be guilty of specialization, and this, to finish my lunch break should be resisted..

I’m feeling a little stuck today. Yesterdays post was admittedly on the senseless side, really in an attempt for me to test out my ideas. A public space is a wonderful place from which I can evaluate myself. One of my concerns being reflected is my recent preoccupation with the body/ organism and space as producers or co-producers of meaning. There is an underlying desire to fully reject Dualism in all it’s guises, from the obvious statement of the cogito to less obvious as embedded in Benjamin Lee Wharf’s theories of language (i.e. we read the world through language or the world is constructed through language). This latter guise of dualism, that places language outside of the body, is equally as false as Descartes. Why? Quite simply because I assert that all sensation, which is inseparable from the world some wish to place outside of themselves, equates to a process that contributes to thought.. language is dependent on it, and it is dependent on language. Language doesn’t just produce meaning, but is itself a process of being (including body) in the world. Thus the poetry I am trying to envision, is a poetry that in some way involves itself in creating the awareness of this process..That said, my own impulse wants to contradict me. The other concern, I’ll mention briefly is the concern that poetry, and other arts have somehow ceased in dialogue. Rather they have developed a mutual respect as independent of each other, not interdependent on each other..

Last night I decided to pick up John Donne and read Epithalamium for Lincoln’s Inn and, of course, The Flea. It’s sometimes such a relief to go back to the modest calm of the Metaphysicals. In Donne, in particular, you get such a contemporary sounding verse that Gertrude Stein (whose Stanzas in Meditation I’m reading now) makes an even greater amount of linear sense. By that I mean, one could easily trace a continuity that informs reading her and the modern imitators. Unlike much of the “mainstream” poetry, there is a strong “sound sense” in Donne and Stein etc, an internal coherence based in sound. Sound is certainly something generally lacking in this current mainstream, at least in the types I am familiar with..it seems the sonic has given way to occasionally the rhythmic or, in the worst case, the contortedly “meaningful” twist-at-the-end story with haphazard line breaks. At least the confessionalism despised by the UB poetics list (and Language poets), was occasionally artful. To sidetrack for a moment, what, aside from his pasted on surrealism and preoccupation with the Cro-Magnon man, sets Clayton Eschleman apart from a confessionalist? The thing I dislike most about confessionalists is their confessions. It’s a type of arrogance to assume that anyone would find their life/family histories interesting. Mr. Eschleman seems to assume we want to know all about his wife, his life, and the debris he can add to the mix.. But I certainly don’t want to criticize Eschleman too much. His contribution to poetry and the arts is highly commendable and I find it a great loss to literary publications that Sulfur went out of circulation. There has, to return, been a significant current foregrounding sound and the sonic qualities of language over the C20th. To my knowledge, Christian Bok is doing/ has done some of the most exciting work in sound, as sound poetry, at the moment. There seem to be a whole host of others, primarily in Canada (?), too, but, please pardon me if I’m not enough everywhere at once (that is to say, I haven’t looked into it yet). Kevin Hehir has a piece available on UBU Web that points in a futurely direction. The ‘score’ is a garbled MA essay he sent to a friend, presumably shredded by an ISP somewhere. Most of the reading is half-formed words, glottal stops, and any other sort of phonic sounds he could lift from the text. Then at some points there is a reprieve, the text that “made it”; text that adds a putatively ‘false’ center’ to the work as an independent text, but that is in fact from a work with a center (the original text).

Oh! What did I do last night? Drunk on HTML advice from webmonkey, I uttered ideas as inconsistencies. No, I guess not drunk enough since I can still remember… The point I was trying to make I still hold to, viz: the context of the study and production of a lot of poetry will ultimately limit it. Artists, architects, and musicians are often cross-fertilizing and constantly looking at new sources of ‘perspective’. Look, for example, at Xenakis who used mathematical theory usually reserved for stock market traders to compose music. Or Gins & Arakawa who are drawing on all sorts of cognitive and experimental sciences to inform their work. Are “literary” artists doing similar things in a creative way? There are more than enough poets sourcing the Critical Theory cannon, deconstructive poets, post-structuralist poets. Et al. Moreover, the Crit theory jargon is becoming the dominant cant of even the non-academy (I might add that I have no objections to academia). My complaint is not that this makes the poets obscure or meaningless etc But rather that it is compartmentalizing poetry. I’m running out of time. By way of example, Marcel Duchamp, widely known as an artist also took hold of poetic ideas and composed at least one poem that focused on sound. He wrote a poem and with a black marker put lines through words to create duration of sound, thus creating a visual document on top of a (quasi) literary document that entered also into the realm of music and sound as well. This is my favorite example, and you can hear it on Kenneth Goldsmith’s (Kenny G’s) Thanksgiving show. KG also provides a better rendering of the creation of the text. Go to www.wfmu.org The other work I’d like to consider, since I’ve been reading about it recently in that great book by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks. Telling it Slant (avant-garde poetics of the 1990’s), is Tina Darragh. I think the claims being made for her works are far above what the work achieves in any sense of it’s actualization in a book (I’m avoiding calling it finished). adv. fans - the 1968 series, for example, does not really do much in the way of showing connections/ surprising relations between words coined in the 60’s and the other pages in the dictionary, mainly because the dictionary cut outs are more or less incomprehensible. I think it is also false to assert that the coinages tell us much about the reality of 1968.. only if we want to also assert the authority of the dictionary. A dictionary is a collection of dead words, is it not? Thus coinages are words that have left a life behind them…However, and I really owe the work more than this but I’m running out of time, her work also embodies a visual aspect that is more compelling than concrete poetry, for example… If only we could get beyond the visual..

Start with a basic, but charged, question: What is a poet? A poet is someone who writes/ produces/ creates poems, right? Well, I have a whole book (What is a Poet? -ed. Hank Lazer) that is saying "kinda". There is a lot more to it apparently, since Romantics went and soiled the show for our bodies and flattered our egos ever since. But I want to stick to my bowdlerization for the time being to go on and pose the problematic: What is poetry? What is a poem? Aside from the odd fossils that seem to lurk in many (not all) English departments and/or who get serious enjoyment from reading poetry in the New Yorker/ Times Literary Supplement/ etc (unusefully termed "mainstream"), I think there are few who would hold to the idea that poetry is the art of constructing lines that are rhythmic and employ a finite number or literary devices termed "poetic". Much seems to be being said about referentiality right now..the poem should/ should not (please delete as appropriate) have an internal coherence.. or something of the sort. {leave this unfinished} I will admit that I no longer know what a poem is. I have a fairly good idea about what it was. My thinking at this time is that what a poem is can no longer be secured by virtue of it's history because by doing so the poem is entering the dust filled myopic halls of flattery and affirmation (other wise known as back-slapping). In other words, the poem enters a world where its existence is already verified by the previous similitudes of itself..I guess in epistemology this might be called recognition. This is not the only reason, however. The extension of this problem is that by placing the poem in this literary environment, it cuts off from a much grander source (its own source) of the combined arts, sciences, and even (this is uncomfortable for me), business. It is often said that poetry is 20 years behind art.. and, though this is often untrue, why would this idea come about? In my view, from the stilted dialogue that each art, especially literary arts, has come into the habit of not participating in. Well, I'll try to clear up this minefield I've left for myself tomorrow. I'll publish this anyhow, just to see what happens.

Welcome to my second attempt at blogging. There are a few things you should know first about this blog's production, and second, about me. This blog will be written, for the most part, during my lunch break at work, which means that it is unlikely I'll be doing any posting on weekends or Japanese national holidays. It also means that this blog will probably be more whimsical than others (yes, it must be possible). I'm using this blog as a test site for ideas, so I welcome comments, criticism, etc. As for me, the only thing I'd like to point out is that I'm currently living in Japan, partly out of choice (that is, I chose to come here), partly due to absurd immigration laws that are currently preventing my family from entering the United States. Since I came to Japan with the intention of staying a year and have now been here four, I don't have full access to my library. I have a mere 4 small, 3 shelf bookshelves full of books. Verifying references and claims is currently very difficult. What I'm saying is, bear with me. If I get it wrong, let me know!