Re-Po Notes : NYC 6/11 – 6/13 2010
** Note: I've inserted my own thoughts, responses,
comments, alongside words from panelists
and 'participants' without differentiation.
Bob Perelman / Michael Golston
- Omnicognition
- 56ths of a second in brain before gestalt
________________________________________
Panel #1 : Poetic Composition: Tools and Materials
Erica Hunt
- before then, that’s the time for writing
- want/need more documented risks
- assume the mind is shapely
Jen Scappettone
- perforated poetic form / field
- infrastructure of tragedy, etc.
- what has infrastructure
- choral space / chorus: public
/ delusional space (Robertson)
- ambient citizenship
- I need my own
poetic vocabulary
- enormity in particulate
- pucker the realist page
Brent Edwards
- practice of outside
- music / sound
translation
across mediums
- raw / cooked
raw / spoiled
- the shell of form
- proliferation of parallels
“- poetic innovation -”
- speech melody / tonal / sentence has music, music has sentence, song
Charles Bernstein
- concretion – from Brent Edwards
- poetic concretion
- ontology of pluralism
- “could also be otherwise”
- human is a crisis – what would be the poetics of this?
- poetics of crisis
- Scappettone – “bruise and channel its invisibility”
- not make invisible visible
(“bruise” or “peruse,” oddly, they sound close)
- advocate mental fright
- pataqueerical – adverse poetics
- re-group/re-sort
- poetics of adversity
- vocabulary: charm, derangement, swerve, artifice, estrangement, zaum, homophonic, etc
- poetry groups necessary but simultaneously problematic
- hybrid / lowbrid
- pataqueerical terminology: odd, weird, curious, strange, funny, oblique, off-key
Discussion
- many minds, one world: ontological pluralism
- but isn’t this always the case, necessarily? why bring it up?
- it is the case, whether we want it to be or not
- patacriticism
- is poetics a limiting frame?
- it depends on what one means by “poetics” and “frame” -
B.W:
- are we rethinking poetics?
- what does rethinking poetics mean?
- what is rethinking?
C.B:
- pataqueero-normative
- invention over innovation
- invention always going to be inadequate to someone else
- (but so will innovation, be inadequate)
- poetry as response to inadequacy
- rhapsody of bruising
- place of poetics in public
poetic / rhapsodic
- create and
share sparks
- clinamen / swerve
- collision - maybe creates spark
- innovation / transformation
- in our words and how
we use them
J. Scappettone:
- place disturbing words inside the bodies of people who are performing in public
- the inhuman - ? - does this mean some kind of Other?
J.R:
- nitty-gritty poetics
- “puncturing the page” - more?
- infrastructural page
revision / puncture
feeds streamed
into poetic page / field / space
- opening selves up to an
other that’s not premeditated : puncturing the page?
- collectivity / collaboration
R.B. DuPlessis:
- 3 things
1 - looking for verbs
- hearing nouns and adjectives
2 - choral crowds
- genres of possibility
- on an individual level
3 - ways to intervene
- spark -
- The archive - rethinking
- activating the archive
- is it still an archive if it’s
been activated?
- what’s the difference between data / data stream and an activated archive?
B.E:
- rhapsodizing is necessary
- sparks - not fire
- small can be important
- pleasure: not to be dismissed -
- sparks : glint / glimmer
- what is this “archive” thing everyone’s into?
- temporality - present is immediately archived
- structure for thinking through disaster
- from the past
- what about re-acting poetics
- action -
- thinking and rethinking is all well and good, but useless without action
________________________________________
Panel #2 : History / Tradition / Relation
Liz Willis: Intro
Ben Friedlander
- the archive again
- tradition / anti-tradition
- doesn’t like tradition, feels obligated
- not my kind of tradition
- if we rethink tradition
it can become what we
want it to – useful
- relation to the past
Tanya Foster
- contingency
- Reggie Watts - comedian -
- scatting as stand in for forgetting
(tradition)
- refuse lineage that confers legitimacy
- individual interpretation rather than tradition
: what is inside language?
- everything is not language
- is outside language
- how to approach what one does not know
- form is occurrence: Retallack on Scalapino
K. Silem Mohammad
- critical tradition of poetics
- what are we rethinking?
- historical modes of criticism
Abrams / Jakobson
1. mimetic / referential : representational
2. pragmatic / connotative : 2nd person imperatives
3. expressive / emotive : 1st person utterance
4. objective / (poetic?) : emphasis on work itself [this pair is no good]
5. metalingual
6. phatic function
- state of contemporary poetic criticism
fatic - stuttering,
stalling, filling
- do we want a coherent poetics? :
that just means it sticks together
- coherence and development
are not necessarily tied
Liz Willis
- tradition
- action of handing over
- transfer / transmit
- poets as tradition mongers
- relation : puissant
trans
trans
trans
- but a counter tradition is simply a tradition
- poetry and non-fiction
- all you can do is suddenly listen
Discussion
- who is the “we” of tradition? :
B. Friedlander
- excrementalized -
- we are “talking shit”
- a new act of creation
- ok but what’s an old act of creation?
- how close is the phatic to the semiotic
- live in the discomfort / don’t make it comfortable
-
Perloff: review on Cage, Perf. of Cage work
in NYTimes: nonsensical ravings of an old man
B. Perelman:
- tradition & innovation is one and the same
- memory as basis of language
B.W:
- Flarf - poetics - metalinguistic, phatic
- but isn’t flarf just an updated “cut-up”?
- opposition to tradition actually preserves it
- it is tradition to keep opposing tradition
- spaces where metalingual and phatic
touch & overlap - rethinking poetics -
: yes - that’s the lyric and the lang Po joining forces
- a scanned text is not culture
- you can’t make culture available - you can make
texts available
- what is “our” poetics
- the estrangement model
- model for what?
- but then it becomes not estrangement
if we get used to it,
- if we expect it.
________________________________________
Lunch Break #1
- if we are rethinking poetics, are we rethinking all poetics? Just “ours”? Are we in search of a possible future poetics? For who? For us? Who’s us?
- to put poetics in the public world / may do no more than putting poetry in public, and what do we mean by public? People who don’t already think about these things? Is the conference public? Is it the non-poets? Is it outside academia?
- important to remember that counter-tradition is very much a tradition
- Mainstream and A.G. are no longer in opposition, they are dimply different types, kinds of, genres of, poetry
- I want us to be particularly critical of our own criticism and what it is we are doing here. Do we really want to be so narcissistic as to only consider “our” poetics? What are the drawbacks to collectivity? Is it inclusive or exclusive?
- what about all the poetics that are not practiced by people in this room?
- if we rethink poetics, what does that mean for our actions, for out writing of poems? Is there a difference / what is the difference between poetics and poetry?
- it’s not about thinking ourselves out of poetics to some other field or career, but of thinking a poetics that is more complete, and by complete, I mean complex, indeterminate, uncertain, changing, ranging, and not pin-downable.
________________________________________
Panel #3 : Globalism and Hybridity
Barrett Watten
- radical particularity
- grid of difference grasses planted in front of building
unused and unfunctional
- critical regionism
- sites of the a.g.
- Horizon of language: spaceless space
- lang. itself is a spaceless space
- discrepant forms of a.g.
- radical particularity & critical regionism
- emerging new genres
- poetics as genre : not-poetry, not-language (linguistics)
Genre trumps form
Global / not-global
Poetry / not-poetry
poetics / not-poetics
- production of differential global poetics
Monica de la Torre
- 1: Rehearser
- 2:
- 3:
I already forget the other two. Damn.
Josh Clover
- complain about, oh I mean rethink
- what do we lose with nuances
- “the attack of being ignored”
- antagonism, foundational / oppositions / binaries
fundamental
- 3rd wave poetics? (what, like 3rd wave feminism?)
Astrid Lorange
- one thinks and thinks again
- & Stein - not re-thinking
- contact zones
Discussion
- antagonism - undoes me
- not just negative,
but detotalizing
- can hybridity have an essential character?
- art’s impossibility to deal with complex
otherness:
as meaning of hybridity
(not for me)
- art can deal with anything and everything,
it’s the artist/writer that may not be able to deal with
complex otherness
- OR
- any language us could be hybridity if it now means multiple
- antagonism and nuance
- wants to guard against the disappearance
of antagonism through nuance (Clover)
- editor of Fence calls Josh Clover “Fuck Face”
- antagonisms as productive
- productive of new forms
________________________________________
Panel #4 : Social Location / Ethics
Rodrigo Toscano
- re-imagined self
- de-imagined world
- strings of failed “now”
- presence cant actually sink to the background
- I guess it can theoretically, or mentally, but
not actually
- Art as revolutionary ghost work
Jena Osman via Juliana Spahr
- biological models for poetry / writing
- connects with Retallack
- echo poetics
Joan Retallack
- took “rethinking seriously
- what are the places of poetry / poetries
in the conversations of human kind?
1. a) report of system failure
- values poei-diversity as much as
bio-diversity
- “I’m an essayist not a critic” *
- what about poetics demands continuity
demands return
- poetry as a form of courage
- doing something one is frightened of
ethically neutral
- do what I THINK needs to be done
- ethos of poetry resembles ethos of poet
- ones choices can’t be about being afraid
- Lyn Stewart - lawyer who got in trouble
- it is important to remember the archive
is “us” : us as dangerous, problematic
- poetics of courage: reciprocal alterity
performative and
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
- the ofness / betweeness
ethics of “of”
- writing is political by nature of nature of politics
and writing
- helix -
dialectic connection
swirl
- intelligent and sometimes enraged -
- we don’t have enough pronouns to cover
how we are going to evolve
how the I is
pushed
- subjectivity, soul,
plurality, sociality
- we don’t have enough pronouns for what we need
- what about prepositions
- recognition of the other
- pay more attention to between (both both)
- secular structure of feeling
- no taboo writing practices
Discussion
J.R:
- concern that antagonism becomes what
drives what we do
- antagonism has been the default
- be different, and argue, but without
antagonism: leads to defense and attack
- radical (roots) is not the same as innovative (new)
________________________________________
Panel #5 : Poetics and the Academy
(missed this one; needed sleep)
________________________________________
Panel #6 : Ecologies of Poetry
Andrew Schelling
- bio-regional
bioversity
- archive / vault
: conserve past for sake of future
- a seed as an archive
- acorn as archive of oak tree -
* go back to P.L.W. Ploughing the Clouds
- soma connection w/ poetry as
divine word
- ecology - logic of home
Jonathan Skinner
- critical edges
- journal / Ecopoetics as site not journal
- Mary Oliver -- Bruce Andrews
[saw flier on light on bdwy for
volunteers for an "experiment
on memory"]
- eco-location - poems of place
- Marcella Durand - oil investigation
- poetry animals
- return to amateurism
Sherwin Bitsui
- interconnectedness
- indigenous poetics
ethno
eco
- eco-tone
- dust cloud with bits of rain / confused / and
land in process of moving
- Navajo poetics, prayer, ceremonial
- relationship between person and nature
- I stand in nature, nature stands in me
- Navajo though - language is already imbued
with sacredness
- poetics tied to coming into existence
Susan Howe
- the older she gets the more astounding
E. Dickinson is to her
- in NYC Dickinson’s garden was constructed
- rdgs. there in connection
- no doctorate, no college
(biggest mistake)
- landscapes change, shift
* -
but words too
- language landscape
- Duncan’s “field”
- S. Howe, child, in Zoo in Buffalo, Polar Bears
acting crazy, dad said they know something
bad is happening - happened to be the day
of Pearl Harbour bombing
- return to a meadow
- return phone calls from a meadow
- Spiral Jetty as poem
Discussion
B.W:
- “Genre trumps form” - commenting on
this - was misheard
- positive content / not-me / identity
non-identity
- poetics change as rhythms of body change
- metabolism affecting ability to memorize
- body as primary site
“I am a wet land”
- A. Lingis - writings on the body, on bodies
- CA Conrad: soma poetics
: somatics
- attend to what we can’t say, won’t say
won’t write
- Robin not writing after 9/11
- certain experiences
- materiality of language / of words
- Navajo language full of verbs
- always in motion
_______________________________________
Panel #7 : “Poetics” as a Category
Craig Dworkin
- Category of poetry
: or poetics
- language operating in financial loss
- “that’s not poetry”
- response of a.g. itself: what is poetry
K. Goldsmith, Vanessa Place
Alan Golding
- look up poetics in OED
- think about possible future for poetics
- pedagogy as site of possible culture
- David Antin: Avant-Garde - look up
- ask Alan
- thought as music
- collaborative reader / reading
- poetry and theory, or poetics
- Spring and All - poet/critic
- legitimacy of poetry - are we still arguing
about this? -
Matthew Hofer
- spareness in America
- problem of it
- is poetry being reduced to function?
- microtonal organizations
Marjorie Perloff
- Poetry
-public reception of poetry
- V. Place: Statement of Fact:
- court testaments
- hard to publish books - but will be published
by a small pres - Perloff was asked to blurb
book
- is it poetry?
- is it poetic?
Conceptual fiction
____”____writer - choice
____“____ poetry
- what’s so great about being poet?
- K. Goldsmith’s
Traffic is poetry
- what McCaffery said about nominalism being
the new/contemporary a.g.
- poetic / poeisis
- conceptual poetry anthology published later
this year by North Western.
- “flarf wants to put poetry out of its misery” - V. Place
Discussion
Perelman:
- on a.g. - yes, and the urinal as both old
hat and shocking depending on
exposure
- talk more w/ Perelman on a.g.
- poetry as read - Perloff
- Ma’s book
- purpose is important / and/or intent
(is intent & purpose synonymous)
Rachel B.D.P:
- poetry - not anything said so far
- chosen segmentivity / rhythm, meter,
rhyme
- selection
- rhythmic segmentivity
_______________________________________
Panel #8 : Affective Economies and Prosodies
Rachel Zolf
- affective economies
Chris Nealon
- role of affect in/on queer theory
in the 90s
- feelings around queer theory not
the feelings within queer theory
- body as rhetorical - Butler
- rhetorically rather than linguistics / language
- utterances that change structures
- humanity as possibility of being tender
Jeff Derksen
- structure of feeling: R. Williams
& affect
- living through structures
- no internal crisis in poetry
- the affective risk
- sincerity poetics
McCaffery essay - poetics of sincerity
- crit. neo-liberalism?
- rethinking poetics =
rethinking relations
sincerity
as a kind
of software
Rachel Zolf
- witness
- subject
Agamben
Homo Sacer speech
- catastrophe
- mad affects
Lisa Robertson
- Henri Meschonnic : Benveniste-teacher
- idea of rhyme as social force
- rhythm & meter not the same for him
- erasure of rhythm in translations of old testament
- rhythm is a subject shape
renovates meanings of things
shape of/in history
- poem as moment of listening
- the archive ethic that is this ... ?
- reject poetry to talk about the poem
- moves language
constitutes subjects - what poems do
- what does this do to poetics? is it one?
poetic / poem
- poem is the critique of sign
- subjectivity can keep on making
- poem
that form of life that
turns language into everything
(or everything into language)
- affect / concept
no differentiation, for Meschonnic
- poetry as work of poem
not of institution
- ethics : poetics
________________________________________
Panel #9 : The End of Authentic Time
Lytle Shaw
- lack of familiarity
no one knows what’s really happening
- reading of new American Poetry temporally
- very contemporary poetics
- microtemporality
- philosophies of time
- chairos,
or kairos
- Eigner
- phenomenological immediacy
- a new kind of temporality that stands
against great big monumental time / history
-- minute elapse of time
Paul Stephens
- authentic time - is it possible?
- lived time, duration
- time, sprawl - urban sprawl, linguistic sprawl,
temporal sprawl
- a moment extended
- in one perspective
this is impossible: an extended moment
simply becomes another moment
- literary criticism -- book keeping
- Book - Adjunct
- Adjunct travesty generator
- Adjunct time
- Zeno time
- Zeno text - C. Bök
Rob Fitterman
- why I can’t look out the window and
write a poem about what I see
- I can’t look out the poem and write
a window about what I see
[I want to look out of a poem]
- I can not look out the window and write
a poem about what I see because
there are squirrels mating on the
tree behind Rob Fitterman
John Melillo
- temporality / poetry
sound
- writing as 1st phonograph
- radical mimesis :is this a way to describe
conceptual writing?
Lytle Shaw
- work of writers
time to write
- annihilated time: ability to shape time by
our own desires
- how does this connect to
the archive - does the archive speed up
or slow down time?
- how does this all connect to Agamben’s history in terms of language - and that the split of
infancy and language is what makes history possible
- the connection between time / temporality and the then existence of language, the use of
language
- unbinding measure / meter
- other history of poetry
- Authentic / Author
Authorial time
- Monumentality / monument : time remembered
Discussion
B.W:
- cultural production /
/ regional cultures
- service industry
- assembly line
- slow time
- surface economy
- poets working in offices - temporality
- then also
space
- production / service
produce service
service production
- is there really anything essential in terms of poetics? - maybe if there is, it would be useless as
some essential aspect of the human
- there is some idea of poetics that is
happening here that is troubling to me
- like it’s turning into some kind of
stuck philosophy - but again ...
whose, what poetics are we rethinking
- duration
- Deleuze, Bergson -
- flow, duration, object
- poetics seems to be becoming the
philosophy of poets - it’s so weird - but I
want to keep the possibility of this trouble
being generative open.
- landscape of temporality
space of time
R. F:
- reading, readership, challenge reading / readers
- is regionalism becoming a fetish - due to
the technology that allows globalism?
- temporality : agency of.
R.F:
- V. Place - the project
(sex abuse court transcripts) is not
about content - Spahr - content is
very important
- working through
- context / attitude
- content, context - ah, the frame
- I have a strange desire to create
lyric flarf
- conceptualism
- proliferation - yes
authentic a.g.
- we need to be careful, I want us to be careful, about proliferation to the point of total dispersion
and dilution, in opposition to sharp discrimination that separates and essentializes to the point
of alienation
________________________________________
Panel #10 : Reading Radicalism: A Conversation Across the Disciplines
Bruce Andrews
- reader coming to grips with radicalism
- patience / impatience
Jeff Nealon
- job given to poetics by post-structuralism
- worlds structured like language if nothing
is outside language
- historical newness
- jack-hammer - ag writing
of fragmentation
- fragmentation put as binary with totalization
- I’m not sure I agree that’s a binary
- new tools for engagement / agency
- Contemporary AG - around reading
Jim Livingston
- revolutionary - what about evolution
- radicalism confused with revolution
- but radical is the roots - if radicals deny the
past, there are no roots for the radicals
which then makes them not radical
- “Marxoid”
Richard Doyle
- experience of being alive moving out of fashion
- history of psychedelic science
- “this is your brain on plants”
- rhetoric of psychedelic experience
- T. Leary / Ginsburg / Burroughs
- poetry was called forth as articulation
of psychedelic experiences
- ecodelic
- manifestation of eco-systems in which we
live
- attention gathering technology
- plant kingdom as inventor of poetry
- the nosphere
say yes to the nosphere
Bruce Andrews
- art and science of making poetry
- presupposed reader
- miss out on differentiation
- innovation vs. transformation
- reader - repo / session
- incompletely intimate
- poetics of reading
Discussion
- periodizing
- rethinking
- immersion / interruption
- I don’t think there’s any outside
- so resistance is already everywhere
- consumption as way to end capitalism
- consumption as healthy for soul
- psychedelic on panel
distinction between
Pynchon - paranoid
& Burroughs - more “whole”
- cut-up invented through
psychedelic experiences
- poetry as forms of research
