<div dir="ltr">Alan, I don't know whether Alan is receiving your post. So I am posting his introductory statement in his place. I hope people respond to it. (Murat:<br><br>"I apologize for the delay in posting this, but I have had a lot of trouble figuring out the system.<div><br></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I am probably older than most people in
this group. I first came to computers when I was in my early 40’s and in grad
school in Buffalo. I had spent years working in various industrial situations,
much of the time organizing for what I later came to see as a communist cult
but which at the time was the vehicle for my passion about justice. The
computer was a Kapro and it belonged to the guys who lived downstairs from my
friend, Peter. You had to build those computers from scratch and they looked
like the grown up spawn of an Erector Set. I thought the hype was way
overblown, especially watching one of the guys play slo-mo pong, the lurid
green dot slowly moving back and forth between two moving lines on the black
screen. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">But then they started talking about MIT and
about <i>going there</i> to <i>talk with</i> some people and get some
software. Going there? Talking? It was my first glimpse of the possibility of a
new mode of relation, of coming together in intangible spaces for the purpose
of talking and of being in common. It wasn’t <i>very</i> common then outside small circles of computer pioneers and
pirates. But soon there were Compuserve chat rooms. And then there was
Facebook.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I can’t say <i>Facebook </i>without feeling physically my deep ambivalence. It’s an
enormous echo chamber where your friends endlessly broadcast their political
preferences to other people just like them, as if it mattered, as if repeating their
brand preference over and over was going to make a difference. Meanwhile they
sit at their desks in front of a screen counting their likes.</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">But I have
also had some amazingly complex and important exchanges on Facebook, exchanges
that led to further engagements in, as they say, the flesh. I have met people I
would never have met otherwise, and renewed old relationships that otherwise
would have been lost forever. So as much as the virtual community on Facebook
is a narcissistic echo-chamber, it is simultaneously a place of actual
relation, of being in common that has enriched my life.</span><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I was thinking about that being in common
when, together with Kent Johnson, I launched the web site Dispatches from the
Poetry Wars in April of this year. Kent and I share a commitment to poetry as a
particular mode of knowledge connected to the writing Donald Allen brought
together in <i>The New American Poetry </i>in
1960. That relation to poetry has largely been lost to a poetry “market” that
arose within the neo-liberal counter-revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. Poetry
became divided between various careerist and professionalizing tendencies that
have dominated its writing and distribution in the years since. The
consolidation of a professional avant-garde on the one hand (the “left” hand),
and the rise of the corporate funded and operated Poetry Foundation on the
other (“right” hand), dispersed and dispirited many ordinary communities of
poets that had been empowered in the years after Allen’s anthology was published.
<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Dispatches from the Poetry Wars was
imagined as a popular, anarchist counter punch to those two Offices of the
Administration. Aside from the satirical critique of the MFA/Creative Writing
axis and the Professional Avant-Garde axis, Dispatches is a kind of virtual
pirate utopia or temporary autonomous zone within which a previously unknown or
lost being-in-common is coming together, making itself known to itself. In the
past this would have been done in print publications like Ed Sanders’ <i>Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts</i>, John
Clarke’s <i>intent.: a newsletter of talk,
thinking, and document</i>, Ken Warren’s <i>House
Organ</i>, The Institute of Further Study’s <i>The
Magazine of Further Studies</i>, or numerous other under the radar
publications. The difference is that the space/medium that the computer offers
allows for almost instantaneous connection and communication. Rather than
waiting 3 or 4 months for the next magazine to appear in your mailbox, the
conversation goes on continually in its immediate finitude. Actual arguments
take place in nearly real time. Errors are addressed and dealt with. It is
immediately responsive. </span><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the last week,
beginning with an announcement at Dispatches that went out to 200 poets and was
picked up and reposted to many more, we responded to the Trump disaster with a
call for contributions to an anthology of poetry of resistance to the new
fascist movement. <span class="gmail-aBn" tabindex="0"><span class="gmail-aQJ">Within three days</span></span>, we were inundated with positive responses.
Using the speed of the internet, the editorial group has now expanded to a
broad and diverse group of 10 poets, each of whom has reached out to 10-20 of
their friends. The book now has 200+ contributors lined up. We hope to publish
it as an INITIAL act of resistance shortly after Trump’s inauguration. It is
the sudden crystallization of a latent being-in-common that this tool, this
medium, makes possible. We don’t need a central committee because we have the
internet. <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<span lang="EN-US">That immediacy energizes the being-in-common
in ways that intensify the resistance to the Administration’s professionalized
death formations (see, for instance, The Poetry Foundation website, or The
Great Philadelphia Poetry Warehouse and Media Centre), and creates opportunities
for further proliferation of relation beyond the immediate, not only within the
virtual space, but beyond it in the creation of formations in the rough and
tumble world. The anthology then will become a kind of decentered centre which
will provoke occasions for coming together in the world. At a time when the
Trump Doom looms before us in its authoritarian darkness, such small centres of
life and thinking are what we have to hold on to to keep the light alive and
extend the resistance in more and more networks of being-in-common."</span></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 5:03 PM, Alan Sondheim <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sondheim@panix.com" target="_blank">sondheim@panix.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
<br>
<br>
Hi Michael,<br>
<br>
I didn't receive anything about submitting; is it possible to send this out again or is it already closed? I think there are a lot of people on this list who would be interested.<br>
<br>
Thanks, Alan<br>
<br>
(Footnote - does anyone know why it's impossible to quote from a message sent out? are people using attachments? is there an issue with the software? I'm looking forward to a lively discussion, but technicalities seem to get in the way - for example, I just read a post from Murat, but it disappears when I try to quote parts of it. Thanks -)<br>
<br>
<br>
==<br>
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==<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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