[-empyre-] Starting the Fourth Week: Chris Funkhauser, Sally Silvers and Bruce Andrews

Sun Nov 27 15:14:56 AEDT 2016

Murat & all,

some 'first responders' [more to come, but let's start somewhere]:
*you said *
"I agree with you about the ups and down of the Project. We all heard our
share of boring stuff there. I did doze off occasionally but the place
always seemed to come through. A lot of poets, artists came from different
parts of the States and the world and learned from and collaborated with
each other."

[As much as I appreciated the Poetry Project as a place to get to hear &
meet my peers & poets I'd only known on the page, what you're calling 'ups
and downs' probably are more reflective of changing aesthetics — or,
possibly these days, what identity group commitments are being reflected.
And a lot of that put some distance in my relationship to its central
pushes.

One thing relevant, I think, to talking about 'the digital' [which is our
topic & I'm as guilty as anyone of straying...] is how poets decide what to
present in a live, 'poetry-reading' situation. This has certainly led a
bunch of folks to put on sophisticated, elaborate multi-media performances,
often with off-putting tech troubles — to incorporate digital formats,
audio-visuals, sometimes the kitchen sink, into their (usually) half-hour
presentations. [In recent years, I've heard many — especially younger —
poets talk about how boring a straight, unadorned reading is, compared with
the additions of singing, video, photo slides, live musicians or
soundtracks:  very possibly as we shift into the 21st century digital
'screen' world].  For me, moving to NYC forty years ago [coming from grad
school in Massachusetts, where there were basically no readings up my alley
— oh, I remember one fabulous exception:  Bob Grenier reading with Larry
Eigner — & my having given only one or two public readings of my own work],
meant figuring out *what* work that I'd written would work best in that
situation (having for the previous half dozen years only evaluated &
quibbled over & sorted my work based on reading it on the page):  so,
checking out audience reactions to various kinds of writing & seeing what
tended to get enthusiastically responded to [parallel? musicians, moving
from bedroom to the stage, from recording to live occasion]. This is still
a keen interest of mine when it comes to making music/sound for dance
performances — seeing, in other people's dance/music collaborations, what
seems to work or not. Anyhow, not only did I start to figure out what
poetry of mine might function well in a live environment, it started (&
continues) to affect the sort of writing I'm likely to do — I'm much more
prone to foreground the *sound* of the language & the sonic tone of the
rhetoric & address than I was in the early 1970s; also, I got much more
interested in not only discursive/social materials to 'deploy' in the
writing, but also to move away from an intense focus on individual words &
word clusters, to allow for more elaborate phrasing & 'speakable' material
— something that also tended to allow for a more
politicized/socially-revved up kind of work, but still with my usual
fascination with disjunctive/disruptive/abnormal language].

*you also said*:

"What the Project has been doing is what the Web is doing now. I have had
long term collaborations with artists over the years whom I have never met.
That is the huge positive of the digital world."

[Like I said, my aesthetic preoccupations were shared in the '70s by a raft
of poets, the ones in my baby-boomer age group being the most accessible —
& here I'm talking ye olde postal delivery:

most of the so-called 'Language Poets' only knew each other through the
mail, so one key was getting mailing addresses for people: which led to an
interesting focus on magazine editors or publishers. Starting out as a poet
at the beginning of the '70s, with pretty definite notions of what was
what, that meant not having to rely on the dominant notion of what was
happening in whatever local 'scene' was in my area. Luckily. Because I
could get their addresses, it led me to correspondence with editors like
Jonathan Williams, Dick Higgins, Jerry Rothenberg (Jerry was key: he put me
in touch with Ron Silliman, in 1971, which jumpstarted what was the first
extended correspondance of our 'language centered writing' world). (This
didn't really change until later in the 1970s, when a small handful of
poets of similar aesthetics began to cohere in NY & in the Bay Area.)

 [And that 'non-localized' or 'un-scene' situation was what Charles
(Bernstein) & I always had in mind when we started, in NYC in 1977-78, to
plan out a journal dealing with poetics, that wouldn't be local/limited in
that way — L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.]

The Web, as you helpfully note, is the current rendition of just this
exciting possibility — & again, it's not so dependent on whatever local
'scene' (or, possibly more fraught, local 'creative writing workshop' value
system) is agreeing on or championing or excluding. So, especially as a
place for collaboration, it has real utopian possibilities. And when it
comes to writers with very primitive tech skills [& this has been true with
all my ventures into sound making], it allows for collaborations that can
bring folks like me into conversation with simpatico people far distant
spatially (& thus, not just having to rely on whatever is 'close at hand'
in the neighborhood).

But I'm still wondering about what type of work it overvalues or
undervalues.

And I'm still wondering about issues of access, recognition, publicity,
career, canon-formation, etc.

[didn't get to this]:
On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 1:12 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> "We did want to focus attention on language itself as the medium, but I'm
> not ready to embrace some of your characterization:  words & letters are
> not non-referential, but we liked to organize them in other ways beside
> what they were pointing to (which was too often, for us, the author's
> personalizing experience or expressiveness or traditional lyric
> expectations). We tended to want the readers' experience at the center —
> which cuts against some of this binary of yours about the sensual,
> movement-based vs. logical aspects of language"
>
> Bruce, when you say "We tended to want the readers' experience at the
> center," are you saying anything different than saying "I want the text at
> the center," the reader reading the text? The question interests me because
> in my essay The Peripheral Space of Photography, I assert that what is
> important in a photograph is not the photographer's focus (framing), but
> what escapes that framing. The real dialogue occurs between the watcher
> of the photograph and what is in front of the lens (human or a landscape,
> etc.). If, as I think you are to saying, it is the reader (and not purely
> the text), then even the "reveries" the reader builds around the text
> reading it become part of it. Is that not so?
>
> "Logical" was an unfortunate choice of words, on my part. I am more
> interested in the distinction between predicated idea (therefore fixed) and
> thought as process (therefore movement). One can have thought and/in
> movement (that's what Eda is). In that way, thought is sensual.
>
> "So if there's an "exchange" it's a mutual bending (which might be way
> too mutually disruptive to warrant being called a "synthesis"). Maybe
> that's more like the relationship between a 'dialect' & an 'official'
> language — [and by the way, doesn't "the dialectic" typically end up in a
> synthesis]?
>
> Yes, mutually bending and disruptive, not a synthesis. That's what a true,
> transforming translation does, bends, alters both languages, discovers
> potentialities in them. Walter Benjamin does see a synthesis in the process
> when he writes that in a translation "A" does not move to "B" but both move
> to a third place "C ," which he calls "ideal language." Some people
> believe Benjamin was being a "poet" (poet in the pejorative sense) here.
> "Ideal language" is a mystical fantasy. I am not one of them.  I believe it
> is part of the core of his very original concept of translation.
>
> "... doesn't "the dialectic" typically end up in a synthesis]?"
>
> Not necessarily. I believe in an art or poetry of continuous dialectic.
> The Talmud, where the interpretations of  a holy passage are never resolved
> and remain always multiple, is such a text.
>
> To be continued (inviting others to join).
>
> Ciao,
> Murat
>
>
>
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