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

Sun Nov 27 23:48:41 AEDT 2016

Bruce

You wrote, "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. …  like Jonathan Williams, Dick Higgins, Jerry Rothenberg …”

Can you say more about this poetry-of-publishing with at least these three key figures?
Also, … 
What role did Bern Porter’s Berkeley magazine play — or had it folded by the time the East Bay poetry scene was flourishing?
Were you introduced to Gertrude Stein or any of the European avant-garde through Something Else Press? Or, was Higgins picking-up on the interests of a group of poets in deciding to publish?
Was there ever a synergy among these publishers? Did they talk about their role in the networked and poetry scene?
Did Jonathan Williams’ Jargon grow from, or encourage, the assembling of poets and artists spread geographically around the US in a loose network? 

Obviously — much more to ask — thanks … 

Craig

On Nov 26, 2016, at 11:14 PM, Bruce Andrews <andrews at fordham.edu> wrote:

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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 <mailto: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

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20161127/f9c68eb4/attachment.html>