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

Tue Nov 29 11:04:18 AEDT 2016

Craig, thanks for this.

Really feeing that life on the web is recreating some of the 'distance'
features of the scattered poets' life in the 70s: where you didn't have to
choose between a local scene (with its shared & often narrow aesthetic
assumptions, groupthink, life style-centeredness — often fondly recalled by
insiders as 'community' & 'warmth') & isolation; now, if you already have a
sense of who & what you're interested in, you can find a network out there
to tap into — whether mail or, now, email & listserves & blog comments,
etc. I remember being invited down to New Orleans to read by Camille
Martin, who was corresponding with a clutch of (mostly women) avantish
poets around the country & abroad, but was frustrated by a (mostly male) &
less avantish local scene [dominated by something similar to the Poetry
Project's mix of New American Poetry, a generation or so younger than the
pioneers in the Don Allen anthology]; she started a small non-profit
literary society that could apply for grants to bring poets in from out of
town, more reminiscent of the work of the people she was corresponding
with. Again, the issue of relying on an 'at hand' already constituted local
scene or community, vs. reaching out to a farflung network of (usually)
strangers. [Some of this is probably affected (or I could say, infected) by
the dynamics of college-based Creative Writing Workshops & the tendency for
graduates to stay close to where they graduated & trying to create a
smaller but maybe even more narrowly focussed scene or community.]

On the 3 editors you mention: I didn't get much sense of a
close-knittedness between Williams, Higgins & Rothenberg, but the first 2
had presses & I was very impressed with what they were publishing (&
gratified that they responded very positively to work that I sent along to
them: both Jonathan & Dick expressed a similar thought — that they might
like to consider doing a small book of mine, but that I hadn't built up
enough of a reputation [in the magazine world] to allow for the sort of
name recognition that'd keep the book from just sitting in boxes. I was
sending them work at the very start of my efforts to track down magazines
that'd be interested in what I was doing. [Jonathan Williams, who I only
met years later — true for the other 2 as well — was also a completely
captivating & charming letter writer, so that encouraged me to up my game
in response]. Rothenberg, as I said, was doing a magazine of ethnopoetics (
*Alcheringa*, with the recently deceased & dearly missed Dennis Tedlock)
that I sent work to; because he was pretty much only doing translations
there, he put me in touch with Ron Silliman — who had just started
*Tottel's* & turned out to be nearly exactly on my poetic wavelength, which
began 45 years (!) years of close contact & collaboration; again, Ron & I
didn't meet for 6 or 7 years.

I never saw Bern Porter's magazine, but had seen his books a few years
after I started writing:  I was in school in Cambridge, Mass. & made a few
trips to NYC where you could find such things in the early 70s — as was
true of perhaps the most radical poetry (etc.) journal of the time,
*0-9 *[which
James Hoff put out a wonderful collected edition of — they had just stopped
publishing when I got around to sending them work. But re Bern P.: I was
asked by Michael Wiater to guest edit an issue of his magazine, *Toothpick,
Lisbon & the Orcas Islands* — quite a title — & I wrote to dozens of people
in 1973, none of whom I'd ever met, assembling their addresses by asking
editors [Richard Kostelanetz, at the time, was a virtual Rolodex of contact
information] & then writing them, saying I'd like to see an extremely large
amount of material which I'd make decisions on very quickly & send the rest
back. Bern Porter sent me a BOX of about 300 separate pages/pieces that I
selected a couple from. Wonderful generosity of spirit was close to a norm
in those days, again all in the mail. As for Gertrude Stein, I was lucky
enough to have access to the Johns Hopkins library (while I was getting a
Masters degree), which had the multi-volume Yale edition including her
early & most radical work, within a year after I started writing, in 1969,
so the Something Else Press attention was a welcome treat. [I'd probably
say that a consensus among my peer 'language-centered writers' of the
70s/80s, Stein was the key writer of the 20th century — something that's
not a consensus in any other group of poets]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 7:48 AM, Craig Saper <csaper at umbc.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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>
> 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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