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

Wed Nov 30 03:07:41 AEDT 2016

"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...."

Hi Bruce,

A poetry community does not mean that poets in it have to agree with each
other or subscribe to the same aesthetic principles or poetics. In fact,
disagreements (or even personals jealousies, etc.) have always been an
essential part of a vibrant poetry community. Take, for instance,
California/Berkeley you are referring to. Duncan and Spicer ended up
violently disagreeing with each each though earlier they were friends.
Spicer's In his Vancouver lectures, in my opinion, one of the most
important exchanges in modern American poetry, Spicer defends his "writing
against the grain" poetics for three days in front of an audience of poets
who did not understand him or disagreed with him.

You say, "... with its shared & often narrow aesthetic assumptions,
groupthink, life style-centeredness — often fondly recalled by insiders as
'community' & 'warmth') & isolation" somewhat contemptuously, implying that
the idea of community is basically a sentimental, romantic one, much
inferior to a cleaner, cerebral, non=personal relationship long distance
through letters or e-mail with people one never met. I do not not why one
way should disqualify the other in a binary either/or situation, or why
looking for people whose poetics is more simpatico long distance is somehow
superior to the other.

I can not speak for the 70's because I was not in the Project community
then. But, in the 80's, the Project did not correspond to what you are
describing. The Project consistently invited poets from outside New York
and from different poetry schools or styles to give readings or participate
in panel discussions and they did. Unlike the way you describe yourself as
a total outsider, Bruce, you were very much part of the Project community
during those years. Not only you, poets who became later known as Language
Poets also were also part of it. You gave readings there. Not only you and
I, the closing panel  that discussed from different perspectives the
Revolutionary Poetry Symposium also included Carla Harryman. Charles
Bernstein and Ullo Dydo (the Gertrune Stein scholar who wrote the
definitive book on Stanzas in Meditation) were in the audience. I can go on.

Bruce, the idea that you or other "future" Language Schools poets were
outsiders in the Project is not born by facts. You were very much part of
it. There were other groups (e.g. New York School poets) that were more in
tune with the popular ethos at the time. But, by no means, were you
suppressed or ignored. You expressed your view and read your work in venues
there, among other places.

In taste, I was also a complete outsider when I came to the Project. My
sensibility as a poet has been originally stamped by factors outside and
different from the American experience. In my essay Questions of Accent I
talk about it a great deal. For some reasons, my work at the time appealed
to the audience in the Project. It was not because I had come to the place
because my work was similar or in tune with the kind of work done there. As
I I wrote before, it was random. When my work changed, I became less
popular. But I still went to reading to see what was happening in the
poetry world. I was invited to read when I wrote a new work.

On the other hand, I acknowledge a blind spot in the Project's openness.
Almost never does it invite multi-media, particularly digital orientated
poets to read there. Chris Funkhouser  has told his own exclusion there.
Multiple times, I suggested to the program directors that they should
invite Alan Sondheim for a reading, that it was amazing that it never did.
My plea fell on deaf ears.

I also agree that ever since the identity centered poetics, the Project has
become less welcoming to views outside that poetics. That is a great pity
and loss. To some extent it reflects our time.

Ciao,
Murat

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 8:42 PM, Macon Reed <swapmeetproject at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Are my emails getting through? How do I unsubscribe?
>
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 7:04 PM, Bruce Andrews <andrews at fordham.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> empyre forum
>>>>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> empyre forum
>>>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> empyre forum
>>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> 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/20161129/800d531a/attachment-0001.html>