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

Wed Nov 30 10:27:29 AEDT 2016

I hope somebody can help Macon Reed with this!

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

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> 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:
>
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>>
>> 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:
>>
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>>> 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:
>>>
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>>> 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:
>>>
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>>>>
>>>> "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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>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>>>
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