In Place of Chairs

Reissue

2009-07-06T13:24:00.003-04:00

I'm happy to report that Greying Ghost has reissued Naturalistless. As you can see, Carl's redesign is as gorgeous as the first edition. Copies are available here.

One Pink Bomb

2009-06-24T15:29:00.004-04:00

Deleuze & Guattari once suggested that literature should explode. In their guide to living a non-fascist life, they write: "The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form and content." I received my contributor's copy of Tight 5 about an hour ago and, I've got to say, this issue went kaboom in my hands. Of particular note is the featured sequence of poems by John Coletti, Me & My Falcon. Talk about an explosive device. Find a copy here.

Rime Rhymes With Expensive

2009-06-20T16:20:00.002-04:00

When I heard the news that The Arion Press had released Robert Duncan's The Structure of Rime, which collects a series of prose poems on prosody written by Duncan over the course of his life and never previously collected, I was excited. Then, I found the price-tag: $1,350.

The work is rare. But, although the book includes an introduction by Michael Palmer and prints by Frank Lobdell, Ducan himself couldn't afford this collection! In fact, I can't think of any poet who can afford such an edition.

1968

2009-06-14T17:08:00.004-04:00

Voice: Right. Well, in a sense it's not even relevant to discuss as poetry. Are you--in other words, the question I have is, are you and Creeley and Duncan--I mean is this a new movement? Are you creating, are you at all together?

Olson: No, I think that whole "Black Mountain poet" thing is a lot of bullshit. I mean, actually, it was created by the editor, the famous editor of that anthology for Grove Press, Mr. Allen, where he divided--he did a very--but it was a terrible mistake made. He created those sections--Black Mountain, San Francisco, Beat, New York, New, Young, huh? Oh, I mean, imagine, just for the hear of it, "Young." Hear the insult, if you're young. You're suddenly classified into a thing--by one of the great editors, the found of Evergreen Review. And the first issues of Evergreen, the first four issues of Evergreen were, really, first rate. But he made a big mistake; he made a topological error. I mean he had the wrong topology. And he created somthing which is very unhappy. For example, poets, who just can't get us straight because they think we form a sort of a club or a claque or a gang or something. And that there was a poetics? Ha ha. Boy, there was no poetic. It was Charlie Parker. Literally, it was Charlie Parker. He was the Bob Dylan of the Fifties.

(from "On Black Mountain," an informal talk given by Olson on March 26, 1968 at Beloit College, collected in Muthologos II)

Ecopoetics

2009-03-31T20:43:00.004-04:00

Here is an interesting article that considers the painting of Jackson Pollock as "Fractal Expressionism." Yes, you read that correctly. Some of the language that Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas use to discuss the work, however, I find a bit confused at times. They write at the end of their discussion, for instance, that Pollock "described Nature directly," yet, "[r]ather than mimicking Nature, he adopted its language -- fractals -- to build his own patterns." In all, their claim that the paintings are indeed fractal paintings is pretty compelling, but I hesitate a bit when they attempt to squarely situate the work within a statistical and ultimately symbolic universe. It is tricky. For if the paintings abandon mimesis--i.e., if they abandon the symbolism of referential systems (and they do)--then the paintings don't really adopt the metaphoricity of language and, thus, don't describe physis with tekhne. Put differently, Pollock isn't interested in the illusion of representing the natural world with artifice, even as self-reflexively, as, say, Wallace Stevens and other like modernists were interested. Pollock's paintings are instances or events of literality: each painting means through itself, rather than through a system of references, of mediation, of infinite relations, and so forth. Yet, I'm still intrigued by the recursive processes that produce the fractal, because it seems that such repetition does not produce the habits of thought that lead, finally, to finality. They are dead ends.

Ticky-Tacky

2009-02-28T15:10:00.002-05:00

"Little Boxes"
by Malvina Reynolds

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
little boxes all the same

There's a green one and a pink one
and a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
and they came out all the same,

And there's doctors and there's lawyers,
and business executives
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
and drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
and the children go to school

And the children go to summer camp
and then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
and they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
and marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same.

Hear it here.
Learn more.

Deux

2009-01-06T12:51:00.002-05:00

New Sous for you.

Featuring:

Bernadette Mayer / Nico Vassilakis / Brooklyn Copeland / Maria Williams-Russell / Peter Ciccariello / William Allegrezza / David-Baptiste Chirot / Rodrigo Toscano / Christophe Casamassima / James Sanders / Barry Schwabsky / Michelle Naka Pierce with Sue Hammond West / Alexander Jorgensen / Celina Su / Matina Stamatakis / Amy King / Bill Marsh / Brenda Hillman / Charles Bernstein / Samit Roy / Stacy Szymaszek / Paul Hoover / Sawako Nakayasu / Thomas Devaney / Sparrow

Pounding Wall Street

2008-12-23T21:29:00.002-05:00

The new issue of Flashpoint focuses on "Ezra Pound and Wall Street," which looks promising. Check it out here.

Just In

2008-12-21T15:00:00.003-05:00

David Rich writes, with his usual outstanding insightfulness, on Playing the Amplitudes:

Playing the Amplitudes is (1) Spicer's golden-gloves screw-you ("my business of screwing business") (2) Olsonian Jeremiad ("two thousand years of shimmer shimmy / and oops, the loop of leggo my ego ergo a Plato") (3) Deleuzian analysis ("manage the state of desire with the state- / ment you guess") reimagined as dissonant bebop, after-hours, furious, head-long; the intense, riffing word-stream a tab of respite, the instant of creation "instanter," a radical present-tense.

Read the rest here.

Reviewpoint

2008-12-21T13:59:00.003-05:00

Steve Fama recently posted on Naturalistless and Aaron Tieger's Collected Typos. Very interesting stuff. Check it out here.

Reviewery

2008-12-20T11:40:00.002-05:00

Lars Palm has written a quite interesting review of Playing the Amplitudes, up now at Galatea Resurrects.

New Blog

2008-12-14T19:53:00.003-05:00

In case you missed it, Dave Rich has a new blog. Interesting reviews of work by Clayton Eshleman, Edward Dahlberg, Geoff Olsen, Cat Meng, David Gitin, etc. Check it out here.

Quickie

2008-11-10T11:37:00.002-05:00

A few poems are newly up at P.F.S Post, edited by Adam Fieled. One's for Joe, another for Jess, and the third's for everybody.

All's here for feeling

2008-10-29T17:49:00.004-04:00

Voice: Where does instinct or intuition fit in there?

Olson: I'm trying to avoid those words. By the way, i would knock'em right down by using Jung's four functions. i think that nobody has improved on Jung's declaration of functions. These are the functions. The four functions are intuition, sensation, thinking and feeling--which I notice that Jung in that article slips and makes "emotion" instead of feeling, which is a terrible error. "All is there for feeling," for example, to take Whitehead's--that enormous statement of Whitehead's about the character of creation. "All is there for feeling." That's not emotion, emotions are strictly a personal business and hung-up stuff, which disappear the moment that you touch the real....

(from "Under the Mushroom," 1963)

This is certainly an interesting distinction that Olson makes between "emotion" and "feeling," although the speculative character of "there" in Whitehead's proposition, as Olson recounts it, goes uninvestigated, which is a concern if we're questioning the problematic of the real vis-a-vis emotion.

It seems to me that feeling, taken in its fullest sense, is implicated in the evental context of now, to which, as Duncan claims, the poet is responsible in terms of one's attentions. In other words, the now's here, not there, the moment through which the past and the future rush into and pass through one another, at least to use Olson's own understanding of history as a presence through which one functionally exists. Presence, in this use, is functionary and doesn't pander to a predicated "metaphysics" in some philosophico-mystical way. I suppose I can put it another way: Here = feeling = being = event = now, etc. Equal, that is, to the real itself.

Adieu.

Playing the Amplitudes

2008-09-25T15:52:00.004-04:00

Now out on BlazeVOX. Free. This one collects a wide range of work, including The Breaks, the sonnet sequence "Zone," and a rather dated but fitting little ekphratic collocation called Draw. Epigraphs by William James, Gerrit Lansing, Ralph Ellison, Willem de Kooning, Charles Olson, Albert Einstein, Chuck Stein, Jean Dubuffet, and the US Anti-Narcotics Campaign, with cameo appearances by Jack Kerouac, Jack Spicer, et al. Much thanks to Poetry Saint Gatza for making this collection happen. Adieu.

File Under Elitism

2008-09-20T21:36:00.003-04:00

I excerpted the following from an article by Sam Harris on Sarah Palin and the question of elitism in American politics, entitled "When Atheists Attack." Although Harris' criticisms of Palin are arguably fair, he is at his sharpest and, paradoxically, his bluntest when he turns to the matter of so-called elitism:

"Ask yourself: how has 'elitism' become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated."

Point taken. You can read the rest of the article here.

Have Such Scams Ever Worked?

2008-09-19T18:52:00.004-04:00

Hello,

Pardon this unsolicited mail by which I am introducing a matter worthy of your consideration and, ultimately, your involvement.

l am Mr. Gary Hsiao (a Branch Manager with Bangkok Bank PCL, Taiwan). I am seeking your collaboration in re-profiling and appropriating a substantial sum of money belonging to a client of my bank who died suddenly without naming a next-of-kin nor leaving a will. This opportunity will be of mutual benefit to the two of us.

I propose presenting you as the next-of-kin of the deceased and benefactor of his financial estate with all the necessary documents I shall provide to substantiate this assertion. If you are interested, kindly get back to me with as much personal contact information as you can comfortably avail me to commence the necessary legal paper work at huang20gary@kimo.com

Upon your response, l will avail you with the modalities we shall use to actualize my proposition. Please treat this proposition as private, discrete and confidential by virtue of my active service and position in the bank; if not interested you can delete this mail.

Regards,

Mr. Gary Hsiao, Branch Manager
Bangkok Bank PCL, Taipei Branch
121, Sung Chiang Road
Taipei 10429, Taiwan

Necessary Margin

2008-08-30T02:32:00.003-04:00

Issue 1. Sous Rature. READ before it is erased.

Post-post

2008-08-18T15:52:00.003-04:00

Take a break and have a little fun with Bulhak's Postmodernism Engine. Or should I say, a Postdiscursive neo-Dada Inter-(con)texual/textural Abstract Machine that decenters phallo-Dad(a)-author-centricity?

I generated an essay on Burroughs and Feminism. Fascinating.

Suppose That You Were Supposed To

2008-08-07T13:54:00.007-04:00

Lars Palm has started up an ebook (ad)venture in writing called Ungovernable Press. I'm happy to report that Supposed to Sound is available for reading and download via the UP blog, as well as two works by Lars himself. From what I understand, there is much more to come.

The ebooks use a reader called Scribd, no download for which is necessary. I'd suggest checking out the reader, even if you're not all that interested in reading poems. I'm enthusiastic (can't you tell?) about the po(e)tentials for textual dissemination via weblogs with the Scribd platform.

Adieu.

Another Day Word

2008-07-17T15:34:00.003-04:00

The following definition comes from Ambrose Bierce:

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Psyche

2008-07-16T16:20:00.007-04:00

The following bit is from an interesting little article that popped up on Wired. Frank O'Hara once joked that there was "nothing metaphysical about tight pants," echoing W.C. Williams' sentiments regarding metaphysics that he was more than wont to voice. Descartes roll over, but I don't see how the psychic function of the individual subject does not cognitively process information in a singularly material way and, moreover, I don't see how the processing of language-information radically differs from that of image-information:

"One way around all this may be to figure out 'how human beings recognize objects in the real world and duplicate that functionality in a series of algorithms.' But here's the catch: 'Recent research has indicated that humans use not one algorithm, but multiple algorithms for the task of object recognition - depending on the object being recognized and the situation at hand."

"Sometimes, people use 'template based algorithms' -- like matching an object to a database. Sometimes, they look for particular features. In other situations, they watch for geometric icons, or geons. 'These three algorithms are used in conjunction with a fourth algorithm, a contextual cueing algorithm, which limits the overall search space. Finally, human spatial memory is able to mentally rotate objects in order to match the object to different representations'."

Once upon a time, there were a select group of workers called computers. They did computations for a living, and they used algorithms to do so. Machines replaced their primary function of computation, but computers are still tools or instruments with which we interface. I'm using algorithms right now to process how to italicize this present sentence. The buttons on the screen (or the hot-keys, as it were) merely serve as extensions of this processing. Perhaps I'll write more on this in the future, but in the meantime, check out a book called The Universal Computer, or, better yet, a book by Berlinski: The Advent of the Algorithm.

Adieu.

Gist In Case

2008-06-30T15:09:00.003-04:00

Or, rather, just in case you missed it, Jerome Rothenberg's blog.

Grenier

2008-06-26T21:51:00.001-04:00

LATE

for John Dowland

you will not
save things or
make them perfect

music is power
yo
lustrous ox

lightly the
transfigured leaves
ok on that

Dodo Way

2008-06-17T14:20:00.006-04:00

Mars lander discovers white material? Scientists hope for ice:

"Here's a closer look at the white material in the trench now called 'Dodo-Goldilocks' that was uncovered by the robotic arm aboard the Phoenix. The white material was first noticed on June 3 but more has been exposed as the robotic arm has dug deeper. Since the white material is only on one end of the trench, NASA scientists theorize that they could have hit the edge of a slab of ice." (Read more here.)

Where there is ice, there once was life? Are they hoping to find traces of life to simply find such traces? To what end is all this? One skeptical suggestion that seems implausible to me, but that piques my interest nevertheless: Where once there was life, there is oil.

The ostensibly humanist project of digging into martian terrain has never struck me as innocent. The very naming of the trench "dodo" suggests the death-drive of Western culture. Here today, dodo tomorrow, and crude the next. The phrase "traces of life" is suspiciously morbid.

As for the so-called curiosity of "Goldilocks," doesn't the moral of that tale instruct one to not meddle?