LWC/LWK

2012-01-21T20:14:00.000-08:00

2012-01-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

2012-01-15T10:22:00.000-08:00

2011-09-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

2011-09-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

2011-09-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

"My answer – Matisse’s answer – is that it opens onto black. It is a way of showing sensuality – sensuous experience – becoming something thought or manufactured, as opposed to felt. Denis’s ‘artificiality’ points this way. Or D.H. Lawrence’s ‘consciousness’. Here, for example, is the odious Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, rounding on Hermione:

‘Spontaneous!’ he cried. ‘You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! … Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness … If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography – looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’

I realise that this makes Proust, by comparison, seem a real lover of women. And Birkin, to be fair to Lawrence, is meant to be a violent and dangerous prig. (A portrait of the author.) Nothing could be further from Matisse’s tone. But tone is not everything: sometimes excess turns out to be a way to get difficult issues in focus; and I believe that Matisse’s and Lawrence’s proposals about modernity are closely linked.

Could we imagine something like Birkin’s words, minus the nasty self-righteousness, spoken gently – spoken out of love? For Spurling is right: love is at stake here. And of course the words in question (transposed into an ironic, puzzled, even admiring register) are addressed by Matisse not just to Amélie but to himself – to his own anxious sensibility. I think that Woman with a Hat is all about getting sensuality ‘in the head’, to use another of Birkin’s insults – making it discursive and reflexive. It is about having the immediate and passionate – having colour, in other words – become a matter of mind."

2011-09-05T07:24:00.000-07:00

So, step by step, you reach the Place de l'Opéra. It is here that Paris makes one of its grandest impressions. You have before you the façade of the Théâtre, enormous and bold, resplendent with colossal lamps between the elegant columns, before which open rue Auber and rue Halévy; to the right, the great furnace of the Boulevard des Italiens; to the left, the flaming Boulevard des Capucines, which stretches out between the two burning walls of the Boulevard Madeleine, and turning around, you see three great diverging streets which dazzle you like so many luminous abysses: rue de la Paix, all gleaming with gold and jewels, at the end of which the black Colonne Vendôme rises against the starry sky; the Avenue de l'Opéra inundated with electric light; rue Quatre Septembre shining with its thousand gas jets, and seven continuous lines of carriages issuing from the two Boulevards and five streets, crossing each other rapidly on the square, and a crowd coming and going under a shower of rosy and whitest light diffused from the great ground-glass globes, which produce the effect of wreaths and garlands of full moons, colouring the trees, high buildings and the multitude with the weird and mysterious reflections of the final scene of a fancy ballet. Here one experiences for the moment the sensations produced by Hasheesh. That mass of gleaming streets which lead to the Théâtre Français, to the Tuileries, to the Concorde and Champs-Elysées, each one of which brings you a voice of the great Paris festival, calling and attracting you on seven sides, like the stately entrances of seven enchanted palaces, and kindling in your brain and veins the madness of pleasure.

But modern art in its first manifestations—in the painting of Manet above all—did not accept the boulevards as charming. It was more impressed with the queerness of those who used them—the prostitutes, the street singers, the men of the world leaning out of their windows, the beggars, the types with binoculars. It wanted to paint Haussmann's Paris as a place of pleasure, particularly for the eye, but in such a way as to suggest that the pleasures of seeing involved some sort of lack—a repression, or alternatively a brazenness. The prostitute was seemingly an ideal figure for things of this kind, for she concentrated them in her person; and Manet like others took her to represent the truth of the city Haussmann had built.

*This last page or so of descriptions is not meant, incidentally, to amount to a judgment of the relative merit of the pictures passed in review (still less to insinuate such a judgment without daring to state it out loud). The Calliebotte, for example, is in my view a lesser painting than the Degas, however much I may sympathize with its thoughtfulness. The requisite clichés are brought on stage a bit less glibly, but that does not save the picture from having the look of a rehearsal as opposed to a real performance. The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense. How that last fact affects the general business of criticism is not clear. But one thing that does not follow from it, as far as I can see, is that viewers of paintings should ignore or deny the subservience, in the hope of thereby attaining to the "aesthetic." It matters what the materials of a pictorial order are, even if the order is something different from the materials, and in the end more important than they are.

2011-09-04T07:25:00.001-07:00

2011-08-31T18:13:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this from a cubicle. An acquaintance told me over a drink she encountered an entitled man pissing on her doorstep this morning, I said that was my afternoon meeting! I'm writing this from a cubicle. I have a friend who logs in every day and never looks at the front page. I wish the green tea were rose. I'm too lazy to correct that. The professor professes too much, a decade, two decades, twenty-four months to the day later. I'm supposed to go to a reception. I "stole" these headphones. I stole this cubicle. I spent so much time being careful.

2011-08-30T18:50:00.000-07:00

2011-08-23T00:15:00.000-07:00

2011-08-17T20:00:00.001-07:00

2011-08-12T08:35:00.001-07:00

David Brazil is working to convene a second labor and community-focused 'Poetic Labor Project' gathering for this Labor Day, 2011, and is looking for others to collaborate with him on organizing this event. If you are interested in participating, please email David at plp.laborday2011@gmail.com.

2011-07-31T19:34:00.000-07:00

Regular Monday Night Chatting

2011-07-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

Dear All,

At risk of boring you To Death with yet another posting on this subject, I would anyway like to let you know that Steve Benson and I are committed now to giving "LiveChat" performance every Monday night, 6:30pm Pacific, 9:30pm Eastern, for the foreseeable future. The chats will last 30 minutes unless specified otherwise, and, if one of us can't make it any given Monday, the other will carry on regardless.

The place where all the chats reside is here. On that page, you can sign up for email reminders (from fifteen minutes to one day ahead) on each of the individual chats.

If you'd like a personal reminder from one of us on the evenings of, please send your email address to suzannestein AT mindspring DOT com with subject line LIVE CHAT. Or, leave your address in the comment box.

Thanks for attending! We hope to make it interesting for you.

Yours,

SS / SB

2011-07-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

My new year's resolution for at least one month is to no longer book my social life by the rules of the Outlook calendar for business. I am not booked. I won't book anything at all. I won't plan after hours. I am always free to see you if you call me that day.

2011-07-18T09:40:00.001-07:00

2011-07-11T17:26:00.000-07:00

Steve Benson and I are doing the LiveChat thing again, right now. Here it is.

2011-07-08T06:02:00.000-07:00

an ideological community can be defined as that set of discursive and institutional constraints which turns its members always away from the edges or inconsistencies of their practice

2011-06-30T17:16:00.000-07:00

2011-06-23T20:15:00.000-07:00

SUZANNE STEIN/STEVE BENSON LIVE CHAT TONIGHT 630 WEST 930 EAST

2011-06-20T16:41:00.000-07:00

HERE

2011-06-20T09:28:00.001-07:00

2011-06-19T07:40:00.000-07:00

wow, sorry about the beach scene. invisible template.

Fresh

2011-06-18T18:36:00.000-07:00

RESET

2011-06-10T20:52:00.000-07:00

RESET

2011-05-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

SS/SB LiveChat 4

2011-05-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=34eb1c6e57" &amp;gt;Steve Benson/Suzanne Stein LiveChat4&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p>

Steve Benson and I will give the fourth in our ongoing 'live chat performance' series this Monday, Memorial Day, at 6:30pm Pacific / 9:30pm Eastern. You can sign up for an email reminder in the little box above. We look forward to (not) seeing you then!

SS/SB Live Chat 3

2011-05-23T06:00:00.000-07:00

Our next 'live chat performance' will take place Monday, May 30, 6:30 Pacific/9:30 Eastern.
You can find all posts related to our live chats here.

busi

2011-05-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

I already own that cat

SS/SB Live Chat 2

2011-05-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=ccc0cdcc5d" &amp;gt;Steve Benson/Suzanne Stein LiveChat2&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p>

Thanks for stopping by! Our next 'live chat performance' will take place Monday, May 23, 6:30 Pacific/9:30 Eastern. Please join us!

You can find all posts related to our live chats here.

2011-05-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, Steve Benson and I gave a "live chat performance" on this blog. The record of that experiment is here. We thought we'd keep doing this for awhile.

======================================================

Steve Benson

Suzanne Stein

LIVE CHAT PERFORMANCE

Mondays

6:30pm Pacific

9:30pm Eastern

30 minutes

======================================================

2011-05-08T06:00:00.001-07:00

Steve Benson/Suzanne Stein: Live Chat Performance

announcement

2011-04-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

LIVE CHAT PERFORMANCE

in this space/on this blog

STEVE BENSON

SUZANNE STEIN

SUNDAY, MAY 8

3pm Pacific

6pm Eastern

2011-04-13T08:09:00.001-07:00

2011-04-12T17:10:00.000-07:00

2011-04-08T22:52:00.000-07:00

xtreme encounters with my own fragility lately. not just fallibility, which i've been slowly acclimating to less success in denial of. but feeling the real separation between the failing front and the self i'm trying to figure how to handle gingerly enough. I like the encounter, but it's strange. no doors

2011-04-01T19:35:00.001-07:00

i might call, it is still before 8pm my time
but i was in meetings all day
then i drank wine
so i'm not lucid
i'm both exhausted from interlocution
and sort of drunk

2011-04-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

surrounded always by the better-educated, i feel this XXXXX that i'm the XXXXX XXXXX in the middle. directing traffic, 'making things happen' but, uh, as the XXXXX (in all senses) XXXXX

2011-03-23T15:35:00.001-07:00

2011-03-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

2011-03-11T10:05:00.000-08:00

I remember saying to my ex-husband, when we were divorcing--it was at the moment of the 2004 southeast asia tsunami--that divorce was the worst thing in the world. No, he said, the worst thing in the world is a big wave can come and wash it all away.

2011-02-21T07:58:00.000-08:00

2011-01-13T14:00:00.001-08:00

2011-01-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

2010-12-29T11:46:00.000-08:00

2010-12-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

2010-12-25T05:00:00.000-08:00

Busie olde foole, unruly Sunne
    Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
    Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
    Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,
  Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
  Call countrey ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, months, which are the rags of time.

    Thy beames, so reverend, and strong
    Why shouldst thou thinke?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,
But that I would not lose your sight so long:
    If her eyes have not blinded thine
    Looke, and tomorrow late, tell mee,
  Whether both the India's of spice and Myne
  Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.
Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

    She'is all States, and all Princes, aye,
    Nothing else is; 
Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,
All honor's mimique; All wealth alchimie,
    Thou sunne, art's halfe happy'as wee,
    In that the world's contracted thus;
  Thine ages askes ease, and since thy duties bee
  To warme the world, that's done in warming me.
Shine here to me, and thou art every where;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

2010-12-19T11:46:00.000-08:00

2010-11-26T20:58:00.000-08:00

2010-11-24T10:04:00.000-08:00

The attentive viewer is likely to remain standing in front of this canvas for a long time after she "gets" this "joke," though, because irony is not its main order of business.

2010-11-20T22:32:00.000-08:00

2010-11-13T00:52:00.000-08:00

2010-11-10T10:25:00.000-08:00

May I write you a letter? If yes, please backchannel your (snail) mailing address.

taxt (at) mindspring (dot) com

2010-11-03T18:45:00.001-07:00

Achilles, you sleep and have forgotten me.

2010-10-21T13:26:00.000-07:00

Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn't

2010-10-17T19:12:00.000-07:00

2010-10-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Matt Keegan

2010-10-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

Ann Hamilton

2010-10-17T15:35:00.001-07:00

sun as error

2010-10-17T15:29:00.001-07:00

Shannon Ebner

2010-10-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Bornstein

2010-10-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Labor Day 2010: notes

2010-09-26T17:43:00.000-07:00

I promised myself I would write up some thoughts, impressions, notes re: the Labor Day gathering ASAP.

I wrote that sentence and many of these notes three weeks ago—work has absorbed all creative or any other energy since then. My job so fully occupies my mind. (I’m open to offers of better-paying, less obliterating labor, btw.)

But to the Labor Day 2010 gathering: I wanted to record a few things here, for now, finally—this will be scattered, no time to cohere.

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Of course, as always happens, so much interesting conversation happened 'off the record' or in the interstice: during the breaks, at the bars afterwards each day, or on the patio or getting a coffee or in the bathroom. Standout extended one-on-one conversations, for me, were with Jacqueline Waters, Samantha Giles, Steve Farmer, Brian Stefans, Brian Whitener, Jason Morris, and then so many shorter encounters and exchanges notably different only in length, not intensity, with a dozen others. Will note some bits and pieces of all of those as I go/if I can.

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Recurrent themes: liminality, domestic space (Steve Farmer, Dana Teen Lomax, Samantha Giles); distraction (probably everyone); the different economies of the art world vs the poetry world (this included support systems such as granting agencies or patron models, direct or brokered sale, and especially, to my mind, the existence of 'objective' --that is, non-practioner-authored---critical apparatus in the artworld, or the impoverishment of critical infrastructures in poetry world (that last bit raised by Brian Stefans); the problem of an ever-growing academicized poet class.

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Brian Whitener, re: 'the wig': "Is stealing time the best we can come up with?" and also, re: the university system as a (false? failing?) respite from precarity---and this came up again on Monday via Tim Kreiner, who also voiced precarity (respite from) as a motive for taking up pursuit of advanced degree.

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Related to this: Brian Stefans asking (in Sunday eve Q/A) why the subject of labor particularly, how is it not then about or the same as gardening, that is, why were participants not speaking more directly to issues of poetics and poetry. (weren't they/we though? cf: Steve Farmer's 'poetry buckets', that is, the places that can catch the little daily drips, droplets of language that happen in between or in the sly spaces during the 70hr work-weeks).

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Also related to this: David Buuck saying that the ‘real hard work’ lies in other forms of community organizing (as though somehow this (community organized) gathering itself and the articulations inside it did not represent “real” “hard work”? )

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Taylor Brady wanted to talk about my own very favorite subject, which is, rather than just how does the labor economy affect the formal poetic one, instead, how do the poetics inform (infect) [reform] the workplace.

This is the subject and form and practice of so much of my own work, in all modes—collapse of the code-switching. I have great faith in the neologistic construction as the resorting, reorganizing tool in social, cultural spaces, in spaces of life and work. It's what's visionary (effectively, actively) in poetry, right? whether you're operating at the level of the phrase, the line, the lyric or the not-lyric, or operating a neologistics at the level of organizational intervention in the social world. The neologistic "makes possible", is the guard against that old stand-by, that stupid old duck employed by capitulated paper-pushers everywhere—"That's impossible."

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Lara Durback produced a phenomenal chapbook/zine for or in/around themes of the event. Bound in re-used standard-issue file-folder, the book documents a couple of weeks Lara spent working for that creepy Levi’s ‘community print shop’ masquerade that appeared on Valencia Street for a couple of months this summer. Lara details working conditions that did not include actual payment in dollars, but in ‘coolness’: that is, free clothes, beer, late night parties—for the long long workdays. Long long uncontracted, unpaid workdays.

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All of our volunteers—that is, people offering time, energy, labor, “human resources”—were women.

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More on the presentations themselves (and I haven't yet gone back to listen to them again—you can and will or have already I hope, at the Labor Day 2010 blog): The continually reiterated experience of 'liminality' or 'two bodies', or competing terms of existence, wherein one is 'a worker' and one is 'a poet'. This beautifully evoked in Jason Morris's talk ('bar community' and it's likenesses and difference to 'poetry community', the confusion between which is the waking dream and which sleeping life or ghost life?), Samantha Giles's (she really has three bodies, that is, caretaker/homemaker, arts administrator, poet), Steve Farmer's talk, Brandon Brown's, Kevin Killian's. Also, distraction a constant theme, not separable really from the two bodies/liminality problem, that is, mode switching between roles takes up so much energy, creates so schizoid an experience—in Kevin's case, as David Brazil pointed out, the result is pataphoric (Kevin writes while working; he writes a line like, 'there was a knock on the door and Jack opened..." and the office telephone rings to interrupt him; on returning to the sentence Kevin finishes with, Jack opened his mouth and I pressed my tongue...." (inexact rendering on my part, obvs)

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(leaving me to wander into my own consideration of the implication of a full system of pataphoric fantasies (into realities) that office work of any kind nearly insists on—i've written/talked abt the pataphor before so want to have time to wonder/consider further this angle of view of it)

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re: Rodrigo's talk: this one was immediately brought up for conversation in the first (super short) Q/A session. That is, the first presentation to be addressed during discussion time was the piece most definitively schematized and thus easiest target really. Or possibly the piece structured along the most familiar rhetorical lines. (oddly!) So, easily taken up as questionable (that is, 'arguable') by anyone prone to that mode. Brian Stefans asked the broad question re: how everyone felt about it. Juliana Spahr answered saying that she had questions about it/found it questionable, but she didn't feel it was appropriate to discuss/argue against RT's piece when he wasn't in the room (which also implied that it was made possible for Rodrigo to make the criticism /slash/ dish it out yet be removed from/ be held safe from/ taking it too.). I reminded the audience that RT was aware that his text would be discussed critically without him being present, and additionally that we could text RT real time (he and I had discussed this). Juliana's answer was that of course she could email Rodrigo in her personal life, "that's not the point". Unfortunately, it really IS the point. No doubt unintended on her part, but this brief exchange neatly described a set of power relations regarding who is allowed to listen in on, participate in, talk about, contribute to discussion, and who gets to set the terms of 'appropriateness' re: discussion of a concern at hand (in this case, a 'work of art' and one deeply critical of the academy). RT's piece was via this short exchange removed from public discussion and tucked back into the pocket/email box of those who already have direct access to a conversation with the writer. Fortunately, we were able to take RT’s piece up again the following day during the open discussion, where issues of academy in/out were talked through at some length.

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Class-passing, from Samantha's talk: what a surprise for me too to hear about this, that this might be a mode one would adopt, or wish or want or need to adopt, and like Samantha I thought, wow, who would want to labor under that/also who of us isn't laboring under that every minute? Also, you can class pass in academy by reading enough issues of the New Yorker?—that is, class passing is about language acquisition—Again, one of the hidden themes of the weekend being who owns speech (the right to speak, the space to speak, the proper subjects on which to speak) "in "the" "community".

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And of course, that very question or argument around the academy---that the gathering both was and was not a response to a perceived split between those who do, and those who do not, 'academy'. Samantha Giles arguing on Monday that our decision was divisive, and that we should have included those workers as participants, and others in the room arguing that as a first step it was absolutely necessary to make a statement about inclusion/exclusion in current hierarchical structures of aestheticizing, of aesthetico-politicizing of poetry that's taking place right now so definitively divisively, in the academy.

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My own bit added to the part of the conversation re: academy, was adjacent to BKS's noting, the previous day, the 'impoverishment' of cirtical structures in poetry world as against a model of plenty found in the art world (and as so much more easily supported in that arena by capital)---and that the thing to be noted of much importance is that, unlike any other art form or cultural form I can think of, poetry theory/poetics/'rethinkings" in the academy are almost entirely dominated by practitioners, with undeniably personal reasons for advancing particular (aesthetic)(and other) agendas. This stating the obvious to an embarrassing degree (I mean, I’m stating it and feel embarrassed).

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Also much raised or revealed, in Laura's talk, and Steve Farmer's, and Andrew Joron's, and Pamela Lu's—the all academy/all the time situation for poets, and poetics, that we're "enjoying" now is so recent a development (two decades?). Someone (in private conversation) argued that 'we've' always looked to the academy for---guidelines?---on how and what and who to read or to care for (much arguable, but not incorrect), and so why is this so different now?

One answer for me, related to the all-theorists-are-practioners (but not vice-versa) problem comes from a conversation I had—a few months back—with a poet (/critic/academic) who I won't name. This person told me they liked another poet's work—Poet X—quite a lot, found it quite interesting, but didn't want to write publicly or critically about PoetX's work because Poet X's theoretical writing on Poet X's own work was "weak"—and so, my interlocutor explained, to write about Poet X's work could subject him/her (this poet-critic) to ridicule in the academy, what? did i hear this right? was I or my conversationalist drunk? (well, yes). The person told me outright he/she would not write positive (or any other) critical writing—even in an 'informal' blog setting—about Poet X's work, because Poet X can't do good theory.

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I speak English, art museum politics, yoga, tax evasion by forgetfulness, friendship, how to ask a question, B vitamins in kale, Facebook, a little Mandarin, Spanish when lost in a border town.

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A wonderful and wide-ranging conversation at the bar Sunday night with Brian Whitener, only one part of which I’ll relate at the moment. He said something along the lines of this gathering as basic starter-issue organizing (let everyone talk about their common condition etc), and then get to the 'real issues', that is, health care and gender and race and capital etc, to which claim, sounding to my ears a bit paternal or even patronizing—so unlikely a mode (either way) to have come from Brian Whitener, I accept responsiblity for projecting it—I answered a bit frustratedly that I was listening to conversations all evening and weekend from both university employees and 'everyone else', and encountering a really different, totally bifurcated, trajectory of response. Which was, on the side of those who don't work for the university, real excitement and relief, to have the chance to speak, first of all, to be heard, next of all, and to hear about this common and so hidden condition, our labor, and how we manage to be poets despite, a strong sense of liberation and excitement at the opportunity to talk together about work first of all, and how it extends to every part of creative life, social life, and political life, next of all. On the side of the university workers, much of what I heard was, well, why aren't we talking enough about poetics? why aren't we talking about 'real' community organizing? why aren't we talking about labor and health care? I very frustratedly said to Brian that yes, we are discussing all of those things also, but there is first of all, in the sphere of local (and extralocal) poetics, life in poetry, a set of public space issues, related to a politics of aesthetics, regarding who gets to speak, be heard, listened to, contribute; a group so disenfranchised in this way that the 'dominant class' (here this was Brian’s phrase, not mine) simply were refusing to hear this set of concerns, evcen while they were being stated repeatedly over the weekend. Mainly, it seems, because those concerns do not concern them. If half your 'colleagues'’—that is, people who make and think poetry—are silenced by circumstance of work life (where one is or is not) (or by, as per Rodrigo, 'straight up erasure'), what do we all lose?

And finally, with all the questions about elitism / accessibility in, and collapse of, the university, might not it be useful to turn to your colleagues outside the system for some sort of constructive collaboration and expansion of modes of learning (and on the sly instituting!!)

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There was a lot of argument around/against a positioning of inside/outside—I think this is partly to do with a fear of acknowleging a frame of unequal access (to the speech state) (among those who are assumed to be ‘of the same class’), as though such acknowledgment states something definitive or unshakeable, and as though it positions one 'side' or the other 'side' as in a weaker or more dominant position 'overall'—

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Chris Daniels, saying he used to care more about the academy’s dismissal, used to be more angry, until he had the means of book production in his own hands.

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For the first time in more than a decade of coming around this particular 'poetry scene' I saw and heard talking to each other in the same room, respectfully and courageously and patiently and generously, people I have never yet seen talking in this way with each other, many, many of whom I've never seen speak up in public poetry space AT ALL.

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I think that we managed to successfully negotiate or provide a comfortable space where those who don't always feel free or 'empowered' to speak, did speak, and those who do often take the floor seemed to listen with more patience and less out of let-me-tear-apart-your-argument [or your gentle, fearfully offered statement] mode. Regarding mode—I think that, aside from or in addition to Bay Area Langpo legacy of aggressive speech-topping, my evocation of a kind of wolves-and-rabbits public speaking space has very much to do with university training, vs other kinds of training, regarding what modes of address and exchange are ‘appropriate’ in the round. If you're trained to schematize, and especially to argue schematizations, it could and I think has become the default mode—listening and speaking skills less highly prized or at any rate less often put to use in public speaking (poetry) space are those modes of compassionate listening, and gentle, exploratory questioning and responding. As though those modes necessarily eschew rigor.

+

Monday's in-the-round dialogue began with Samantha Giles saying she thought our decision not to include university workers was unduly divisive. While I think that conversation was frustrating for many of us who felt that the inclusionary model—that is, including as many possible NON-academy workers, was an absolute necessity for carving out desperately needed conversational space, one of the very marvelous things to come out of it was a mutual recognition from both "sides" (if there can be said to be sides here) that we have mainly or many like social aims, and that building a new space of dialogue among us would be one possible, incredibly constructive, next step. Monday's discussion did leave us w/ a couple of potential "locations" of "activity" going forward, some of which I hope we'll work on taking up in coming months. Worth noting that, for me anyway, it seemed that many of those locations of activity being suggested are really around a poetics of politics, or straight up activism.

+

The worst moment for me came in the ladies room, between the morning and evening sessions of the long day. I saw someone who'd been all morning at the first session and had just returned from the lunch break for the second half of the day, and I thanked her for coming back for the round two. "Well," she said, "I went and had a beer and now I'm going to power through". Considering the lucidity, generosity, care, and indeed listenability, really, of the presentations generally, this was quite the disagreeable dismissal, and it was received in the manner it was intended, that is, a slap in the face. I blushed. (Although its other intention, that of emotional undermining, I have finally learned not to take in). No one was asked to 'power through' anything not to their liking. That's appropriate perhaps when looking to add points for your next job interview, but this was neither work nor an academic conference. I would have preferred this person just go on home. What would one 'power thru' for? What's the cultural capital likely to have accrued for this listener by sticking around/powering thru?

Aside from this, I experienced compassionate listening and generous offering, and real openness in almost every exchange I had during the weekend. Absolutely astonishing. “Heartening” is a word I’ve used a dozen times or more in describing the way everything unfolded, both in the months of planning with DB, BB, SL, AW, and the weekend itself. The generosity of our presenters, deputizers et al. The generosity of so many others, with their time and money. The generosity of the listening and speaking.

+

By the second half of Sunday we had a strong house at Studio One, about 60 people. And 30 people showed up for the open discussion at 21Grand, on an absolutely gorgeous, hot and bright Labor Day Monday morning. As Sara Larsen likes to say, "Fuck yeah"

+

Like I said, totally scattered, and so much has been left out—more to come as/if I can.

2010-09-18T15:49:00.001-07:00

2010-09-13T10:04:00.001-07:00

2010-09-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

2010-08-30T08:53:00.001-07:00

2010-08-27T23:43:00.000-07:00

this is not the sort of thing I want to deal with in 'a poem' and would never bother writing into a notebook. It's something maybe to be told to a lover. Or I might tell it to my mom, who is interested in such things. It makes sense to put it here, weird repository of dreams, fantasies, compulsions, aggressions, admissions....

I tried to write all the backstory but it's boring. I'll try to do it faster. I have been over the last seven months slowly reclaiming my life from horrible constant chronic pain, a weird thing for someone the very picture of confident Russian Polish American peasant health, glowing with California sun, produce and yoga. But then I did nothing but work for four years, it was the writing of 'a poem' called work and the writing of 'a poem' which is a book of work finally finally finished. Anyone knows writing just one will kill you, etc. So I really fucked myself up. I couldn't walk, sleep, or sit. Also, I had a successful worker's comp claim because of the bad ergonomics and constant pressure, sleeplessness, and overwork of the job. So I've been to physical therapy, and occupational therapy, and acupuncture, and the chiropractor, and the X-ray machine, and the spine doctor, and the MRI tube, and the gynecologist, and the general practitioner, and the takers of blood, and the pilates instructor, and the massage therapist.

It's the massage therapist I want to tell you about. I realize I can't tell this 'story' in the way I would like to, that is, with some kind of frame. I had a 90minute appointment, twice as long as I have been able to afford in the past. My mother helped me pay for this one, because we agreed something is necessary. I thought it would be mainly the same as before, rubbing, pressing, stretching, stroking, kneading etc, with special attention to this area of the right psoas, especially where it meets and attaches to groin, pelvis, because this seems to be---after all these months of gradually bringing the pain out of referral to thighs, hamstrings, back---where the pain originates. Last time I saw the massage therapist, he pressed on a part of my pelvis that shot electrical shocks down leg and into brain. Then I went home and slept for three hours. Two days later I cried a sort of sick deep form of weeping I don't think I've registered before. And two days after that again, registering grief of rejection, a lifetime's worth. I thought today it would be the same massage but different, longer. But instead, after massaging back, shoulders, registering and soothing legs, spirit--I was nearly asleep, very odd--he had me turn over on my back, made some moderate adjustments of each leg, attended briefly each psoas, and then pulled up a stool and sat down, and placed his hand over my abdomen, just below my belly button, just above the pubic bone. He just stayed there. It was very strange. No electrical shocks. I started to cry. It was very embarrassing. Embarrassment the strongest sensation, and surprise and the shame of --what? he just stayed there. Then he asked me a lot of questions about the shape and color and texture and sensation of my experience. I won't share this with you, it's embarrassing in the way of a very small child not wanting to tell you their favorite color. This went on a really long time. Then the next thing was to begin to let that energy move. He was very kind. He asked if he could put some crystals on my body, I said ok. No one has ever done that before. My eyes were closed or paying attention to the slowly shifting changing moving internal terrain of my abdomen, my pelvis, my groin, my ovaries, my thigh. Then he did some other things, I'm not sure what, but for awhile gently massaging my skull. My body felt so light three fourths of it disappeared, it was as if it wasn't there, it was light instead. White light, absence of substance, how embarrasing to relate. I can't remember the rest, this much is embarrassing and doesn't express. I came home and slept for three hours.

Labor Day Event Details

2010-08-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

Agenda for Sunday, September 5, 1:00 - 7:00 p.m.

Studio One Art Center, 365 45th Street, Oakland

In an effort to include as many people as possible in this gathering, we are happy to announce that we will be posting audio files of the presentations on the Labor Day Event Blog shortly after each one is given. You'll be able to listen and participate no matter where you are.

1:00 - 3:30 p.m.

Welcome

Group I

Pam Lu  (text read by Erika Staiti)

Steve Farmer

Jason Morris

Lauren Levin

Brandon Brown   

(15 minute break)

Group II

Rodrigo Toscano (text read by Suzanne Stein)

Cedar Sigo

Chris Daniels (deputized by Pam Lu)

Dana Teen Lomax

Open Discussion

Break -- 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.

4:30 - 7:00 p.m.

Group III

Laura Moriarty

David Brazil 

Andrew Joron 

Vanessa Place 

15 minute break 

Group IV

Sara Larsen

George Albon (deputized by Stacy Szymaszek, text read by volunteer)

Samantha Giles (deputized by CA Conrad)

Kevin Killian

Open Discussion

Please note, there is an hour long break in the middle of the day. We won't be able to provide food but there is a lovely grassy area and patio out front, and we encourage you to pack a lunch! We will have coffee, tea, water, and cookies.

______________________

Agenda for Monday, September 6, 11 am - 2pm
at 21 Grand Gallery, 416 25th Street, Oakland

11 am - Noon

Potluck brunch

Noon - 2pm

Open moderated discussion

_______________________

Please spread the news! We hope to see you there! 

For more info: http://labday2010.blogspot.com/
If you can volunteer, or would like to bring something to the potluck brunch, write to us at labday2010@gmail.com

2010-08-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

2010-08-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

2010-08-20T07:00:00.001-07:00

2010-08-15T14:46:00.000-07:00

Day which I dig out with a shovel
Blue which piles up on the edges to become some night

2010-08-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

Please join us in the Bay Area this Labor Day Weekend for a unique collaborative event.

2010-07-30T16:11:00.000-07:00

Sunday, September 5, 1-7pm, Studio One, 365 45th Street, Oakland
Monday, September 6, 11am – 2pm, 21 Grand, 416 25th Street, Oakland

THIS EVENT IS FREE.

We are convening around the notion of labor and poetics. Because issues of labor and money are integral to so many of our lives as artists, we hope that gathering as presenters and participants will highlight the particularity of our struggle to “do two jobs,” that is, make artworks and earn a wage to support ourselves. For the many of us who are not employed by the University, the occasions for speaking in and with a group concerned with poetics and politics in a formal way are rare. We think and hope this gathering will be a positive model for thinking cooperatively in the future.

Our participant-presenters:

Chris Daniels (as deputized by Pamelu Lu), Steve Farmer, Samantha Giles (as deputized by CA Conrad), Andrew Joron, Kevin Killian, Lauren Levin, Dana Teen Lomax, Laura Moriarty, Jason Morris, Vanessa Place, and Cedar Sigo. We are also glad to be able to present short texts from Pamela Lu, George Albon (deputized by Stacy Szymaszek), and Rodrigo Toscano.

The gathering will include two events. On Sunday at Studio One we will have a day of presentations. On Monday (Labor Day), we will reconvene at 21 Grand Gallery for an open, informal, but hopefully rigorous conversation about issues and ideas raised in Sunday’s presentations and performances. This will be a potluck brunch at 11:00 a.m., with moderated conversation from 12:00pm to 2:00pm.

A detailed schedule of presentations will be available shortly before the event.

As we are organizing this in our "free time," we do of course need your help! There are several ways you can help. If you can host out of town attendees, furnish supplies for the potluck brunch, have video or other technical skills, or would like to pitch in and lend a hand facilitating the event itself, we would love to put you, uh, ‘to work’! Please send us an email at labday2010@gmail.com and tell us what you can offer.

Finally, this community event is open to all, and there will be no door charge. We would be quite grateful for help defraying costs of the event: for those who would like to contribute cash, we have set up a PayPal account. Money will go towards space rental costs, supplies, and tech.

Feel free to spread the news! We hope to see you there!  

David Brazil, Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen, Alli Warren

http://www.labday2010.blogspot.com/

original announcement/save the date is here.

2010-07-29T12:49:00.001-07:00

2010-07-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Stewart/Studio-111/Stewart-Susan_02_Apple_UPenn_4-20-04.mp3

2010-07-27T15:42:00.000-07:00

2010-07-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

2010-07-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

2010-07-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

<>http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Spicer/Spicer-Jack_Song-of-the-Bird-in-the-Loins.mp3

2010-07-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

It's your birthday, it's Bastille Day, which I didn't know anything about until you told me, you introduced me to Frank O'Hara, you took me to the Frick for the first time I never not think of you and all of these things at the same time, thank you for not letting it go wasted and thank you for giving all that to me, Happy Birthday

2010-07-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

2010-07-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

2010-07-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

2010-06-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

2010-06-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

"In the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same. The people will feel hopeless and depressed and panicked, because they can't deal with the post-growth economy and they will miss our dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be to attend to these people and to take care of their trauma showing them the way to pursue the happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance, zones of therapeutic contagion. Capitalism will not disappear from the global landscape, but it will lose its pervasive, paradigmatic role in our semiotization, it will become one of the possible forms of social organization. Communism will never be the principle of a new totalization, but one of the possible forms of autonomy from capitalist rule."

(More Bifo. Thanks to my friends)

2010-06-24T22:31:00.001-07:00

2010-06-24T08:53:00.001-07:00

2010-06-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

2010-06-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

"Virtual is a reality whose tangible physicality has been eliminated. Frigid Thought can well be recognized in the network world, where the relation to the other is artificially euphoric but substantially desexualized as well."

............................SAVE THE DATE.............................

2010-06-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

Labor Day 2010/ Convocation

Please join us in the Bay Area this Labor Day 2010 for a unique collaborative event.

Partly as a response to the form of the academic conference, in which invitees share the common condition of working in the academy, we are organizing a gathering in which poets who survive by other means are able to present in a formal structure that encourages conversation about poetics and social life.

The topic for this first convocation is therefore LABOR, and we have invited a number of poets and writers to prepare short presentations around how they earn a living.

Because issues of labor and money are integral to so many of our lives as artists, we are hoping that gathering as presenters and participants will highlight the particularity of our struggle to “do two jobs,” that is, make artworks and earn a wage to support ourselves. Because we are not employed by the University, the occasions for speaking in and with a group concerned with poetics and politics in a formal way are rare. But we think this gathering will be a positive model for thinking cooperatively in the future.

Specific locations and exact times remain TBD, however the overall structure of the event looks like this: Sunday afternoon and leading into evening, we'll gather in the East Bay to hear the presentations. Afterwards, we'll have drinks and socially process the material from that day's event. On Monday (late) morning, we'll all convene again to have brunch. At brunch, the presenters along with the audience will have an open, informal, but hopefully rigorous conversation about issues and ideas raised in the performances of Sunday.

We would especially like to encourage attendance by as many of you from outside the Bay Area as might be interested in participating. Because we understand that out-of-pocket travel can be quite expensive and difficult, we will do everything we can to try and help find accommodation and defray the cost of meals. And the weather is usually quite perfect here around Labor Day, if that’s any more persuasive.

This event is open to everyone, and we hope to see as many of you here as possible. This is also something to share with others. Travel will be easier if done in pairs or small groups, and absolutely no one is discouraged from participating.

We'll also look into the possibility of Skype or other forms of broadcast, in order to include as many as might wish to engage.

Times, locations, and a list of presenters shortly forthcoming.

We hope to see you there!

David Brazil, Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen, Alli Warren

2010-06-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

Valie Export, Ontological Leap, 1974

2010-06-09T04:39:00.000-07:00

yes always though you said it first
you the quicksand and sand and grass
as I wave toward you freely
the ego-ridden sea
there is a light there that neither
of us will obscure
rubbing it all white
saving ships from fucking up on the rocks

[etc, repeat]

2010-06-04T21:43:00.000-07:00

On the train coming home this evening I saw a near-blind lawyer I used to work for. He was reading a paperback novel. In order to read the paperback novel, just as I remember he would do in order to read the brief, the letter, the offshore hedge fund circular, he had the book held up so close to his face the pages practically touched the left lens of his eyeglasses. I only saw him as I was crossing the car to get to the open doors. I thought he saw me, that we had that exchange you have with people you once knew, slightly but very regularly, where you recognize, look away, and remember later who they were. But he couldn't have seen me, he can't see. He probably never knew what I looked like then. Did we note each other in the car anyway? Yesterday, no, Wednesday, the man sitting in front of me in the carshare looked so familiar, from where did I know him? Is it from the cafe? Have we had a conversation? I know his face, his beard, his hat, his style, everything. I couldn't place him. Later, that evening, I was standing in the staff reception entrance of the museum, talking with some new writers for Open Space, and out he came, this fellow: a colleague.

I'm not negotiating a crisis, but I'm negotiating something. Once upon a time--- I'd wake up every morning with pangs of guilt, anxiety, shame, it always circulated around the cigarette, that I'd smoked too much, too many, too long, that I smoked at all, that I was a smoker. When I quit, for several months even, I woke up every morning without that feeling, or with a set of comforting replacement feelings: relief that I hadn't smoked, also pride. But those feelings wore off as I gradually lost the addiction, and they were replaced by the surfacing of all the other anxieties or negotiations that were not about smoking but were about living. I don't have something I call those feelings; maybe I should call them 'morning feeling'. Recently they are mid-life-crisis style anxieties: where am I now, where will I be, what do I do next, with whom, where, I'm going to die, etc.

The 'I'm going to die' thing is a funny one. I was always going to die. From 8 or 9 until 40 I was sure I would die in my 39th year. Lo, I turned 40 and that was a very odd day. I call that a birthday. Who was I before that, besides a person who was sure she would die? One plans differently or not at all when one does not expect to continue to live.

Who reads this blog? Where should I invest my creative energy? What should come next anyway? I've finished up having made mistakes of the kind you make when you're half-alive and unhappy. In a way it seems like there aren't any other life mistakes to make, except for the failure to aim towards whatever's truest in the heart, give that kind of a clear path. Maybe it's a good idea to consider what they've always meant by 'nest egg'. What gets stored up for 'the future'? What was I doing up til now? Leslie and Judith asked me along with some others to write about "The Future." I had quite a terrible time with that. This blog post must be about Leslie. We talked about Paradise after that. I recall reading somewhere about people under extreme duress, and how time collapses or explodes into an infinite present in order to tolerate the intolerable constant presence of threat, of trauma, I read this in relation to a study of prisoners at Auschwitz, why am I recalling this now? I recall being in a graduate seminar with Stacy, and sitting in the half dark---why were the lights in the classroom out?---talking about this extreme duress and my own experience of -- I can not remember now what was so pertinent about my own experience of time to have so earnestly tried to articulate it then.

2010-05-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

Every acceptance may recognize an end, permit outcomes thus, but skillful
Uncovering has strength to negate, and nobody can act without art.
In expression, facts lock into yes and no, an alterance. Words are then
Positive while insubstantial. Promise. So vocabulary's each culmination's
Vehicle, even in dance, lexical, meaning limited. Meaning joy, celebrated
In finitude's context, assume a greater span upon ending. Since what's
Mortal's fettered, fulfillment extols death.

Each moment, fifteen pounds of air pin us by gravity. Then anyone
Needs sixteen pounds of lightness to ever budge. Such compliance
Demands levitation, must generate excitement, which passion enact;
Thus dreams have all they can handle. From a stone, anchored, is how
We rise, where faith is placed only in potential, miracle without
Dimension's measure so opening, unhinged at least, where each "they"
Is porous, in penetrability dunked and enriched.

"In the explosion," says the cat, "the whole world becomes a skin,"
Meaning ash coated every ledge and cranny, for good. Production then
Strung on dismantlement, an augmenting transparence where, seen as a
Model, renovation's inconceivable.

--Stacy Doris

2010-05-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

recent sighting

2010-05-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

2010-05-26T12:06:00.001-07:00