Hello to both of my readers. It’s been slow on the blog front of late, and will most likely continue to be for the next week or so. I’m trying to migrate my whole website over to a Wordpress install, to make it easier to manage from multiple locations. This blog’s address and feed will change, but not for a little while. This blog will stay up to keep old links current.
So much stuff to catch up on, not least the sudden return from summer haitus of the Openned boys. Firstly, in collaboration with Berbeck and Intercapillary Space, they have produced Constellation: Alice Notley.
Go there straight away!
Next up is the welcome return of the Openned readings:
Sorry I can’t make this one, guys, but I should be at the next.
Last but not least, Steve will be giving a talk at the Birkbeck TALKSTALKSTALKS series on 12th November, title of talk tba. Check out the original post on Openned, though I’m sure they will release further info when it’s available. These talks series are usually great, just formal enough without being stuffy, and generally an enthused and useful QA at the end. Plus the pub afterwards. Again, sorry I’m out of the country when this is on, Steve.
Openned was another good one. Decent turnout this evening, perhaps due to the extra-high-profile readers. Here’s a quick recap:
Ensemble whose name I didn’t catch first. Illness meant improv insert, skillfully achieved by good conducting and keen ears. My friend commented that in all the years he’s accompanied me to poetry events, this one fulfilled his need for woodwind, string, words and jazz hats. Bravo. But it wasn’t mere Jazz Club. It was, indeed, well-crafted sonically, and Steve did a good job, meeting crescendoes like Bruce Dickinson without the plane. He looks good in a hat.
Maggie O’Sullivan, whose work I have heard read on several occasions, is perhaps my favourite poet to hear read outload with voice. She is such a good reader of her own work, and it reminds me how much I have to work on my own delivery. O’Sullivan read from All Origins Are Lonely, which bears familiar phonetic play to earlier works, apparently embracing misheard and colloquial phrasings, jarrings and tensions in language. O’Sullivan’s voice carries through musical wordings, and often pretty odd phrasings, in a way which jars beautifully. An example might be how she delicately pronounces the phrase “abattoir voltages”. Lovely, indeed.
Part of the O’Sullivan reading, aided by Bernstein
David Bowie recently said, “if I were Justin Katko, I wouldn’t leave the house,” and I see his point. I’d stay in and sing meself opera. 8-bit videogame, suicyclical opera.
It was a whistlestop tour of the opera, at just under ten minutes, and so lots of the text was flixed thu at CRT rates. Justin recently posted the intro on the British Poets Listserv:
The Death of Pringle,
in which is related the Discursive Alignment of the Battlefield to Come. Our Story takes place in the Environs of Southern California’s Salton Sea, a World unto itself, where a Party of Alchemical Topologists and Real Bureaucrats have Launched an Imperial Scheme for World Domination. With the Power of a Mysterious 4-Dimensional Dust, an Infinite Research Grant, and a Fortified Lab Complex, these Imperial Mother Fuckers have acquired a Total Copy of Washington DC’s own Sonny Bono Memorial Park, binding it to the Interior of a Transparent Virtual Reality Sphere, and accessing, by means of this Chamber, a Fundament giving Real Physique to Architectures which until now have been merely Spectral. The Roll of the Great Plan continues. A Synthetic Atmosphere of Electro-Magnetized Dust is to be installed over and around the Sea, hermetically priming this Zone for Discrete Terraformalization. Upon the Accumulation of Power to the Critical Degree, it is their Vile Intention to Sublimate the Sphere’s Outputs into the Atmospheric Dust Particles, saturating the newly Truncated Sky with the Pure Stuff of the Virtual. Thus, the Entire Region takes on the unique Ontological Function of an Augmented Total Copy of the Sonny Bono Memorial Park, scaled Two Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty One Times its Actual Size. The Sea is converted into the Park’s Kentucky Bluegrass when the Mother Fuckers fill it up with Rotting Meat and let it grow its Own. This One Celestial Seed, bound in its Glowing Atmospherics, will Detach from the Earth to Propagate the Long Aether. The People, whom the Mother Fuckers have Tempted into Passive Alignment with Indefinite Free Lunch, must tend for Eternity the Park’s Banal Landscaping. And so goes the Evil Plan, but not unchallenged. A Pringle vested with the Power of Speech has Freed itself from the Lab Fortress, being one Pringle who has undergone Purchase and Storage, Stocked in the Laboratory as an Object of Experiment. Upon Escape, the Free Pringle brings News of the Imperial Machinations to the People. The Poets welcome this Talking Commodity and attend to its Speech; but the People, blinded by the Ease of their Freedom, fail to Listen to this Piece of their Food. It is thus that the Fate of the Commons and Autonomy itself is an Imperative Function of the Efficacy of the Poets’ Song. Will their Lyrics be well enough Advanced to Hijack the Technoitopian Scheming of the Imperial Mother Fuckers? Can a Pringle really DIE?
Who the fuck knows, but this question now seems pertinent enough to pursue.
Justin reading
You gots a good voice for singing, too. Proof (and reactshun documentashin):
And the music was awesome too. Bring on Opera 2.0.
Charles Bernstein, of course, a pro. Steve wisely skipped to the end of the intro and guaranteed I got the last train home. Bernstein read from a variety of work from over the last 15 or so years. Here’s how he could have introduced himself:
The email and list poems I found myself perhaps least receptive to from Bernstein’s reading. In spite of my line of poetic/digital interest, I find it hard to be convinced by spam-mail poetry, or the use of spam language. Perhaps part of my skepticism for this lies in the fact that spam language is, in and of itself, already deliberately disjointed in its quest to slip through the spamfilternet, making it’s re-presentation unremarkable unless it’s deflected elsewhere. Though Bernstein’s take shot through noise and into pockets of meaning in a way which was interesting (also reminded me in parts of the performances I’ve heard of Steve McCaffery’s Carnival) I still find email language a difficult one to use, but Bernstein’s was hardly a predictable take. Though I enjoyed the semantic implications of the “like” poem, though I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as the poems from which the above decontext springs, and the excerpts from “Girly Man” which was great finish to a great evening’s reading.
Illness and commitments away from puter are my excuses for my interwabsence of late. Appropriately, my recent hiatus comes the week before I give a workshop to my MA group about the importance of blogs for practice and self-enquiry (hmm, on practically every level, it would seem). What a role model.
Not that I need to be. The Small Publisher’s book fair was a triumphant weekend for the RHUL Poetic Practice group. When I arrived, I came to a table containing varied, GOOD work – impressive from a group only into their 3rd week on the course1
It showed that these students were already engaged with writing prior to joining the course. Hopefully this event showed them that their enthusiasm (I mean that in the least patronising way possible) is not wasted.
Which has right royally fucked up the order in which this post was supposed to unfold. Much has happened in the last week – I’ve discharged at least a tonne of mucus from my now peeling dry nostrils.
The Veer Away launch presented an opportunity to put a couple more notches in my poetry bedpost. Not that I shagged a poet – god forbid – but I did watch / listen to a few. And the Veer Away mag launch was well-attended by contributors, who read if they were there. I was interested to see Ulli Freer, whose shuffling rhythmread reminded me that he has more skill than mere Bowie lookalikes. Jow Lindsay’s reading employed a half-bad American accent. I’d seen videos previously of Jow performing another text all scotch, but it doesn’t take long to realise that these are more than mere gimmickry, though tis much fun. The mag as a whole seems to contain a varied and high-quality tenderloin of work. It’s baked pretty well too – guess they were funded by some body.
Jow pointed out a non-offensively critical viewpoint with regard to my own reading, noting that its clearly visual element is lost in translation. This is a problem indeed, and one I don’t think I can resolve. The double-page I have in Veer Away is a textual assemblage, a printed kind of montage of text, image, iconography. The visual muddling and working out of strategies is part of the process of reading it. Reading it out load to an audience, I guess, somehow undermines this very important aspect of the work. Still, I think it’s still enJowable as long as someone sees the rest later.
Saturday’s reading was kind of meh but ok. Over too soon because read so fast, which was the intention, although I hadn’t quite accounted for it quite so extremely. Still, who am I to steal the limelight and overrun? Thankfully, Steve Willey had enough info in his circuitboard to rescue the rest of us. Reading last, he carried us through so we filled the timeslot without looking like pussies. Rosheen I’d never heard read before – she has an excellent reading voice for her own work, I think.
Jow has also won first prize by spotting two references to Charlie Brown in my readings in one week (separate pieces of work). Yes, Jow. It was a kennel. I thought everyone knew that. Mind you, I had no idea that beagles smoked cigarettes. I suspect they will be glad about the recent rise in age limits for smokas.
Ok, that’s it for now. Seeing as Veer Away is free, I’ll get up the section I contributed on this blog in the next day or two (you-gotta-pad-a-blog-post-or-two).
Obvious exceptions were Sejal Chad and Graeme Estry, whose work was clearly more MA-ified in it’s proliferative-err, ness, but who have, let’s face it, had a YEAR and three weeks to get there [↩]
Openned have fixed the Anthology! Amendments are available for download, and they’ve offered a full-fat version for those of you with good eyes and equally good internet connections:
Stephen Willey, from Translations out of Walter Benjamin
Steve has been working on this project for some time, spending most of the preliminary stages researching Benjamin and laying out what appears to be an exceptionally thorough theoretical basis for his practice. Out of this comes Translations out of Walter Benjamin, a series of variations writing through Benjamin’s ghost (this is paraphrasing what Steve has told me about his work, and my apologies to him if this is inaccurate). Anyway, the result is a highly-planned and well-thought-out mish-mash of form. I don’t mean this negatively – Willey is experimenting here with various forms, some palimpsest in their approach (in one, a carefully deconstructed Battersea Power Station – a landmark notably unscathed in the Blitz, dictates the layout for an overlapping text; in another, an old Elizabeth Arden advert is détourned to subvert the existing language and set a context for the new language) some adopting the format of codes and structures to imply (in my view) a system of reading analogous with that code.
Both of these examples strike me as interesting. I am always hot for détourned media, diagrammatical systems, code structures. But Steve’s use of code structures reinforces that we should be reading his texts differently to the usual. Code (or at least the type of code he seems to emulate in this extract) is object oriented, much like regular language use. Yet it possesses its own terms of use and parsing of object, and how an object is created. Bastardised HTML code implies broken anchors, unfinished (or already finished) links to nowhere. Curly brackets contain the parameters of a function, thus redefining the possibilities of meaning in “loop + echo” in terms of quantifying qualitative values or implying that loop and echo must have numerical equivalents and are therefore extraneously referential. Lists within functions imply arrays which themselves imply a one-out-of-many decision making process – a glance at a text of which only one array per realisation would exist.1
All of this is just personal interpretation, of course, but the way Steve has jumped from form to form means that one is only just getting used to one way of reading before being jerked into the next frame.
With all this focus on form, I’m not ignoring the text itself. Yet Steve’s texts are so intertwined with the form that binds them that neither seems secondary to the other. The projection slides, for example, demand readings through their shadings which exceed a left-to-right, top-to-bottom scan. Various reading strategies based on the textual aesthetics are naturally provoked, producing several sub-texts within an overall text.
Ceri Buck, What is action?
Ceri Buck, where have you been? Or where have I been? And how do I go about talking about your work when we sat together all those times and fretted about dissertation woes through beer soaked eyes?
Of course, I know how good Ceri’s work is – I saw it. I knew. Still, it’s been a while since I saw newer work (probably the last time I saw anything was in HOW2, and her performance at the e-poetry festival 2005). What is action? is phonetic and visual pun / play / trap-setting at its finest. Like an autistic mother, Ceri’s neologisms slip you up and make you think of combinations. Combinactions. Then we’re in another crammed paragraph of open meanings with not enough seconds for the words. In the rush towards definition, we fall over the ‘wrong words’ and are brought abruptly to the surface once more:
somewhere in London a woman hijacks the supermarket tannoy to sing sweetly to the shoppers ‘combat the capitalist inside of you’ / Where was I and what did I do when Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed? A keep pressed battery hen blind of free rage
This is combined with a kind of Steinian repetition-variation-repetition trap, spanning a few mere words or travelling across paragraphs. I get pulled to and fro and I like it. My favourite:
5. Desirable bacteria
or is not ravaged by the imprint scorch of a kiss & waking up mast
Ur bating? repossess a connection in a possessive it rubs it rubs up against us Up against against Up freedom from possession(s) up
against love one how it rubs up against up free pursue against possess up love another are you sure you want to be here? Can we check in?
I’ve got that feeling in my belly gut feeling belly warmth context is everything a warm feeling in my belly a deep low belly feeling an
awareness of the belly belly deep down warm the blood spilling This coming must do something!
Demo and Die, Flickerng Bdy, John Sparrow
Such utter genius defies words. Only kidding. Big pile of shit, ignore at all costs.2
Drew Milne
Read this poem (poems) and notice how your mind runs out of breath. Milne’s punctuationless onslaught is perhaps so entertaining because it doesn’t form any kind of tirade against anything, rather it seems to collect and disperse genres or themes (in a vocabulary sense rather than a narrative sense) such as music, tools, ancient civilization, mythology, archeology, architecture and more.
However, it’s where these vocabularies cross over which strikes me as interesting. “spinal tap”, “Zildjian”, “big hair”, for example, are very visual words3, through which “set to slay in metal” “axe” (”golden axe” too – which calls to memory the early 90s computer game) “rock god” take on new meanings. It is this dense battle of contexts drives on the text, and, thankfully (for me at any rate) heavy metal wins.
Word grids make many reads, then back into juxtapolevaulting as phrases cram together emoshred:
neo-industrialists in prog lime glad rags
leopard slipper shaker all heaviest raw
denim columns to riff glow the republic
preaching the perverted ivy corinthians
cometh the shredder cometh the beard
metalocalypse beyond parody sky blue
willy-tinsel and emo schlong giving pink
spandex in thrashtastic grunt retro-stonk
loose stoic populists hardnosed to brine
scuzzy perhaps
Extra marks to Milne for inclusion of the word “stonk”, which the Urban Dictionary defines as “World War II British slang for a massed artillery bombardment on an enemy position” but which also might stir in some memories of a Comic Relief campaign centred on the “stonk”, along with suitably bad music release.
John Cayley, to whom I attribute a great deal of inspiration with regard to digital poetics, features in the Anthology in the first section of PART 2. imposition was performed at an Openned night which I regrettably had to miss. This is a shame, as it’s a piece of work which I find conceptually very interesting, and was keen to see how the concept was realised in a live setting. The Anthology coverage forms a link to the main Openned site (in the real internets) which opens up a Quicktime panorama of the Foundry setting, with the audio of the performance over the top. The inclusion of the panorama certainly is not an arbitrary aesthetic decision; part of the brief for the audience was to arrive with any laptops handy, and with the software installed and ready to go. The result is that the audience form much of the performance – an achievement strikingly visual as around 1/3 of the audience sit with their laptops all working in tandem.
The notes on imposition state that the project is “the networked performance of an evolving collaborative work engaged with ambient, time-based poetics and harmonically organized, language-driven sound.”1 As loaded as this statement may seem, it makes more sense given its origins in overboard (footnoted in imposition’s notes), a ‘textual painting’ in which, as far as I can tell, noise and a stable text interact, one emerging through the other.
Such a setup seems relevant for the performative setting of imposition, since it foregrounds a reciprocal creative process between human beings and their language, all in terms of a wider reflexive participation with the media of flesh and machine. Random generation within algorithmic constraints produce textual variations, and it would appear that the same algorithmic system has been remapped onto the compositional strategies of Giles Perring.
I hope I can participate in one of these performances soon.
Fiona Templeton, imagining being at the republican convention
Before picking up Mum in Airdrie (available here) I was really only familiar with Templeton’s work YOU–The City. Like Mum, this excerpt utilises mainly extremely short lines of text which, as I noted in Robert Hampson’s work, seem to blur the starting and finishing points of phrases. This is helped by the occasional neologism (or perhaps partial erasure), as in the following:
bang
off the realm of
eager range
sun pists down
hold you on hold
like fire spreading
a scale of dampnation
and this is where I really
oozes itself
disturb
lack of
kid knownly2
This extract scans fairly easily but turns away from comfotable closure at every turn. “pist” here could be a partially erased “piste” turned into a verb. It also phonetically demands a reading as “kissed” as in sun kissed (or even Sunkist) or (the way I like to read it) “pissed” turned into a kind of past-participle present hybrid verb. I like this reading better, as it complements the neologism “dampnation” later in the extract, a word which seems to imply wet damnation as well as simply an adjective and noun fused. “kid knownly” might go unnoticed as “knowingly” at first glance, only to refuse that reading alone. Interestingly for me, the persistent grammatical disagreements produce a plateau through which such tensions come through with exciting energy. Such has been the joy of reading Templeton’s page-based work for me.
This post has taken longer than I’d expected! I’ll carry on in my next Anthology roundup with Steve Willey’s excerpts from his extended project (to be presented as part of his MA disertation) writing through Walter Benjamin. His relationship with this project, I assume, will eventually drive him mad.
As an aside, it would be interesting if anyone has anything to add / disagree regarding my comments on these works so far. No pressure, but feel free.
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