l to r, joseph, jared, andrew...photo by jennifer dunlap...
this past july, andrew peterson, joseph cooper, and myself met in beantown for some daysnights of thievery and general pirate-like behaviors. i want to recap (from some distance now) on some of the conversations as well as attempt to (re?) vision gestures in my own poetic repetitions.
We walked: from the Y, to Northeastern U, to the fens, to fenway, to cambridge, to boylston, to MIT, to Harvard, to bookstores, to etc...we walked. we took the trains. we dove headfirst into a sideways rainstorm. we drank. we walked. we burned. we walked. we had a catch. but most of all...we read poems. we read poems out loud. we talked about what was just read. we (re)membered our own histories. we created. we collaborated. we destroyed. we talked. we read. we continued to walk. Joe had blisters.
as i look back into my memory (is memory something to look back into or to actively create?)i am overwhelmed by the pleasure of encounter and the friendship the three of us shared together that weekend. in fact, as of this moment, the joy of it clouds some of the fruitful knowledge making that occurred (as exegesis may be a kind of illusion anyway(?)). im learning i shld carry a digital recorder with me everywhere i go so that i might mis(re)member more succinctly. in any case, andy, seems to always be carrying the right texts for (dare I say it) coterie engagements. i'm sure it has to do with his love and attention to the various constellations of New York School.
Non-New York school related Sidenote: i smiled, and am smiling again thinking about a moment when we all brought up Creeley and his idea/use of the living-room-word "company"...and now it seems as though my moment was not singular but rather a congruence of a few choice interactions when it seemed as though no other word made more
sense in its relation to us there, then in those particular momentums...
So Back to it: Andy has immediately with him at a bench at Northeastern U, ron padgett's YOU NEVER KNOW. I remember thinking as we shared the reading, volta, volta, volta (like marsha, marsha, marsha) and...these are amazing TEXTBOOK prose poems...and now i'm also (re)membering mr. padgett has also written poetry TEXTBOOKS...
padgett sidenote: those prose poems are, to me, exemplifications of a kind of postmodern reading/writing through of a modernist lineage...the manner in which (i apologize for the quick labeling rather than an extensive unpacking) a kind of "personism" infused with padgett's relationship to other new york schoolers, berrigan and koch in particular (again, to my less than comprehensive reading) combine with a line of breton, aragon, shlovsky, and jakobsen...wait...not sure that NY/surrealist/futurist labels can really describe what i mean now or what i meant then...no matter...the reading cld stand a closer gesture sometime...Joe...what was it you said, there, then, about cinema, about padgett's imagery, about his skullduggery? about his influence and relation to a different kind of visual world...and andy, what was your observation about the actual films he wrote about and through? will you both attempt to remember for us, (or make it up again) and add your thoughts here( ).
by then we were lit up...the twilight shone through our eyes and we felt spirits in our smiles and word-voices...we went to some bars...we read from each of our newest projects...re-re-vealing our poetics to one another...my own overtly obsessive interaction with ethics and architextural pre-conception, joe's pursuit of transcendence through excess, violence and desire, andy's deconstructive phenomenology of dream-presence through lyric dream (collecting) memory (collecting)...all of us landing in a matrix of shared relationships to poets, geographies, histories...a shared desire for the blaser labeled spicerian PRACTICE OF OUTSIDE...for a dialogic or polylogic approach to reading and writing (our worlds)...and maybe connecting most of this is the desire for the disruption of traditional, phallogocentric, static, singular, authoritative panoptic modes of authorship...but maybe i'm just projecting my own values upon that great time...
...so although we didn't know it yet in beantown...the best was yet to come...installment two with buffalo addendum coming in the near future!
