A Movie For Jared Hayes

the poetry meme...

THE FIRST POEM I REMEMBER READING WAS...

Surname Viet Given Name Nam (?) Trinh T. Minh Ha
Frankenstein (?) Mary Shelley.
Job (f. the bible)(?) GOD.
Titus (?) Shakey Shakes.
The Kingfishers(?) Olson.
The Light in the Crevice (?) Hounani K. Trask.
Looking for Livingston (?) Marlene Nourbese Philip
The Raven (?) Poe.
Naked Lunch (?) Burroughs.
Howl (?) Ginsberg.
Mamma Roma (?) Pier Paolo Pasolini.
A baseball game
a sermon
My Life (?) Hejinian.
Ring of Fire (?) Jarnot.
Tender Buttons (?) Stein.
Language (?) Spicer.

(I really don't know...i mean they all are "first poems" to me for different if not at times similar reasons... and my memory seems to transfigure itself as i try to think
of what i have thought
at times what a poem might be...)

I WAS FORCED TO MEMORIZE NUMEROUS POEMS IN SCHOOL AND...

...Um...Just two as I remember...Mercutio's queen Maab speech in Romeo and Juliet...but my teacher had us theme out the scene for fun...so i played mercutio as a hippie wastoid....my teacher responded to my almost perfectly recited speech/poem as hipster with an affectionate, "jared, i trust you're not really stoned..."

...the only other time I was required to memorize a poem was for Reed Bye at Naropa...but in his contemplative poetics class i knew i could have a little fun with it...so taking a cue from a Rimbaud poem Andy Peterson had given me, I translated the lines of the poem i was supposed to be memorizing...i think it was Perce Shelley (SP?) or a Niedecker poem....into only its vowels...then following rimbaud, translated the vowels into colors...then i memorized the sequence and recited that back to the class...in the end, getting out of memorizing the poem might have proved more difficult. One line read, red, red, blue, white, white, red, green, red, red, red...

MY FIRST PUBLICATION...

Was either a non-fiction community college newspaper article on composition instructor and editor of 3rd bed, Vincent Standley...at the time i had no idea of the journals place in the american lineage of avante...although i bought it because he was my professor and i was interested...and i felt an energy in it hard to find in community college comp texts...The piece i wrote was just a sort of spotlight..."Hey look at this great teacher" kinda thing...

The other "first" publication was a poem titled "War Room." It was published in Western Washington University's Womens Center Journal, Labyrinth. It was an anti-war pantoum.

I READ POETRY BECAUSE...Is there anything elso to read...but i don't mean this as a contempt for other literatures, rather it is an attempt to try and see every Thing (object, sound, feeling, sight, taste, etc.) as poetry..or as an extension of humanity's transmissions into the world...our world is made of poetry...the question becomes (for me)... when are we not seeing poetry?

...And this is not to make a universal statement but to call into question the idea that poetry is some specific thing and suggest that poetry is much more abundant in our culture than we sometimes think or is presented by institutions who hold particular interest in keeping static the imagination of the beings in their vicinity...

FAVORITE POEM QUESTION...

The Man Without Content (?) Agamben.
Autobiography of a Stutterer (?) Cooper.
Museum of Thrown Objects (?) Peterson.
Periplum Maps our Star/ Less Shores (?) Rogers.
The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (?) Kapil.
Look at Me Now and Here I Am (?) Stein.
Proprioception (?) Olson.
Brain of the Earths Body (?) Preziosi.
Arcades Project (?) Benjamin.
Collected Celan (?)
Parade Rain (?) Koshkin.
This is Affront You Pig (?) Logan Ryan Smith.
Neoliberal Rocket Badge(?) Boykoff
For Love (?) The Creels.
Mouf (?) Sakkis.
Ring of Fire (?) Jarnot.
That They Were at the Beach (?) Scalapino.
Discipline and Punish (?) Foucault.
Eunoia (?) Bok.
Notes on the Possibilities and Extractions of Existence (?) Hollo.
Level Ground (?) Armentrout.
Kill or Cure (?) Waldman.
A (?) Zuk
Tri/Via (?) Corpuz and Naka Pierce
Kaddish (?) Ginsberg.
Stanzas in Meditation (?) Stein.
S*PERM**K*T (?) Mullen.
Precinct Kali and The Gertrude Spicer Story (?) Bertolino.
So We Have Been Given Time Or (?) Nakayasu.
Oxota (?) Hejinian.
Further Sightings and Conversations (?) Rothenberg.
Cunt-ups (?) Bellamy.
Une Semaine De Bonte (?) Ernst.
Four Buildings on Mardou Street (?) Killroy.
Happy Birthday of Death (?) Corso.
Collected Spicer
Collected Berrigan
Naked Lunch (?) Burroughs.
Howl (?) Ginsberg.
Lunch Poems (?) OHara.
Spring and All (?) WCW.
M (?) Cage
Finnegans Wake (?) Joyce.
Scout (?) Cole.
Vicuna (?)
Howe (?)
Harry Smith (?)

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature...

what if in fact it is not the writing which determines a genre or categorical designation but the reading...in this sense i am a reader of poetry regardless of what formal architecture is brought to my senses...um, or at least try to be....so i read both the formal category of poetry the same way i try and read other types of literature...

I Find Poetry...

...constantly...

The Last TIme I Heard Poetry...

Jules Boykoff's Reading!!! I saw someone read there own poems in a way that revealed how no one else could have written them, and they were, genuinely political, collaborative, and social.

I THINK POETRY IS...

We Think
Poetry Is.

I tag, Andrew Peterson, Jennifer Rogers, Joseph Cooper, Elizabeth Guthrie, and Michael Koshkin.

Happy Holidays From the Fairy Elf Jester

wowzah

the barn door is open
mammals running amuck
a word an awk
someone sat upon a duck
a foot in pooh
and a little piggy too
ah, the barnyard
how gracious you are

A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM

I first encountered this picture on the wall of the great Andrew Peterson. Last night I saw a documentary about it. It was amazing.

::

"you should be on the oulipo payroll."

Beatrice Duckofsky translated homophonically by Gertrude Spicer

From "B-12"

Eternity
is not
worth my time.

****
From "B-4"

This is a frame
so is this

we are framed

frameable
this is a frame
so is this

as you proceed
remember framing

for this
and this
both are frames

frames framing
so other frames may frame
themselvesin.

****
From "B-17"

this is the yesterday
tomorrow

i wanted nothing
i wanted everything
it was better than opera
plotted over several years
in it bob barker performs

shrinking
to such sizes

the gorilla has made it
into the girls bathroom

but he only holds handouts
"he whathe howhe means love"

this is the
do or not do.
It follows me like someone who hates me.
over here with the roses
over there aristotle,
peaches, as it were
it is, the mind is never found
producing movement without the will

rest or restless
does it not ask for it
again, gaining,
it is driving
Me wild.

****

From "B-2"

there is no bowling in boulder.

****

What's up with the Livestock Editions?

I keep hearing Jen say she feels bad for not sending in the final mss yet, but I know it's big enough for a chap....bigger....how big is it, you must be wondering...

What else will be coming from Livestock?

lest we forget

the ropes
the ropesthe ropesthe ropesthe ropesthe ropes

Echo to Narcissus: a poem for and after Allen Ginsberg, suggested by Andrew Peterson.

i myself sAw the sunfLower-monkeys of the moon

i stared in the mirror naked today

i'm getting baLder

my kittEn mews

what uNiverse do i enter

thank God i know
i dunno

that i taste the shIt of being at last, that i touch thy geNitals
thrilled with my deathleSsness, thrilled with this endlessness i dice and Bury
come poEt shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your eaR
with my fuckinG suave manners & knowitall.

for every goon i ever met but especially for reed bye

the basic problem in artistic endeavor is the tendency (to cultivate our ability) to imagine that yr mind is like a calm lake or a vast empty pure clear interpretation of blue mountain mind waves a mirror as our own mind weeds gently and precisely instructing children fantasies that neither love nor hate the attention of a flower cultivating experience of someone who lives in a bustling dried hollyhock hummingbird fog thick impermanence of a saner look at suffering the air is fresh filled withhighfalutin colorful adventures very poetic on the breath yr eyes away the monkey's shadow something outside something inside branch to branch the human realm a single breath the surest proof was put in jail which is based on emptiness and the color yellow heaven and works perception you look through a sight savage and deadly a partial definition of individuals who spread across the ceiling still seeking language which is quite rich apart from the complaints we experience it try it just zero you are not confined to a pidgeonhole.

Consultations Available: Patients Needed

the professors, the quacks, the savage medicine
sticky, thick and putrid air
exposed to the most suitable subjects

the clinic brings into play
the study of monsters
monstrosities of human beings

in the quasi-paralysis of the intestines
this autonomous organic space
opened in time

(pain, heat, acceleration of the pulse)

open up a few corpses
through the thoracic cavity
a hasty, composite training

we have discovered a pathological anatomy...

"a clinic of symptoms seeks the living body of the disease;
anatomy provides it only with the corpse" -foucault

a doubly misleading corpse interrupted by death

RIP Bob Barker

Bob Barker is heading toward his last showcase, his final "Come on down." The silver-haired daytime-TV icon is retiring in June, he told The Associated Press Tuesday.

ADVERTISEMENT

"I will be 83 years old on December 12," he said, "and I've decided to retire while I'm still young."

He'll hang up his microphone after 35 years as the host of "The Price Is Right" and 50 years overall in television.

Though he has been considering retirement for "at least 10 years," Barker said he has so much fun doing the show that he hasn't been able to leave.

"I've gone on and on and on to this ancient age because I've enjoyed it," he said. "I've thoroughly enjoyed it and I'm going to miss it."

Reaching dual milestones, 50 years on television and 35 with "Price," made this an "appropriate" time to retire, Barker said. Besides, hosting the daily CBS program — in which contestants chosen from the crowd "come on down" to compete for "showcases" that include trips, appliances and new cars — is "demanding physically and mentally," he said.

"I'm just reaching the age where the constant effort to be there and do the show physically is a lot for me," he said. "I might be able to do the show another year, but better (to leave) a year too soon than a year too late."

Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corporation, said Barker has left an enduring mark on the network, calling his contribution and loyalty "immeasurable."

"We knew this day would come, but that doesn't make it any easier," Moonves said in a statement. "Bob Barker is a daytime legend, an entertainment icon and one of the most beloved television personalities of our time."

Barker began his national television career in 1956 as the host of "Truth or Consequences." He first appeared on "Price" on Sept. 4, 1972 and has been the face of the show ever since.

A CBS prime-time special celebrating the show's longevity and Barker's five decades on TV was already under way, a network spokesman said.

To kick off his retirement, Barker said he will "sit down for maybe a couple of weeks and find out what it feels like to be bored." Then he plans to spend time working with animal-rights causes, including his own DJ&T Foundation, founded in memory of his late wife, Dorothy Jo, and mother, Matilda.

He said he'd take on a movie role if the right one came along, but filmmakers, take note: "I refuse to do nude scenes. These Hollywood producers want to capitalize on my obvious sexuality, but I don't want to be just another beautiful body."

Freemantle Media, which owns "Price," has been looking for Barker's replacement for "two or three years," Barker said. And he has some advice for whoever takes the job: learn the show's 80 games backwards and forward.

"The games have to be just like riding a bicycle," Barker said. "Then he will be relaxed enough to have fun with the audience, to get the laughs with his contestants and make the show more than just straight games, to make it a lot of fun."

As for his fans, Barker said he "doesn't have the words" to express his gratitude.

"From the bottom of my heart, I thank the television viewers, because they have made it possible for me to earn a living for 50 years doing something that I thoroughly enjoy. They have invited me into their homes daily for a half a century."

But when it comes to saying his final TV goodbye, Barker said he'll do it the same way he does each day on "Price": "Help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered."

on dawn’s grey hunting ground
the buildings break the sky
with points and right angles

as phantasms play a game
of keep-away with the light
curvilinear swimming in the rays

spots of water fall on our eyes
and chins that are bent upward
before turning downward to the walk

of concrete blotched and dull
past the donut shop of coffees and oils
and early blank conversations

rising up from the escalator
leading down to a series of tunnels
filled with trains and people turning

with yellow lights at their helm
and the bending reds streaming
at their backs thru the dug-in dark

while above thousands of feet stomp
on their heads and wheels roll over
their upturned faces lit up

thru windows as they stand
shaking in the fluorescence of
the dry lulling train car

as light flickers above light
flickers below turning
faces on faces off and on

while the roar of planes are
heard but not seen and
the city is a desert in the rain

on a count of morning

All This Falling Away--Section 2

Cautious steps
Through snow dust
Early Monday
Dark fades from mountaintops
New day’s nausea
Disorienting sleep
Walk slowly into graves
Convinced of morning’s
Cruel signature
Sunburst pain
Explosion above the hips
Dawn abandoned hope
Grey
Like milked excuses


A desire for stomachs
Calm as Tuesday
Cold breakfast in the snow
Reinventing ritual
With a hand shovel
Sage and crystals
Burial before earth freezes
The preservation of life
Does not guarantee its quality
Laboratory rejection
Is still a death sentence
Fragmented
By glory and illusion
Rising with winter sun


Disastrous leadership
Scanned crowds down lines
Of pointed fingers
The search for home
Where blame can rest
On thieves of Wednesday’s innocence
Responsibility minimized
Sliding in and out of back doors
Shadowed compassion
History has been shaved
Sounds of bone echo
Memories of meat
Refusal to admit
Flesh is an opaque veil


Late eyes
Lifted thick from frost
Pre dawn doors frozen open
Visions of breath
Crystallized shift to higher gear
Climbing red lines
Into white hills
Ground crunch beneath
Boot heel
Silent exodus
Through Thursday’s routine
Ceremonies of movement
Break like language
Into cold air


Blindfolded formless dawn
Without light
Conversations break into divisions
Sidelined dark intentions
To howl in solitude
Obliterate the sun
Speeding through a thunderstorm
In a cardboard box
Symbolizing nothing
The actions of dismemberment
Rain falls on Friday
A universe laments
The sin of imagining purity
When hands eliminate space

Buddhist Poem for Reed Bye after Emily Dickinson

Mind
Sufficient

Sufficient
Mind

Ear
Word
I knew I heard

An eye
A thing
I know
Came in

As if
Body
Might
Setting kernel in
Into the dust
Went out

Uncertain
Light
The windows
Could not see

hankering

It's 6:54 am. I'm running late for work and see no reason why I shouldn't be later. So I'm here, feeling it relevant to mention that I would very much like to eat sausage. Perhaps some gravy and a biscuit.


oink you meaty acrobats.

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the buff finally unburied...have always wanted involvement in disaster...this didn't quite satisfy...somewhat like being inches from the tit...

A closet of hacked tongues, too full, to speak easily, forms an orchestra out of severity, bulk, / and belts out the symphony bloody, eminent, damp.

"In summer those who are fat attract attention, in winter, those who are thin." --Walter Benjamin

...

i thought i was here.

HAHA

I am not the gobbler. Turkeys have neckbeards. We make obsessive connections. The feathers look like oil in a parking lot, hinting at an entirely different somewhere over the rainbow. Turkeys travel in large groups, often covering the same several mile round track every day.
Driving through Audra State Park recently, a flock of turkeys was mistakenly referred to as "peacocks," but little did the enthusiast know, peacocks do not reside in the Appalachian mountains. The enthusiast has since become the butt of several jokes against common knowledge. However, the deer are abundant and running out of cover. Time to kill or be killed. Motorists beware. This year, the deer will have their revenge. Perhaps there we find the culprit behind the missing/found bike. The deer want us driving so they can attack. Two wheeled travel protects us and renders them defenseless.
Back to the drawing board.

thoughts on the work of bhanu kapil

Bhanu Kapil's new book, Incubation: A Space for Monsters, has just been released from Leon Works. In anticipation for this work (of which I am waiting for in the mail from spd) I offer some thoughts on Kapil's previous volume from Kelsey St. Press, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.

Donald Preziosi defines modernity in a recent lecture given at MOCA in LA:

"Modernity is a relational term, co-existing dialectically with real or imagined pasts and futures. It has always been a utopian concept of time, staging a virtual present suspended between twin desires: between a romanticized and allegedly unfulfilled past, and a longed-for future of progressive empowerment....A present utopia in which past and future are staged as museological artifacts, in which the future is projected as the wish-fulfillment of what aims to reinvigorate that unfulfilled past...Modernity marks a mode of interruption; a discontinuity with what in hindsight are conventionally claimed as anterior states of continuous or continuing social, cultural, historical, political, ethical, and aesthetic development, evolution, or progress, whether real or imaginary...To cite ideas of modernity is to acknowledge sites of contestation which potentially threaten to reveal the very artifice itself of time, and history, chronology, and identity; even the very idea of the nation itself is a phantasm." (Preziosi, Pacified Modernities: Museum Culture as Civic Engagement: MOCA March 10-11, 2006)

Most importantly for this blog entry is the way in which this definition allows for us to acknowledge the relational extent to which our lives might be artificial, phantasmatic. This writing is concerned with how we might investigate what Preziosi termed "sites of contestation." How might we as community members, academics, and artists, investigate the artificialness of our lives? I suggest we look to Bhanu Kapil's Vertical Interrogation of Strangers as a way to think about all of this.

Vertical Interrogation begins with three specific gestures: an epigraph from Helen Cixous' Utopias, an introduction, and a list of questions. In different ways each of these gestures offers us a way of understanding and problematizing the ideas presented in Preziosi's definition. The Cixous quote, the first gesture, exemplifies much of what Preziosi suggests. The Quote:

"Because she arrives, vibrant, over and over again; we are at the beginning of a new history, or rather a process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another. As a subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places. (In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history.)

"I wished that women would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard of songs. Time and again, I too, have felt so full of luminous torrents I could burst--burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put in frames and sold for a stinking fortune."(Vertical Interrogation, Pg. 5 epigraph, excerpted fr. Helene Cixous' Utopias)

By beginning in this way, Vertical Interrogation seems to be staging or framing a specific modernity. "A new history, or rather process of becoming, " resembling the "mode of interruption" Preziosi brings to our attention. From this passage Vertical presents us with Cixous' utopic feminist modernity, one that surely interrupts and detaches women from some other modernity. I might wonder here if this "simultaneity" of blended history and subjectivity is Cixous' attempt at breaking from a patriarchal modernity that supports itself by rigorously attributing a hierarchical, linear, chronological and binaristic structure to its world. If the patriarchal mode has its own kind of modernity with its own "unfulfilled past" and "longed-for future" doesn't the feminist modernity Cixous presents exist in the same way? I want to imply in this statement that because of their similar aspects, of being both utopic modernities, they invite the possibility to share similar fates; both hold the potential to become unwittingly co-opted in polarized non-negotiations.

The second paragraph of the Cixous epigraph is a call for women to write this kind of modernity, this simultaneus interruption to which women and "other unacknowledged sovereigns" have access. Vertical Interrogation's first gesture then, is to forecast an interruption of one modernity by another: A feminist one, which simultaneously blends the subjectivities and histories of women, from a presumably patriarchal one. These ways of reading our world, be they a feminist modernity or a patriarchal one, are inevitably revealed by the numerous ways in which they are projected onto the forms of our world. However artificial, these perceptions and projections of modernities reside in the stuff of our lives. The objects, poems, artworks, fashions, etc. as well as the ideas and time we share are all bound and interspersed with our own modern conception. And so the Cixous quote ends fittingly, addressing the very real artifice of materiality, "burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put in frames and sold for a stinking fortune."

I want to offer the Cixous quote, as well as the next two gestures that begin Kapil's book, as a possible method and context of relational modernity as critique. And really, what is important to me here isn't necessarily identifying theories of modernity, although that could be useful, but rather how one puts to practice their own idea or perception of moderity in a transformatively critical way. The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers first gesture provides the stage for this critical performance. Cixous invokes a break, an "unfulfilled past and longed-for future," an idea of a nation or "unique empire," and suggests that this is related to aesthetic forms: objects, ideas. Preziosi's words become relevant, To cite ideas about modernity is to acknowledge sites of contestation which potentially threaten to reveal the very artifice of time, and history, chronology, and identity; even the very idea of the nation is a phantasm." Cixous is indicting a kind of beauty that is put into a frame (for who has been doing this framing) and at the same time is presenting us with a "site of contestation" that marks a specific convergence of modernities. Implied in this last phrase used in the Cixous quote beginning Vertical (as I will continue to call it) is the tangibly felt artifice of Cixous' modernity in relation to another's. I argue that within this acknowledgment of artifice lies transformative potential.

And thus ready to be transformed we reach the second gesture of Vertical: The Introduction. Many of the ways this book problematizes, or is an example of modernity as a critical device, rely on this Introduction.

In brief, the Introduction explains that for four years Bhanu Kapil "traveled in India, England, and the United States, interviewing Indian women of diverse ages and backgrounds." Kapil asked these women to respond to twelve questions she had predetermined. The interviews were written or recorded and lasted thirty minutes. She states that in editing the responses "she did not attempt to 'clean up' their roughness or rawness in terms of syntax or grammar, spelling, punctuation, or the way in which they filled the space of the page." Kapil continues by explaining that she also answered these questions herself, leaving them on places, on stickers, on scraps of paper, etc. This introduction (within the larger one composed of the aforementioned three gestures) has two main sections; both have concluding sentences referring to stages of the project's conception.

"The project as I thought it would be: an anthology of the voices of Indian women."

And,

"The project as I wrote it: a tilted plane."

Between these last quotes, Kapil reveals ambiguities that impel us to question borders or interfaces relevant in aesthetics and authorship. Directly put to the question in this introduction is who the author might be. Is it Kapil, or is it the women she interviewed, or, maybe most importantly, is there a difference between the two? In fact, if we combine this question with the previous Cixous epigraph it might suggest the "simultaneity" of a feminist modernity. The least of which this introduction does is to call into question the very troubling idea in western aesthetic thought of what/who or when is an author? If we cannot specifically call Bhanu Kapil the author of this work, what then might we label her as? Editor? Curator? Collector? Idiosyncratic collector?

What then constitutes authorship? What constitutes an anthology? What does it mean to question such seemingly obvious and culturally prolific constructions? This gesture, towards specific ambiguity could be an acknowledgement of our world, our current modernity in relation to others, as artifice and therefore a world able to be transformed, and mythologically broken away from.

David Harvey's Essay "Modernity as Break" proves useful in demonstrating how Vertical's introduction makes the book an appropriate subject for a performative investigation. Harvey addresses two sides of the discussion around modernity. In his words, the first side, "One of the myths of modernity is that it constitutes a radical break with the past." And, "The alternative theory of modernization (rather than modernity), due initially to Saint-Simon and very much taken to heart by Marx, is that no social order can achieve changes that are not already latent within its existing condition." These two sides converge in what Harvey terms "Creative Destruction". He writes, "So if modernity exists as a meaningful term, it signals some decisive moments of creative destruction." The essay describes in detail how, in the years following 1848 in Paris, a Creative Destruction overtook the city. He explains the work of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Daumier, and Haussmann, illuminating how their massive revolutionary undertakings break with that which preceded them, as well as showing how all of these men followed in the lineage of Balzac. By acknowledging this lineage, Harvey exposes what was latent in 1848 Paris. Harvey is providing us with a way to see both the latent conditions Marx and Saint-Simon speak of and the Myth of the Break that is necessary for revolution.

As I pointed out earlier, the Cixous epigraph implies a feminist utopian modernity that breaks from a patriarchal mode. While the epigraph provides us with a Myth of the Break necessary for revolution, Vertical's introduction elaborates on a collaborative and dialogic method for looking into what might be latent in a population. My effort here is to keep the massive scale of the previously mentioned Parisian projects in mind in this entry because I don't believe they have ever left. They loom as refurbished furniture, their revolution commodified and reproduced with new fabric. I posit though that with this notion of creative destruction in mind, Kapil's work finds a transformative critique through an investigative socio-poetic modernity. Vertical investigates the latency that she as the participant, author, editor, curator, et al. or none, suspects to exist in the multiplicitous and simultaneous convergence of post-colonial Indian women. The evidence of what is latent resides in the questions and answers of Kapil and the women interviewed. Kapil, through the nomadic collaborative gesture of interviewing and recording this social group, intuits the possibility of "render[ing] very visible, processes of change in an embryonic state."(Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity)

In this reading I am attempting to understand Vertical as Creative Destruction. Before a reader gets to the first response they are equipped with the Myth of the Break (Cixous epigraph) and the promise of what is latent in the population by the books investigatory position (the introduction). And so here just before the reader sets out into the text body, (these gestures being limbs, possibly to allow for the most flexible movement of the body) Kapil provides us with the third gesture (limb): The list of questions.

"1. Who are you and whom do you love?
2. Where did you come from / how did you arrive?
3. How will you begin?
4. How will you live now?
5. What is the shape of your body?
6. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?
7. What do you remember about the earth?
8. What are the consequences of silence?
9. Tell me what you know about dismemberment?
10. Describe a morning you woke without fear?
11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?
12. And what would you say if you could?"

As they are framed in nomadic, post-colonial, deeply personal, difficult, and introspective ways, these questions stem more from Kapil's "tilted plane," than an "anthology of the voices of Indian women." In their idiosyncratic selection, Kapil problematizes the positions of Cixous' utopian feminist vision by removing it from the realm of the theoretical and translating it into the world of her experience. What is ulimately relevant is how this idiosyncratic, experiential, and poetic version of Cixous' utopia cannot be easily categorized or periodicized as simply another modernity. Here Bhanu acknowledges her own subjectivity as the nomad interviewer, translator, collector and curator. Through these twelve questions the reader is left suspended between the idealized version of a blending of every woman, and a specific human subjectivity.

The third (limb) gesture of Vertical also presents the architecture for investigating what might be a potentially powerful force latent in this social group. It is within the answers to these twelve questions that a Myth of a Break gestates. I return to Donald Preziosi's lecture, his conclusion states:

"Reckoning with our embeddedness within this world order entails foregrounding its artifice so as to articulate more powerfully nuanced possibilities for engaged civic responsibility. This is at base an ethical issue, entailing a permanent critique of one's own historical era and its artifice: modernity not as periodization, but as critique: as mode of continually reconfiguring our relationships to our own present."

Kapil, in her preconception of a poetic experiential project(ion) has equipped a reader with the tools of seeing modernity the way Preziosi so succinctly describes, "as critique." The three gestures (limbs): the epigraph, the introduction and the twelve questions combine to form an admittedly "tilted" entrance into an idiosyncratic and nomadic museum. For readers, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, provides the "creatively destructive" occasion that is "continually reconfiguring our relationships to our own present."

fuck--my bike--miraculously found!!

the story...bike stolen anytime between 7:30pm-11:00pm wednesday night...at the time i was working at a teahouse...organizing the opening of a tea/alcohol bar...offering tea cocktails for the alcohol and tea aficianado...walk home angrier than i should have been...file police report...smoke....smoke...watch incredible hulk....er and Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries...go to work at 3:00pm...get call from co-worker at 4:15...

"Jared, fuck, i think i just found yr bike...uuhhh, how do i know its yrs?"

"shit where are you?, shit, shit , uuuhhmm, chchcheck its fender, uhhm is it broken, yayaya its got a broken front fender, ya right at the fork, the fork, the fender its broken at the fork."

"ya, it is,"

"Hey lock that, fuck, shit, lock that up willya, shityashitya!! aaaarrrggghgghh!!!!"

Call the cops.. leave work met ummmhhh, my friend...the fuzz...they check my report bust out the cutters...my bike is frrreee...friend rescues desperate biker from months of hour-walk commutes each cold portl night!!

I say this calls for a celebratory reading:

Gertrude: from tender buttons:

Apple
Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold
green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a
little piece please.
A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready
eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners
of a kind of ham. This is use.

fuck--my bike--its gone

oh, black bianchi, how good you were to me...did i treat you so poorly? why go home with some vicious and rabid hoodlum? the hip streets of portland will do you no good without me. sometime mr. milano you'll see me walking and wish you hadn't left. you with yr smug and dirty soul, yr broken fender and yr non-working seat light, oh who am i kidding, i want you bck, wnt ya bck sooo bad.

:: ::

So, I have tried to track The Irreparable--the destruction of exprience, the shattered transcendentals, the current enormity--in the recognition of these for what they are--as if by chance to discover an opening into our contemporary task: "to redefine the concept of the transcendental in terms of its relation with language." I call this the poiesis of thought--or more simply the honest work of language--never an afterthought, for we are inside The Irreparable. We are as we are implications of it. Infants of the task. Infants in the language of it. I have studied and loved the footsteps (yes, you can love footsteps--think of your own--these footprints are news of us)--into the poiesis of The Irreparable--thus, in Jean Paul, Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Jarry--in the currents and cross-currents of modernism and in the mis-said postmodernism--the poiesis of these footprints in the poetry since 1945, Jack Spicer pressing the shifting sands of this irreparable aporia--the sundered, risky, refounding language of so many--the astonishment of such honesty that transforms the poiesis into beauty out for this walk with ugliness.
--Robin Blaser

:: ::

Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged from knowledge as 'unreal,' was the supreme medium of knowledge.
--Giorgio Agamben

:: ::

...the sense of existing is shape out from the silence...
--Nicole Brossard

...Ode to the wall...oh, and to the Peterson...

1.
Who knew MIke

the headless chicken

had been to Scottsdale

necking echoes

casin' joints


2.
church muses

organs births vast harpsichords

a corso on every corner

always in relation

revolutions crab tuesdays troubles birds
oranges giant sea turtles remixes of eggs

3.
meat wheels

webs

thrown objects

hitchcocks and belvederes


4.
all yr zodiac signs

a daft prick display

a craft lick array

a draft pick away

So that BoomBoom and Koshkin might live in this blog

here while I wait for the coops

a person looking into the store

meets michael and the booms

two total


boom boom


"yr groceries were roses"

gertrude grubbed
against us

so we set out with one

good ol' eye toward

ourselves boxed er

subtracted by light

um, both

both both

bout bout a pig


the farm we've left

inside us still

drafting the windows

the

women we'll need

to remember beaches

and those Zuk'd steeds

galloping beside us