Tuesday, January 30, 2007

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 1 FEB 6:00PM SHARP!
THIS JUST IN FROM THE EDITORS OF BIMBO JIM:

Thanks to all you beautiful people who have submitted thus far...to those of you who haven't, I offer these urgent words:

SUBMIT TO BIMBO JIM BY FEBRUARY 1ST AND RECEIVE A FREE PERSONALIZED LIMERICK!

Don't say we never gave you nothing.

bimbo.jim@hotmail.com

-BJ

Friday, January 26, 2007

english 102

so i just finished my first week as a college professor (so to speak) teaching 2 sections of english 102, concentration in research. my 10 am class is partitioned with participators, apathetics, insecure, stoners, and other fond categories of students. it's so bizarre stepping in front of a class and feeling as if your entire body is unzipping readily, detaching at every limb, leaving you nearly paralyzed to disclose any relevant information to people who truly care very little to listen to anything you have to contribute to their educational evolution.

after burning through all the propaganda and necessary dribble that have to drool out to their unpleasantly unreceptive ears we are going to dive into some rather interesting essays. my course is focusing on identity and the many angles of interpretation of personal, cultural, etc. identity issues. if you guys have never heard of the magazine, "Body and Society", i recommend it very much. it is a magazine devoted to investigating psychological/sociological issues in regards to the body, development, standards of perspective, etc.

anyway, what a weak, bouts of nervousness, ass explosion, excessive drinking (perhaps correlative to the prior), and overall insecurity and humiliation, my last class today was a success, people participating, getting involved, feeling perhaps interested in what was going on. on the up and up...

Check These Poems Out! Even Buy the New Fingers!

  • (ME) HARRY SMITH, MAGICIAN, SQUIRREL LOVER

  • (JOE) AS IF YOU HADN"T ALREADY ORDERED YOUR COPY

  • (LOGAN) TO READ AS YOU WAIT FOR YOUR PRE-ORDERED COPY

  • (ME) NOUN, NOUN, NOUN, NOUN, NOUN

  • (THECRAZIES) COLLABORATION IN PROCESS
  • Thursday, January 25, 2007

    Wednesday, January 24, 2007

    just a hello...

    The cool oak
    beneath
    her thighs


    Slow motion pushes her head down
    for the first time. I want to live
    according to the swell of my lower
    body. I cannot sleep in the
    photocopied pages of my notebook.
    She introduced him to the rate of
    forgetting. Gray World War II planes
    remote controlled by wire. The air we
    breathe is capable of engendering
    involuntary imagination. Partly color
    blind. I play a sentimental role with
    wet naps. We had captured dozens of
    potato bugs prodding them to open.
    You have to take on the role of the
    aggressor, she said, showing her left
    profile. Dry humping is a sort of
    ceremony, much like shoe polishing.


    A statue of Juliet in Verona grows
    tarnished around a perfect pair of
    polished apple breasts.

    DUSIE #5

    Dusie #5, edited by Susana Gardner, is online! Check out poems by yours truly, Logan Ryan Smith and Joseph Cooper as well as many other exciting writers, and yes we are exciting!

  • dusie

  • Oh, and while yr there be sure to pre-order Logan's BookBook "The Singers," and after that mosey (sp?) on over to BlazeVox to purchase Joe's new, "Autobiography of a Stutterer."

    Sunday, January 21, 2007

    The Pixies in Our Ears Sing of Heaven


    Necks arched skyward as if straining
    to better understand the language
    of disconnected lines
    a representation of the space between
    the audibility and perception of god
    and how quickly we dodge opportunities
    to communicate under less than ordinary circumstances

    Necks bent downward as if training
    to greater withstand the damage
    of poly-connected crimes
    a plantation of the space between
    the in-credible reception of sod
    and how swiftly we plot ingenuities
    to prostitute, under less than ordinary circumstances

    Necks extended from treacherous blaming
    to better prosecute the perpetrator
    of insatiable apathy
    a disentigration of place and
    spiritual cramps against incestuous odds
    and how idly we concoct disease
    to quantify what everyday's chance is

    necks spaced forward in movement
    stunted misfortune of the ring on-looking
    for memory to locate the spacial place
    representative provocative transience of something
    wanting the neck to be of a thing some
    part tender or warm a token
    to put in one's pocket

    (7 more lines anybody? Let the animals speak...)

    Saturday, January 20, 2007

    A Word to the Wise

    All pictures displayed on this blog were taken by the notorious and beautiful Tim Armentrout, who lives in the amazing ancient timber hills of Appalachia. Tim, the rest of us o'r here at the barnyard are quite in debt to your glorious pictures (adjectives in these sentences were stolen from/form the emails of Joseph Cooper).

    thanks again tim,
    honk.oink.gobble.moo.

    ps. Post the hersey photo...plleeeeeaaaaassssee....i'm dreadfully tired of posting!

    Wednesday, January 17, 2007

    MANIFESTO #39

    39. The earlier you do your taxes, the earlier you get tattoo money! Woo-hoo!

    Monday, January 15, 2007

    Monday, January 08, 2007

    Like BoomBoom Sakkis, I'm Pretending it's Week Two of the SWP.




    Norma Cole's Workshop July 11-14

    Constellations...Rhizomes...interpret the picture/group mind....randomness/orbits/memory...fluid...identity...
    history/spirals...non-mono-lithic models...non-male-histories...think Kristeva think...we look at a picture
    of a chair in the center of a street in the center of a Croation suburb...we make our constellations...
    we share our constellations...our constellations are all related...this is what our 'ship' er 'shop' becomes a map for...
    topology of interests/experience/identity/collaboration...

    Goons...Bertolino....Olson...Spicer...Stein....MUllen...Jarnot...Jarry...
    Mallarme...Hejinian...Burroughs...Breton...Brown...Coolidge...Celan...
    Cage...Berrigan...Agamben...Preziosi...Sakkis...Kapil...Freire...Berlin...
    Naka Pierce...Parlatore...K. Bhabha...Mohanty....Nourbese-Philip...Park...
    Kristeva...Kanhai....Derrida...Butler....Iragaray...
    Spivak...(LR)Smith...Benjamin....Arendt...S.Howe...Chagall...
    Foucault...Deleueze...Corso...Guattari...Ginsberg...Waldman
    ...Hollo...Bye...Collom...

    Investigations through the week include Duchamp and in particular S. Howe's Singularities...artist in exile as a footnote...

    ...orbits/constellations...how to re-, recontextualize, rehistorisize, reconstruct, recompose...reinvestigate...i find gaps i want to exist inside of...a consistency of meaning is a fleeting instance of ambiguities betwen existences being overcome through desire?....but of negative capability...ethical relation...of what? For me?

    notes...
    The Shadow of the enterprise precedes the enterprise/ A photograph after the downpour/ knit a musical sound/ insects in motion/ in time the metaphor becomes the thing/ let us consistently defy the conventionally crazy/ people just aren't erudite like Duncan anymore...

    Elizabeth Robinson Lecture on Poethics July 11, 2005

    Chaos...formal disruption...bewilderment...ethics not as closed system...go beyond contexts to unknowns...rupture...flux...the experimental is always plural...repeat the experimental is always plural: the experimental is always plural: echo Cole: Cole echo: the experimental is always plural...cage, berrigan, stein...social poetics etc...

    ERob invokes Hejinian...poet to improve the world... Kapil's Vertical Interrogation is brought up...Vertical...redefines responsible social action...dislodges reader from systems...this is important....

    pressure against the imagination...new areas where action BECOMES...the possible....repeat:rupture...

    Vertical: voice is never specified....inquiry based (investigative?)...not conclusionary:this is important...not traditional male verse forms...resists static perception...a differnt kind of motion...momentum:momentum:momentum....the body can never be whole...blood as mode of travel...diaspora performed not defined....>TRAVEL<>TRAVEL<>TRAVEL<

    see, Joan Retallack, Emannuel Levinas, and Pierre Joris.

    Jena Osman Lectures on Is Poetry the News? July 14
    What is the poetical and poethical use of found poetry?

    Alfredo Jaar and Cecilia Vicuna presented as two artists not in opposition, but specifically dissimilar in ways...Cecilia using dissappearance...ephemerality...anti-massive structures in streetwork constellations...her famous precarios...and other projects primarily concerned with red yarn and all its metaphoric intonations...Jaar in a different mode still using ephemerality but on massive scale...co-opting mass media events, spectacles in order to bring out the culture of the spectacles anesthesizing effect...

    How do each of us (poets/artists) deal with the poethical question of found art in Osman's Categorical designations? My thoughts are towards Parasite Host Relationships vs. A Burroughsian Third mind vs. A Cageian or Berrigan centered collaboration through homage vs. group association collaboration(Surrealism, Oulipo, Dada, etc) ...are any of these unethical to me? Also back to the Cole constellation ....what is appropriation? Where are the borderlines between ethical bodies...Robinson--find the place beyond to make things possible...Re- historisize, re compose, re contextualize etc.

    "What is the dialectic between making it and letting it be." Jackson Maclow

    see, Walter Benjamin, Lisa Robinson, Reread Brain of the Earths Body, Preziosi.

    "Locate a new moral center. Poets getting into trouble is a good thing." Jena Osman

    Charles Bernstein Lectures on Objectivist Blues July 15

    Notes: poetry as series of terraces...over a valley of language...the world, an event of language...chance and the poetics of bewilderment....to not know where you are going!....multi-form and chaotic...ingenuity rather than solutions....get used to the going...particulars and their constellations....morality vs. aesthetics...everything is process...not to teach you how to think, rather, to show a different thinking...radical modernism reinvents aesthetics for a new context...innovation and the necessity of the new...the new is not related to improvement...but a grappling with the contemporary...the present...see Stein, Gladman, Osman, Retallack, Robinson...innovation as a marker of the human condition...failure as well...the innovators dilemma...a desire for refined works based on the best readers (whomever they are)...or disrupt what it is the best readers read!...it is admirable to fail at innovation or succeed at nothing...invention is not linear...not just Pound's "make it new" but make it live, see:moment:momentum re:momentum...read globally, write locally...heh!

    Echo Cole:echo Osman:echo Robinson:echo Bernstein.
    Repeat.

    the thinking text...the noetic position of travel....innovation and text as present making and vice versa...re:

    Thursday, January 04, 2007

    Joseph Cooper's Autobiography of a Stutterer, Available Now From BlazeVox Books



    The Autobiography of a Stutterer

    Synopsis:

    Autobiography of a Stutterer is a culmination of the past fifteen years of my life as a stutterer. The purpose of this text is to give readers the opportunity to experience a speech impediment first hand. By following the legend and mimicking the symptoms of a fluency disorder, difficulties in communication and comprehension will begin to surface. Although non-stutterers reading this text will naturally elude the psychological fears and inhibitions experienced by stutterers, they have the chance to discover the mechanics of a fluency disorder and its frustrating interruptions. The text is to be read aloud, preferably in front of others.

    -Joseph S. Cooper

    -------------------

    Praise for Autobiography of a Stutterer

    In Autobiography of a Stutterer, Joseph S. Cooper has realized a beautifully timed sequence of works running through the double gates of lips and teeth, and faith and love. He arrives at the fabulous tongue, personal runway of language, and from there the words take off and return in a series of spasmodic flights that together comprise a breakthrough book. Like a new family member, please welcome it and enjoy its unpredictably bright and wide-eyed movements.

    -Reed Bye

    Joseph S. Cooper’s, Autobiography of a Stutterer positions the reader (performer) in the liminal spaces between articulation and interruption, fluency and stuttering, the spaces between monologue and dialogue, language and body, in order to develop a narrative wholly engaging, critically poised, and deconstructive. It is no small accomplishment that this autobiography carries within it a specific subjectivity (the author’s) at the same time it stages the desubjectification of its readers/performers. This text allows you to lose yourself within it, as one ethical body encountering another. In fact it holds the potential to reveal how being a more ethically responsible human might be to do just that.

    -Jared Hayes


    Joseph S. Cooper writes where the body does not exactly say yes but where it wants something else. By this I mean the bodies he is making are profoundly wild: propelled by phonetic imperatives and breaks in the deep structure that could be described as aberrant, but which I prefer to think of as delicious. What is a mouth and where is it going? I read his work as a future for the tongue, whether that's English, pre-English or the English that's dismayed and privately ashamed (in a good way) to find itself in such proximity to the teeth. I suggest wearing a gum-shield. I suggest serving Jell-O to your guests. Joseph S. Cooper is a genius and, to find out how the party really got going, I suggest you open this amazing, completely frightening book.

    -Bhanu Kapil

    A quote for Joe and, um, everyone

    "...Michel Foucault refers to this very definition when, at the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he summarizes the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, and politics turns into biopolitics. 'For millenia,' he writes, 'man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question' (La Vonte, p 188).
    According to Foucault, a society's 'threshold of biological modernity' is situated at the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society's political strategies. After 1977, the courses at the College de France start to focus on the passages from the 'territorial State' to the 'State of population' and on the resulting increase in importance of the nation's health and biological life as a problem of sovereign power, which is then gradually transformed into a 'government of men' (Dits et ecrits, 3: 719). 'What follows is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques. For the first time in history, the possibilities for the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust.' In particular, the development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective, without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the 'docile bodies' that it needed.
    ...Foucault's death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however, the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis--the politicization of bare life as such--constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if politics today seem to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. The 'enigmas' (Furet, L'Allemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has proposed to historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be solved only on the terrain--biopolitics--on which they were formed. Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc.)--and which have steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction--will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon. And only a reflection that, taking up Foucault's and Benjamin's suggestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its practical calling..."

    --From the Introduction to Giorgio Agamben's, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare LIfe