Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
from CARRION SUITE
for Jared Hayes
I. Wry Savages
The bats always come back, making music by striking against footprints
Filling the world with the humor for a low intrigue
The emergence of lover and assassin, a congress of empty rooms
Useless and therefore trustworthy
A problem confronting an imaginary sex
[line accepted though obscured for continuity]
I. Wry Savages
The bats always come back, making music by striking against footprints
Filling the world with the humor for a low intrigue
The emergence of lover and assassin, a congress of empty rooms
Useless and therefore trustworthy
A problem confronting an imaginary sex
[line accepted though obscured for continuity]
In circuits—ever, however, someone plays the piano
Of the occupation reasons which the stars permit
An unpropitiated snuggling of a greater anemone
To the unscrambled accidents of the obvious
Your rhythmic bedroom is nursery to flesh, girl flesh
Wolf flesh, meat in the doorway, spilling into the orchard
The smell of autumn, a vicious banquet of proposition
A dining room of Sawako candles,
The accuracy of arrangement pauses to remember
Parched vessels of the ocean’s milk cuff
Into which we reach, discounting the confluence of fluids
“Its hints of earlier and other creation:”
Backbones slither glittering, rough and cool
Wings clamor the city’s foam glee
The more delicate view is nothing if not ambitious before the crime
On the suburban tennis court of your spirited pasts
Where the gears of voices have unhinged the attractor
Of The Modern Empress Disaster
Unzip your victims
And puff on them a bit until the room begins to sparkle
Error
Is the sparkle of your spirited past
Heard frigging an ambitious vaginal scroll
That reads: dear Keith, on second thought…
Form is the language of captors
So write me a letter, I’m feeling sad tonite
Heaving groaner drawn into narrative
Rounding homewards, the bats always come back
The oppression of punctuation without words
Their attack and decay resembles violins
Strummed by the unhurried inquisition of lovers’
Milkswell, untimed
Tightly strung, tighter
Than anxious shores
Calculating an epithet or act
That proceeds, more or less on its own,
To suspend the mean and sleazy,
To precede the day when the rat is on its side
Before the morning watch bends backward for a kiss
From within the milkswell, the rose fire burns;
That is and was a stumbling into position
That burning
Is a model of Helen Adam
Of the occupation reasons which the stars permit
An unpropitiated snuggling of a greater anemone
To the unscrambled accidents of the obvious
Your rhythmic bedroom is nursery to flesh, girl flesh
Wolf flesh, meat in the doorway, spilling into the orchard
The smell of autumn, a vicious banquet of proposition
A dining room of Sawako candles,
The accuracy of arrangement pauses to remember
Parched vessels of the ocean’s milk cuff
Into which we reach, discounting the confluence of fluids
“Its hints of earlier and other creation:”
Backbones slither glittering, rough and cool
Wings clamor the city’s foam glee
The more delicate view is nothing if not ambitious before the crime
On the suburban tennis court of your spirited pasts
Where the gears of voices have unhinged the attractor
Of The Modern Empress Disaster
Unzip your victims
And puff on them a bit until the room begins to sparkle
Error
Is the sparkle of your spirited past
Heard frigging an ambitious vaginal scroll
That reads: dear Keith, on second thought…
Form is the language of captors
So write me a letter, I’m feeling sad tonite
Heaving groaner drawn into narrative
Rounding homewards, the bats always come back
The oppression of punctuation without words
Their attack and decay resembles violins
Strummed by the unhurried inquisition of lovers’
Milkswell, untimed
Tightly strung, tighter
Than anxious shores
Calculating an epithet or act
That proceeds, more or less on its own,
To suspend the mean and sleazy,
To precede the day when the rat is on its side
Before the morning watch bends backward for a kiss
From within the milkswell, the rose fire burns;
That is and was a stumbling into position
That burning
Is a model of Helen Adam
II.
This glass is holding only time, the soundless end to it,
Echoes in slow fall leaves,
Dropping motionless, the repetition of a question
The scene of the apartment with all those people in it
The continuum of bone lacquered like an arm chair
Oh heartland television of Missouri, we grovel at your ugly festivals
There is no end to your museum of organized space
In rebellion the virtual sum
Would somehow explain eating metaphor
As onslaughts of matter deteriorate
The most delirious consumed quietly by earthbound branches
Unforgiven crude constructions of this beast
To play or perform the failing
The something monitor sitting down as clothing
An unattached devotion for the young and loving man that the wolf ate
Smuggled into the poem by the salesman of authorship
Undeniably listening as the warm blood welled
Around the steaming legs bitten by jumping music
Where ends the breasts of reckless men
Scraped bundles of fur my lover leaves
Cleaning talons over shallow banks
Of latticed blood around the mouthing action
Of dancing girls and singing boys
Of bats we seek in sheets as if to feed the cat
Think of them despite footsteps falling light
In warping blue industry domestic
The shallow unchanging taste of her kiss
Joke. “Drying sails at dockage:”
Spilling the debt of a savage bed
Where the imagined pedestrian-you turns orange
Bail lily fields of one magnificent prize
Spilling silver from a fountain to a silver screen
As Thomas Culpepper sprang from the crocus
Onto the slanted playground of the dead
Where bone prayer is made payable only
On Halleluiah day
As it flows from thought to ear to tongue
To ear balanced of a christened raving
A partial fallacy adored and dreaded in worship
As the warm math of honeymoon
Lilies dance as they tread
Sinking higher always at the wrong time
Fruition of night beneath a haunted wave
A hungry ghost dreaming in the forest
Lilting rhyme trembled in the absence of meaning
The nectar of the carrion suite restores dissent
In a form that longed for no lover
And obscures nothing of its envy for the bats
The crust of the moon, and mortal wound
Found in the kitchen mixed inside a bowl
Unforgiving of the grizzly dance of their captors
Found drowned return in charge clear
A backward look crawled through a keyhole crack
Elbow notch above a flowering boner
The primitive terror of coeds and kerosene
Caught in a down under looming
A bundle of tantalizing contradictions
Of Baroque nods and looks of explicit knowledge
Permanent as morgue attendants
Lighting skulls secretly behind mirrors
The agony of another heads from the body
To bridge shadow tastes, black slashes in sky
An active flicker in the bone
Reluctance, light of moonless knowledge
Attrition between legs of muscular bodies
Calmed in the meeting space of sleep
Mitigate and shock, restore
Small semblances of truth to the crumbling republic
To the barn, to the crow’s bitter apple
Dropped along the eyelash of the shore
Waves washing over them confidently
Running to the fluid notions of land
Navigating vacancy
Dissolving lines of odors trail among the house
Parting the curtains, for the doll won’t rest
- Joseph Cooper & Andy Peterson
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Buddha Says, "Happeph Brrphderph Jarry Hayrph! Ern Hrrph Groondhoph Derph!"
I think what Budda is trying to say is,
"Happy Birthday, Jared Hayes!
and
Happy Groundhog Day!"
"Happy Birthday, Jared Hayes!
and
Happy Groundhog Day!"
May your birthday bring you
S P R I N G A N D A L L
Friday, January 30, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Poetry Reading In Portland
Spare Room presents
Laynie Browne
Jared Hayes
Sunday, February 1
7:30 pm
Concordia Coffee House
2909 NE Alberta
$5.00 suggested donation
www.flim.com/spareroom
spareroom@flim.com
Laynie Browne is the author of seven collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include The Scented Fox (Wave), Daily Sonnets (Counterpath) and Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (University of Georgia). She was for many years a member of the Subtext Collective in Seattle, and now is part of the POG reading series in Tucson. She is currently developing a new a poetry-in-the-schools program for K-5 schools, through the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona.
jared hayes lives in portland, oregon. he is publisher and co-editor of livestock editions. jared hayes believes in ghosts. his poetry can be found.
=============================================
from Radiolarian Atlas
Petalospyris arachnoides
Descending claw
spider thrift
Ten-legged trope
with triceratops leanings
Inside your yellow-chambered
soirée is a bouncing
reverie of a ballroom
O hidden balustrade,
from whose aquamarine invitation
was this divine gathering sung?
Laynie Browne
from night after night
mesostic transpsych(ot)ic iteration
this is the best leJos to do things. this is the very best ecerrAda to do things. this is the very best sIempre to do things exactly poeMa transparEncia now and excluSiva is the night acercAdo doing the night dEstino and this is the night illumiNan doing the night veZ at the night caJa and these are the night brAzos at the night imagIna and this is the night Mascara doing the night Escribe at the night Seno in the night rosAs and these are the night tormEnta doing the night muNdo to the night quiZa at the night refleJaba and these are the estrellA that are exactly night and these exactly night habIta are doing their Muerte which is night and carnE is the night poSa to oscuridAd at the night gravE which is night now and night now cuerNos is exactly night night now where atroZ is.
Jared Hayes
"There wouldn’t be an experimental poetry scene to speak of here without Spare Room, which brings to town readers from the same tribe that tends to circulate between the Poetry Project or Segue Series in New York, Small Press Traffic and 21 Grand in San Francisco, Subtext in Seattle, Kootenay in Vancouver, In Your Ear or Ruthless Grip in DC, I.E. in Baltimore, Woodland Pattern in Milwaukie, Myopic in Chicago, or The Smell in L.A., just to name a very few. The fact that that’s only a few—that there’s a network of “Spare Rooms” across the nation—indicates the health, really the lifeblood, of a poetry culture the media and arts funding biz more or less ignore.
While I’d like to see the poets who travel here get paid more, there’s a bliss in that ignorance, too: the fundamentals of the poetry economy Spare Room’s a part of remain sound despite downturns, budget cuts, shifting enrollments, shrinking bequests or bloating windfalls. As Portland collects more arts refugees from the big cities, I hope Spare Room carries on for 100 more." --rodney koeneke
for more about spare room visit their website spare room
and read rodney koeneke's modern americans blogmodampo...
Laynie Browne
Jared Hayes
Sunday, February 1
7:30 pm
Concordia Coffee House
2909 NE Alberta
$5.00 suggested donation
www.flim.com/spareroom
spareroom@flim.com
Laynie Browne is the author of seven collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include The Scented Fox (Wave), Daily Sonnets (Counterpath) and Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (University of Georgia). She was for many years a member of the Subtext Collective in Seattle, and now is part of the POG reading series in Tucson. She is currently developing a new a poetry-in-the-schools program for K-5 schools, through the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona.
jared hayes lives in portland, oregon. he is publisher and co-editor of livestock editions. jared hayes believes in ghosts. his poetry can be found.
=============================================
from Radiolarian Atlas
Petalospyris arachnoides
Descending claw
spider thrift
Ten-legged trope
with triceratops leanings
Inside your yellow-chambered
soirée is a bouncing
reverie of a ballroom
O hidden balustrade,
from whose aquamarine invitation
was this divine gathering sung?
Laynie Browne
from night after night
mesostic transpsych(ot)ic iteration
this is the best leJos to do things. this is the very best ecerrAda to do things. this is the very best sIempre to do things exactly poeMa transparEncia now and excluSiva is the night acercAdo doing the night dEstino and this is the night illumiNan doing the night veZ at the night caJa and these are the night brAzos at the night imagIna and this is the night Mascara doing the night Escribe at the night Seno in the night rosAs and these are the night tormEnta doing the night muNdo to the night quiZa at the night refleJaba and these are the estrellA that are exactly night and these exactly night habIta are doing their Muerte which is night and carnE is the night poSa to oscuridAd at the night gravE which is night now and night now cuerNos is exactly night night now where atroZ is.
Jared Hayes
"There wouldn’t be an experimental poetry scene to speak of here without Spare Room, which brings to town readers from the same tribe that tends to circulate between the Poetry Project or Segue Series in New York, Small Press Traffic and 21 Grand in San Francisco, Subtext in Seattle, Kootenay in Vancouver, In Your Ear or Ruthless Grip in DC, I.E. in Baltimore, Woodland Pattern in Milwaukie, Myopic in Chicago, or The Smell in L.A., just to name a very few. The fact that that’s only a few—that there’s a network of “Spare Rooms” across the nation—indicates the health, really the lifeblood, of a poetry culture the media and arts funding biz more or less ignore.
While I’d like to see the poets who travel here get paid more, there’s a bliss in that ignorance, too: the fundamentals of the poetry economy Spare Room’s a part of remain sound despite downturns, budget cuts, shifting enrollments, shrinking bequests or bloating windfalls. As Portland collects more arts refugees from the big cities, I hope Spare Room carries on for 100 more." --rodney koeneke
for more about spare room visit their website spare room
and read rodney koeneke's modern americans blogmodampo...
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
mesostic transpsych(ot)ic iteration
for Jaime Saenz after Lisa Jarnot's Right Poem
this is the best leJos to do things. this is the very best ecerrAda to do things. this is the very best sIempre to do things exactly poeMa transparEncia now and excluSiva is the night acercAdo doing the night dEstino and this is the night illumiNan doing the night veZ at the night caJa and these are the night brAzos at the night imagIna and this is the night Mascara doing the night Escribe at the night Seno in the night rosAs and these are the night tormEnta doing the night muNdo to the night quiZa at the night refleJaba and these are the estrellA that are exactly night and these exactly night habIta are doing their Muerte which is night and carnE is the night poSa to oscuridAd at the night gravE which is night now and night now cuerNos is exactly night night now where atroZ is.
this is the best leJos to do things. this is the very best ecerrAda to do things. this is the very best sIempre to do things exactly poeMa transparEncia now and excluSiva is the night acercAdo doing the night dEstino and this is the night illumiNan doing the night veZ at the night caJa and these are the night brAzos at the night imagIna and this is the night Mascara doing the night Escribe at the night Seno in the night rosAs and these are the night tormEnta doing the night muNdo to the night quiZa at the night refleJaba and these are the estrellA that are exactly night and these exactly night habIta are doing their Muerte which is night and carnE is the night poSa to oscuridAd at the night gravE which is night now and night now cuerNos is exactly night night now where atroZ is.
a quick note from michel de certeau...on bosch's garden...
(click on picture for a closer look)"Despite our knowledge of the iconography of the late middle ages, we have here the "pure and simple volatilization of meanings." Wilhelm Fraenger concurs, but, being an acute observer, on the lookout for anything that might "signify," he wants to force the "mute oracle" to speak nonetheless. His dictionary-machine (this "means" that) constrains each signifier to confess to a signified, thus transforming the painting into the transcription of a textual system. For others, and the best of them at that, such as Dirk Bax, the secret ofThe Garden arouses a rapt attention to its details. It is the labor of a Sysiphus, curiosity trapped in the cryptogram-rebus. This painting plays on our need to decipher. It enlists in its service a western drive to read. The meticulous proliferation of its figures calls irresistibly for indefinite narrativizing, whether it be that of a folklorist, a linguist, a historian, or a psychologist. This narrativizing, by countless erudite convolutions, makes each iconographic element tell a meaningful story. Like the discourse that is produced on the basis of dream fragments, the literature on The Garden is an endless series of stories elicited by some detail or other of the painting. Using a great many references, works, and readable documents, that literature produces its learned stories on the basis of pictorial fragments. Lettered stories seemed endlessly generated by The Garden of Delights. In point of fact, these scholarly tales (the thousand and one nights of erudition) follow, or postpone, or deny the moment when the pleasure of seeing is the death of meaning...
...The Garden cannot be reduced to univocity. It offers a multiplicity of possible itineraries, the traces of which, as in a labyrinth, would constitute so many stories, until one comes to a dead end that marks a forbidden meaning. But there is something more here. The painting seems both to provoke and frustrate each one of these interpretive pathways. It not only establishes itself within a difference in relation to all meaning; it produces its difference in making us believe that it contains hidden meaning."--from the mystic fable
:implication:implication:hyperbole:transmulti:hybridity:differance:
hyperbole:interintra:trans:discipline:discourse:implication:
implication:poetics:vispo:hyperbole:void:
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
..."what is the body capable of"...
go find out what j/j has to say about it: "what is the body capable of". (if you're not taken directly to the essay click on the blog link on the left.) or go here: what is the body for.
...and remember that j/j's new books are out!!...get .compilate. by emailing livestockjared@gmail.com..and get asymptotic lover//thermodynamic vents at blazevox.
Friday, December 05, 2008
Blush
The boundary and margin are out of order. We love what we love, fearing it at the same time as a machine of death. The fascinating defilement of the social aggregate. Fires still burning in heart, the exchange of presences and absences. The human body is metaphor for exclusion and prohibition. Don’t ever refuse that which, separating it from itself, breaches the living voice. The speaking being is permanently engulfed. And what the hell else to say but I too am a dreamer; I give my dreams as dreams. The result of such is worth confronting. Echo of what it has come for it leaps over the text toward its presumed content. Without going into the details of the demonstration, note the following. There is a long stretch of sky before us. The speaking being is separated by sex and language. I want to fuck you in a classical shape that gives itself out to be a synthesis that faithfully restores.--cooper/hayes
Friday, October 17, 2008
five tangents in praise of j/j hastain's livestock edition, .compilate. (available today!!), or a special episode of abc's of attention with guests j/j hastain, robert grenier, andrew peterson, joseph s. cooper, gertrude stein and the duncanator.
in the process of reading and doing the layout design of and for j/j hastain's .compilate. i was inexorably moved outward into the past and future of my relationship with poetry and thus my relationship with the world. in many ways i wanted to write a short note explaining or offering some brief insight or captivating and influential press release to share this book with the world. as i was writing these blurb like phrasings/opinions i was thrust beyond them via the texts own diverse momentums into further thought and other books. so, here, rather than condense my feelings/thoughts/impressions/relations of and to j/j hastain's writing, i thought it might be useful to map the movement of my thinking and reading...those processes being produced by the varying gestures of .compilate.'s text....as an introduction and example set, here is a short sampling of the book (please understand my personal html limitations in formatting produce a text not identical in format to the original):
from the first section:
.amor surgical.
.stolen. books. objections. personas. exiles.
membrane. junky jolted you. in groan and
localized eros. corporeality of any cicala
theory. if it matters when it goes engraved.
salted. strung together to make more than two
hundred miniaturized girls.
.with accommodations the sentences begin to shift.
.the room is opaque often laminatedly related.
something like out of the top of your. who
does the incremental switch belong to. making
beings that extend beyond contradictions in the
fashion. general constructions beading banality.
dead cats then a dress made of cast. calle as
in this to reach renee. the hospital is not
fake. the infant and its numerous furry bulks.
.nomadic taxi touch.
.sockets become unexpected shovels. the
syringe buries. impulses of sea umbrella.
waning circulature. intelligence actually dying.
the sacrilege of dedicated grosspace.
.skewering sonata.
.work itself verge or spill construction.
the trusting blackened. grind to and ash.
tumultuous turning floatations into sanskrit.
or potatoes between hardening hands.
tangents:
I. this text is one that co-operates with language. as i have heard mr. duncan point out in audio lectures: some "use" language others "co-operate" with it. this is something fundamental for/to me as a reader/writer of text/world. i am prompted to continue that premise...knowledge/language exists outside of myself and only in relationship to others/geographies/texts do i (whatever/whoever i may be) collaborate in meaning making....compilate. did not necessarily reveal this to me, yet .compilate. is a text that re-members this consistently throughout. and maybe that is the process that this book encourages in the experience of it...the re-membering of these polysemous cells. i am brought into the biological act of fusion, or no, something more dirty...some prosthetic or transformation process where membranes are introduced to each other and either reject or assimilate themselves. here in .compilate. i believe we as readers/writers both assimilate and reject this prosthetic membrane. we as co-participants in the meaning making process re-member and suture this monster to ourselves (willy-nilly and with momentum). it hangs strangely and comfortably off of ourselves...changes our functions as we learn its own kind of consciousness.
I. in the beginning of .compilate. the reader is given a few brief "pre" poetic texts. these texts act to me as a womb or gestational mediation system viewed from an outside...or maybe through ultrasound.... texts like: "compilate: collect+compile+grate.", "gathers things from many different sources. much duration. this matters." reveal some of the clues of the form and shape and parts of the baby/monster to come...then the book proceeds into the birth, "has no affinity / to the history book". this birthing of things collected, compiled, and grated resembles the ways i have read benjamin, arendt, and jae emerling (on benjamin and arendt). each of these authors has lauded the collector's relationship to her/his/their world...by re-contextualizing objects/words/things through a kind of "pearl-diving" into the past (arendt on benjamin) the genuine collector "exhibits a love of things, a care of things, that refuses to appropriate their alterity...in the presentation of the what-has-been, a past that was never present the as yet unlived." (emerling on arendt and benjamin). from here i suggest also that recent discussions of kenneth goldsmith's work in a parallel fashion, as well as thought in/around/about viktor shlovsky's queering/making strange/defamiliarization can be thought in terms of this kind of idiosyncratic and and times radical collecting/birthing. pulling texts/worlds together through a variety of personally idiosyncratic methods of construction/reconstruction/rereconstruction so that their past breathes in the present. In fact through reading/writing this .compilate. monster i am reminded that maybe this process--of idiosyncratic collecting--is what builds (and possibly has always built) the polysemous human conversation/narrative [and not just what is called "discourse" (but that too)]...is it only now that humans have been so easily rendered useless to their own future through the lack of attention to their past? Or have we always been so forgetful?....compilate., through its attempt at collection and dispersal, is building a narrative in conjunction and in relation to the reader/writer and their world. this monster is growing/transforming on/into us...it is re-membering itself as it attaches its history to you and your room presently.
and don't these notions/notes also reinforce similarities between benjamin's ideas about brechtian performativity and relationships between our objects, ourselves...a dialogic or polylogic dialectics of reading/writing.
(note to self: write a paper on benjamin's brechtian influence towards a performativity of the reader/writer: a benjaminian performative dialogic dialectic of reading/writing a new art-historical poeisis?wtf?.)
I. .compilate. is a text that meditates, that breathes, that sits and yet transfoms. I am reminded and sent back to gertrude stein's stanzas in meditation, a text in which language comes back to itself...back to its own breath (huh?)....the form of .compilate. is phenomenological in this sense...or attempts to be so...it does not seem like a record of meditation (though it may be)...rather it appears to me to be the enactment or embodiment of meditative states....the reader/writer of .compilate. is confronted with accumulations of meanings and contexts only to be moved steadily, if not swiftly, (on the wind horse) into others...just as during a sitting meditation one's mind may wander and body may begin to fatigue (these never being mutually exclusive), one attempts, consistently, to bring their mind and body back to the immediate moment...it is in in this sense that .compilate. seems to be operating in my mind and body...as i read/write the text i am brought back to the immediacy of each phrasing...then group of phrasings...then back. then back. again. again. consistently. back. again. .this movement is not one that gives a sense of forward linear movement...there is no "progress"....trajectories are rhizomic in .compilate....we breathe. we read. we sit. we go out. we come back. we set the book down. we go back. we hear the gong. and the music doesn't stop. rather, we experience our moments and .compilate. rests itself uncomfortably and monstrously in our breath and seats...
I. so far in writing responses and close readings/writings of texts it has been difficult for me to express specifically what it is that is happening lyrically. now here .compilate. has added another insight into where i find lyric and lyricism most intriguing. in the past year or so a handful of texts have stood out to me lyrically for the simple reason that there forms seemed antithetic to lyric or to use nezval's phrase (i think) antilyric...these texts are joseph cooper's autobiography of a stutterer, andrew peterson's anselm hollo private eye, gertrude stein's stanzas in meditation, and now j/j hastain's .compilate....what each of these texts does in their own ways is to create a music that would at first seem to be impossible. "stutterer" places reader/performer in the place of the author through the use of symbols that articulate the difficulties and seizures of his own tongue. a brief look at the text is dizzying due to the number of disruptions. yet a clear lyric is imbedded and made possible by the impediment. one finds herself working through the text in her own disruptive singing. i have spoken briefly in the past about AHPE by peterson and will again reiterate how a period after every line created a kind of stop. /and. /go. /experience. that motion becomes a kind of music of musics or musics of music as you move through...small voices combining for an overall effect of song. stein, of course, in stanzas uses almost no nouns in her masterpiece which serves to alter your presence with it...the text is most difficult to stay involved with in prolonged readings...yet its music becomes unmistakeable with all of the prepositions and articles repeating in every possibility...(in an ideal world i'd give lengthy examples of all...but...)....compilate.'s music is also at first an interruptive one as well. we are confronted and released by periods on both sides of the text...in a way framing but also a kind of punching through the page...as if the periods were holes in this fabric...or to look back to duncan again in his warp and woof lecture...this is a fabric that is hol(e)y. so even though i am in a way interrupted by its formal architecture i am pressed through these (w)holes into another weaving. into another weaving. into another weaving. and so on. and these are, ultimately, part of the same fabric. (which is why it is possible to be read at all...for anything to be read.?)...but the music is in the movement from warp to woof and back...wait...does that make sense? .compilate. is an interruptive lyric or antilyric in the sense that you come to abrupt holes (metaphorical and lyrical) that move you into and out of cushion-ey...then rocky...then velvet-ey...then abrupt sound spaces...but the only way to travel from stop to song is through those portal period holes. And those portals are revealed two-fold: architecturally [periods (punctuation and length of time)], semantically [meanings (relationally created)]. the result is a movement of sound that traverses underneath between, over and through the accumulated text...a kind of superstructure...or ego...there it! is!...the sound of compilate is the accumulative identity binding its monstrous baby system to our own as readers/writers/experiencers...the lyric of .compilate. acts as a barb extending out of its tentacles which have wrapped themselves around yr torso...sticking its lyric inside of your body this monster releases its genetic sonic fabric changing again and again the way yr ears make their sense.
I.…ralph the naropa bookstore owner while i was attending (whose been at naropa since its beginning) would bring certain books in (i can only imagine his stashes from previous 30 odd swp’s) one at a time to be found by the most steadfast explorer of books. some of us understood that if we spent the time to look (three to four x's a week) we might find some crazy textual rainbow loot! something not visible (and most likely not even there) the day or two before and placed there just for us (or so it seemed)…this is just how i came across robert grenier’s attention, a curriculum of the soul book, #28 that was put out in 1985 by the institute for further studies at glover publishing…so, here (in portland), the other day i see it sitting next to .compilate., as if placed there by the ghosts of kerouac and stein, and i pick them both up and read them into each other...and so here is part of that experience.
here are grenier narratives, IV., V. and .compilate. poems, .susceptible variations., .borderlands as in late noon., .the magma of the alley., .lace vortex., .this is a party., .so what nests after woman.:
“IV.: What’s the ‘connective tissue’? what does “it makes another syntax” mean? ‘Syntax’ & ‘narrative’ clearly indicate (?) ‘the same thing’? What a charming muddle!—Darling, don’t leave!
.susceptible variations.
.invoices. repetition polarities. seek tendencies
authoring what differentiates the frogs. forums
filled with buttered corn. scrolls and apparatus.
Almost everything remains to be undertaken in the investigation of ‘narrative’—we don’t know what it is—what’s the ‘symbiosis’ between language (apparently a ‘structural event’) & human (animal, generally, huh? Semicolon; rocks?) ‘mental process’—“language”?/”mind”?(“language are”—‘in’ the brain?)? Almost everything is “in quotes” including, particularly, that previously casually supposed copy-relation among /between “language” & “the world” (now presupposed to be merely the image, purely projected by men’s and women’s wills, as language, within which ‘we’ are trapped, rather unfortunately, but within which we can alter the environment by transferring ownership or employing a competent & highly recommended gardener to reduce traffic noise?—the notion of ‘syntax’ as some total ‘governing’ language’s pre-programmed ‘narrative’ of ‘events’ arrived?)?
.borderlands as in late noon.
.what loops it to itself. a regional frothing
of circular. the revolt of parabolic literals.
playing music out of the tips. of a war
who can speak for halle barry leaving her
husband. the most complex biological slates.
What’s the ‘comparative time’? Eh!? How, then, ever know what follows? One thing after another?—“one one one”—what does that language mean? Form is what it looks like afterward, depending ‘from’ what happens?—well, then, on same old question, how such? Mark what happens, extant sort!—how ‘then’?—how did what happen?—the past, It Was—outcome of what mysterious ‘flesh’…? What made it?—something make it?
.the magma of the alley.
.form of how it does or does not respond
to the cat the henchman. the reach. akin to
over fifty. retaliations against the etymology
of darwin drawing. dissolution of embedded
organs. self-invention in break with god.
“Don’t mess with narrative!”—absolute dictum of society which would phase you in, phase you out, ‘finally’—assumption of “beginning/middle/end” & series form through which we are supposed to ‘live’, so heavy-handed & pervasive it’s not even noticed—until you step out, on occasion—with ‘narrative’ as henchman of this awful mind-control, that spreads abroad, with intent to aggrandize whatever it can push/persuade the world is this the way to—the whole thing ‘organized’—synchronized/in sequence—in our lifetimes!
.lace vortex.
.not named but nameable transmissions.
disintegrating loons taste the great arousal.
upside down pineapple. hive. closest. flute.
ferret running in its passage. they go. because
they made it.
V.: What is the passage of time to time, that's narrative, what is the order in which 'things happen', in 'language' of course--i.e. in & through language--but more primarily order of events through man perceived to share that same 'structure' that...
All writing is essentially ‘narrative’—not only storytelling/prose—but any combination of letters, that moves in time.
You always have to tell the story of.
It does its activity as a major means to salute & acknowledge, recognize & ‘define’ & manifest itself, I write.
.this is a party.
.send out the coaches. accesses of
ontology. zoo roams. protruding
reimaginings of refused vestibule.
this is a cup is an orb calculation.
caress. am still leaving. the me
of my doctored herbs.
The mere activity of a reader ‘reading’—by moving through words and syllables (at high speed or at a crawl) while thinking almost anything about/never everything by any means of what the words ‘say’, in toto—makes a small (unwritten) ‘narrative in itself’, for itself.
Essentially, the reader makes the narrative—the writer, as a reader, makes the narrative?
.so what nests after woman.
.snorting vein along the coast of your
squiggling cuerpo. ligatures activate
the temporary barn. each other politic
hygiene. shines exquisitely press-on
can’t say blatantly. moss-complications
meaning you stay if not one shape.
then dividable in the cleanest. the
final body becoming the first.
Ok, then, the issue is the same thing (as if the writer makes the story up, out of the Imagination)—its glory forth—
:: ummm, so ya....compilate. is available today!!!
email me at livestockjared[at]gmail[dot]com and order yours!
livestock editions does not charge for their books...but is always happy to accept donations or trades!!
in the process of reading and doing the layout design of and for j/j hastain's .compilate. i was inexorably moved outward into the past and future of my relationship with poetry and thus my relationship with the world. in many ways i wanted to write a short note explaining or offering some brief insight or captivating and influential press release to share this book with the world. as i was writing these blurb like phrasings/opinions i was thrust beyond them via the texts own diverse momentums into further thought and other books. so, here, rather than condense my feelings/thoughts/impressions/relations of and to j/j hastain's writing, i thought it might be useful to map the movement of my thinking and reading...those processes being produced by the varying gestures of .compilate.'s text....as an introduction and example set, here is a short sampling of the book (please understand my personal html limitations in formatting produce a text not identical in format to the original):
from the first section:
.amor surgical.
.stolen. books. objections. personas. exiles.
membrane. junky jolted you. in groan and
localized eros. corporeality of any cicala
theory. if it matters when it goes engraved.
salted. strung together to make more than two
hundred miniaturized girls.
.with accommodations the sentences begin to shift.
.the room is opaque often laminatedly related.
something like out of the top of your. who
does the incremental switch belong to. making
beings that extend beyond contradictions in the
fashion. general constructions beading banality.
dead cats then a dress made of cast. calle as
in this to reach renee. the hospital is not
fake. the infant and its numerous furry bulks.
.nomadic taxi touch.
.sockets become unexpected shovels. the
syringe buries. impulses of sea umbrella.
waning circulature. intelligence actually dying.
the sacrilege of dedicated grosspace.
.skewering sonata.
.work itself verge or spill construction.
the trusting blackened. grind to and ash.
tumultuous turning floatations into sanskrit.
or potatoes between hardening hands.
tangents:
I. this text is one that co-operates with language. as i have heard mr. duncan point out in audio lectures: some "use" language others "co-operate" with it. this is something fundamental for/to me as a reader/writer of text/world. i am prompted to continue that premise...knowledge/language exists outside of myself and only in relationship to others/geographies/texts do i (whatever/whoever i may be) collaborate in meaning making....compilate. did not necessarily reveal this to me, yet .compilate. is a text that re-members this consistently throughout. and maybe that is the process that this book encourages in the experience of it...the re-membering of these polysemous cells. i am brought into the biological act of fusion, or no, something more dirty...some prosthetic or transformation process where membranes are introduced to each other and either reject or assimilate themselves. here in .compilate. i believe we as readers/writers both assimilate and reject this prosthetic membrane. we as co-participants in the meaning making process re-member and suture this monster to ourselves (willy-nilly and with momentum). it hangs strangely and comfortably off of ourselves...changes our functions as we learn its own kind of consciousness.
I. in the beginning of .compilate. the reader is given a few brief "pre" poetic texts. these texts act to me as a womb or gestational mediation system viewed from an outside...or maybe through ultrasound.... texts like: "compilate: collect+compile+grate.", "gathers things from many different sources. much duration. this matters." reveal some of the clues of the form and shape and parts of the baby/monster to come...then the book proceeds into the birth, "has no affinity / to the history book". this birthing of things collected, compiled, and grated resembles the ways i have read benjamin, arendt, and jae emerling (on benjamin and arendt). each of these authors has lauded the collector's relationship to her/his/their world...by re-contextualizing objects/words/things through a kind of "pearl-diving" into the past (arendt on benjamin) the genuine collector "exhibits a love of things, a care of things, that refuses to appropriate their alterity...in the presentation of the what-has-been, a past that was never present the as yet unlived." (emerling on arendt and benjamin). from here i suggest also that recent discussions of kenneth goldsmith's work in a parallel fashion, as well as thought in/around/about viktor shlovsky's queering/making strange/defamiliarization can be thought in terms of this kind of idiosyncratic and and times radical collecting/birthing. pulling texts/worlds together through a variety of personally idiosyncratic methods of construction/reconstruction/rereconstruction so that their past breathes in the present. In fact through reading/writing this .compilate. monster i am reminded that maybe this process--of idiosyncratic collecting--is what builds (and possibly has always built) the polysemous human conversation/narrative [and not just what is called "discourse" (but that too)]...is it only now that humans have been so easily rendered useless to their own future through the lack of attention to their past? Or have we always been so forgetful?....compilate., through its attempt at collection and dispersal, is building a narrative in conjunction and in relation to the reader/writer and their world. this monster is growing/transforming on/into us...it is re-membering itself as it attaches its history to you and your room presently.
and don't these notions/notes also reinforce similarities between benjamin's ideas about brechtian performativity and relationships between our objects, ourselves...a dialogic or polylogic dialectics of reading/writing.
(note to self: write a paper on benjamin's brechtian influence towards a performativity of the reader/writer: a benjaminian performative dialogic dialectic of reading/writing a new art-historical poeisis?wtf?.)
I. .compilate. is a text that meditates, that breathes, that sits and yet transfoms. I am reminded and sent back to gertrude stein's stanzas in meditation, a text in which language comes back to itself...back to its own breath (huh?)....the form of .compilate. is phenomenological in this sense...or attempts to be so...it does not seem like a record of meditation (though it may be)...rather it appears to me to be the enactment or embodiment of meditative states....the reader/writer of .compilate. is confronted with accumulations of meanings and contexts only to be moved steadily, if not swiftly, (on the wind horse) into others...just as during a sitting meditation one's mind may wander and body may begin to fatigue (these never being mutually exclusive), one attempts, consistently, to bring their mind and body back to the immediate moment...it is in in this sense that .compilate. seems to be operating in my mind and body...as i read/write the text i am brought back to the immediacy of each phrasing...then group of phrasings...then back. then back. again. again. consistently. back. again. .this movement is not one that gives a sense of forward linear movement...there is no "progress"....trajectories are rhizomic in .compilate....we breathe. we read. we sit. we go out. we come back. we set the book down. we go back. we hear the gong. and the music doesn't stop. rather, we experience our moments and .compilate. rests itself uncomfortably and monstrously in our breath and seats...
I. so far in writing responses and close readings/writings of texts it has been difficult for me to express specifically what it is that is happening lyrically. now here .compilate. has added another insight into where i find lyric and lyricism most intriguing. in the past year or so a handful of texts have stood out to me lyrically for the simple reason that there forms seemed antithetic to lyric or to use nezval's phrase (i think) antilyric...these texts are joseph cooper's autobiography of a stutterer, andrew peterson's anselm hollo private eye, gertrude stein's stanzas in meditation, and now j/j hastain's .compilate....what each of these texts does in their own ways is to create a music that would at first seem to be impossible. "stutterer" places reader/performer in the place of the author through the use of symbols that articulate the difficulties and seizures of his own tongue. a brief look at the text is dizzying due to the number of disruptions. yet a clear lyric is imbedded and made possible by the impediment. one finds herself working through the text in her own disruptive singing. i have spoken briefly in the past about AHPE by peterson and will again reiterate how a period after every line created a kind of stop. /and. /go. /experience. that motion becomes a kind of music of musics or musics of music as you move through...small voices combining for an overall effect of song. stein, of course, in stanzas uses almost no nouns in her masterpiece which serves to alter your presence with it...the text is most difficult to stay involved with in prolonged readings...yet its music becomes unmistakeable with all of the prepositions and articles repeating in every possibility...(in an ideal world i'd give lengthy examples of all...but...)....compilate.'s music is also at first an interruptive one as well. we are confronted and released by periods on both sides of the text...in a way framing but also a kind of punching through the page...as if the periods were holes in this fabric...or to look back to duncan again in his warp and woof lecture...this is a fabric that is hol(e)y. so even though i am in a way interrupted by its formal architecture i am pressed through these (w)holes into another weaving. into another weaving. into another weaving. and so on. and these are, ultimately, part of the same fabric. (which is why it is possible to be read at all...for anything to be read.?)...but the music is in the movement from warp to woof and back...wait...does that make sense? .compilate. is an interruptive lyric or antilyric in the sense that you come to abrupt holes (metaphorical and lyrical) that move you into and out of cushion-ey...then rocky...then velvet-ey...then abrupt sound spaces...but the only way to travel from stop to song is through those portal period holes. And those portals are revealed two-fold: architecturally [periods (punctuation and length of time)], semantically [meanings (relationally created)]. the result is a movement of sound that traverses underneath between, over and through the accumulated text...a kind of superstructure...or ego...there it! is!...the sound of compilate is the accumulative identity binding its monstrous baby system to our own as readers/writers/experiencers...the lyric of .compilate. acts as a barb extending out of its tentacles which have wrapped themselves around yr torso...sticking its lyric inside of your body this monster releases its genetic sonic fabric changing again and again the way yr ears make their sense.
I.…ralph the naropa bookstore owner while i was attending (whose been at naropa since its beginning) would bring certain books in (i can only imagine his stashes from previous 30 odd swp’s) one at a time to be found by the most steadfast explorer of books. some of us understood that if we spent the time to look (three to four x's a week) we might find some crazy textual rainbow loot! something not visible (and most likely not even there) the day or two before and placed there just for us (or so it seemed)…this is just how i came across robert grenier’s attention, a curriculum of the soul book, #28 that was put out in 1985 by the institute for further studies at glover publishing…so, here (in portland), the other day i see it sitting next to .compilate., as if placed there by the ghosts of kerouac and stein, and i pick them both up and read them into each other...and so here is part of that experience.
here are grenier narratives, IV., V. and .compilate. poems, .susceptible variations., .borderlands as in late noon., .the magma of the alley., .lace vortex., .this is a party., .so what nests after woman.:
“IV.: What’s the ‘connective tissue’? what does “it makes another syntax” mean? ‘Syntax’ & ‘narrative’ clearly indicate (?) ‘the same thing’? What a charming muddle!—Darling, don’t leave!
.susceptible variations.
.invoices. repetition polarities. seek tendencies
authoring what differentiates the frogs. forums
filled with buttered corn. scrolls and apparatus.
Almost everything remains to be undertaken in the investigation of ‘narrative’—we don’t know what it is—what’s the ‘symbiosis’ between language (apparently a ‘structural event’) & human (animal, generally, huh? Semicolon; rocks?) ‘mental process’—“language”?/”mind”?(“language are”—‘in’ the brain?)? Almost everything is “in quotes” including, particularly, that previously casually supposed copy-relation among /between “language” & “the world” (now presupposed to be merely the image, purely projected by men’s and women’s wills, as language, within which ‘we’ are trapped, rather unfortunately, but within which we can alter the environment by transferring ownership or employing a competent & highly recommended gardener to reduce traffic noise?—the notion of ‘syntax’ as some total ‘governing’ language’s pre-programmed ‘narrative’ of ‘events’ arrived?)?
.borderlands as in late noon.
.what loops it to itself. a regional frothing
of circular. the revolt of parabolic literals.
playing music out of the tips. of a war
who can speak for halle barry leaving her
husband. the most complex biological slates.
What’s the ‘comparative time’? Eh!? How, then, ever know what follows? One thing after another?—“one one one”—what does that language mean? Form is what it looks like afterward, depending ‘from’ what happens?—well, then, on same old question, how such? Mark what happens, extant sort!—how ‘then’?—how did what happen?—the past, It Was—outcome of what mysterious ‘flesh’…? What made it?—something make it?
.the magma of the alley.
.form of how it does or does not respond
to the cat the henchman. the reach. akin to
over fifty. retaliations against the etymology
of darwin drawing. dissolution of embedded
organs. self-invention in break with god.
“Don’t mess with narrative!”—absolute dictum of society which would phase you in, phase you out, ‘finally’—assumption of “beginning/middle/end” & series form through which we are supposed to ‘live’, so heavy-handed & pervasive it’s not even noticed—until you step out, on occasion—with ‘narrative’ as henchman of this awful mind-control, that spreads abroad, with intent to aggrandize whatever it can push/persuade the world is this the way to—the whole thing ‘organized’—synchronized/in sequence—in our lifetimes!
.lace vortex.
.not named but nameable transmissions.
disintegrating loons taste the great arousal.
upside down pineapple. hive. closest. flute.
ferret running in its passage. they go. because
they made it.
V.: What is the passage of time to time, that's narrative, what is the order in which 'things happen', in 'language' of course--i.e. in & through language--but more primarily order of events through man perceived to share that same 'structure' that...
All writing is essentially ‘narrative’—not only storytelling/prose—but any combination of letters, that moves in time.
You always have to tell the story of.
It does its activity as a major means to salute & acknowledge, recognize & ‘define’ & manifest itself, I write.
.this is a party.
.send out the coaches. accesses of
ontology. zoo roams. protruding
reimaginings of refused vestibule.
this is a cup is an orb calculation.
caress. am still leaving. the me
of my doctored herbs.
The mere activity of a reader ‘reading’—by moving through words and syllables (at high speed or at a crawl) while thinking almost anything about/never everything by any means of what the words ‘say’, in toto—makes a small (unwritten) ‘narrative in itself’, for itself.
Essentially, the reader makes the narrative—the writer, as a reader, makes the narrative?
.so what nests after woman.
.snorting vein along the coast of your
squiggling cuerpo. ligatures activate
the temporary barn. each other politic
hygiene. shines exquisitely press-on
can’t say blatantly. moss-complications
meaning you stay if not one shape.
then dividable in the cleanest. the
final body becoming the first.
Ok, then, the issue is the same thing (as if the writer makes the story up, out of the Imagination)—its glory forth—
:: ummm, so ya....compilate. is available today!!!
email me at livestockjared[at]gmail[dot]com and order yours!
livestock editions does not charge for their books...but is always happy to accept donations or trades!!
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
"It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." - WC Williams
Revolutionary Letter #9 By Diane di Prima
advocating
the overthrow of the government is a crime
overthrowing it is something else
altogether. it is sometimes called
revolution
but don't kid yourself: government
is not where it's at: it's only
a good place to start:
1. kill head of Dow Chemical
2. destroy plant
3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM
to build again.
i.e., destroy the concept of money
as we know it, get rid of interest,
savings, inheritance
(Pound's money, as dated coupons that come in the mail
to everyone, and are void in 30 days
is still a good idea)
or, let's start with no money at all and invent it
if we need it
or, mimeograph it and everyone
print as much as they want
and see what happens
declare a moratorium on debt
the Continental Congress did
'on all debts public and private'
& no one 'owns' the land
it can be held
for use, no man holding more
than he can work, himself and family working
let no one work for another
except for love, and what you make
above your needs be given to the tribe
a Common-Wealth
None of us knows the answers, think about
these things.
The day will come when we will have to know
the answers.
advocating
the overthrow of the government is a crime
overthrowing it is something else
altogether. it is sometimes called
revolution
but don't kid yourself: government
is not where it's at: it's only
a good place to start:
1. kill head of Dow Chemical
2. destroy plant
3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM
to build again.
i.e., destroy the concept of money
as we know it, get rid of interest,
savings, inheritance
(Pound's money, as dated coupons that come in the mail
to everyone, and are void in 30 days
is still a good idea)
or, let's start with no money at all and invent it
if we need it
or, mimeograph it and everyone
print as much as they want
and see what happens
declare a moratorium on debt
the Continental Congress did
'on all debts public and private'
& no one 'owns' the land
it can be held
for use, no man holding more
than he can work, himself and family working
let no one work for another
except for love, and what you make
above your needs be given to the tribe
a Common-Wealth
None of us knows the answers, think about
these things.
The day will come when we will have to know
the answers.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Sunday, September 07, 2008
kenneth goldsmith via linh dinh via tony tost
(for Linh Dinh)
"I thought to myself, wow, writing is so far behind other art forms in this regard. . .
Twenty five years after Baudrillard, these poetry students were still prioritizing Romantic notions of authenticity -- "truth", "individuality" and "honesty" -- over any other form of expression. My god! Is it a case of naivety, amnesia or just plain ignorance?. . .
Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all. With digital fragmentation any notions of authenticity and coherence have long been wiped. When we're everywhere and nowhere at once -- pulling RSS feeds from one server, server-side includes from another, downloading distributed byte-size torrents from hundreds of other shifting identities -- such naïve sentiments are even further from what it means to be a contemporary writer. Identity politics no longer have to do with the definition of a coherent self, rather it has to do with the reconstructed distributed, fragmented, multiple and often anonymous selves that we are today. We're infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute. Shouldn't our notions of art expand once again to include these as well?"
-- Kenneth Goldsmith
"I thought to myself, wow, writing is so far behind other art forms in this regard. . .
Twenty five years after Baudrillard, these poetry students were still prioritizing Romantic notions of authenticity -- "truth", "individuality" and "honesty" -- over any other form of expression. My god! Is it a case of naivety, amnesia or just plain ignorance?. . .
Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all. With digital fragmentation any notions of authenticity and coherence have long been wiped. When we're everywhere and nowhere at once -- pulling RSS feeds from one server, server-side includes from another, downloading distributed byte-size torrents from hundreds of other shifting identities -- such naïve sentiments are even further from what it means to be a contemporary writer. Identity politics no longer have to do with the definition of a coherent self, rather it has to do with the reconstructed distributed, fragmented, multiple and often anonymous selves that we are today. We're infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute. Shouldn't our notions of art expand once again to include these as well?"
-- Kenneth Goldsmith
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