STATEMENT FOR 21 GRAND -- BARRETT WATTEN
Putting together a reading is always a matter of rethinking a range of formal strategies in my work in terms of the space in which I present it, and the time of presentation . For 21 Grand, I wanted to make a frame of the current section of The Grand Piano 8 I am writing, as it is my most recent work. It will go out to the printer by the end of the month, and then I will be on to the next and last sections, to appear by the end of 2009.
The focus of that section is "West"--oceanic feelings I associated with San Francisco as liminal site, and the interstellar space between sites (San Francisco and Detroit, and elsewhere) I also know and experience. The section connects the desiring space of open form and no boundaries with the empty space of no community, and interrogates the relation between them. I'm negotiating a poetics desire in two forms, in that sense.
To introduce my project, I read three short, occasional poems from the recent past. They are poetic anecdotes; one begins with the story of a forebear pouring several gallons of out-of-date human blood onto a compost heap, somewhere in the repressed suburbs, during some oppressive decade, in Oakland. After the reading, a friend suggested this was a trope for the question of representability throughout. It is a negative poetics.
In between the opening and closing sections of The Grand Piano I read sixty one-to-ten-line poetic overwrites of samples from William Carlos Williams's Paterson, book 1. I see a connection between Paterson as a site and Oakland, and between the Passaic Falls and the ocean. In adapting the samples of Paterson to my purposes, I was thinking of the relation between knowledge and information; democracy and the crisis of representation; parataxis and hypotaxis; the poetics of the "genius" and modernity (Henry Ford); basketball and sentences. In the overwrites, I tried to write "knowledge sentences" that would represent "a complex state of affairs"; in the course of the work, a centripedal tendency of the fragment interacts with the centrifugal dynamics of meaning.
I wanted to perform the Paterson overwrites in a voice of "not me." Somewhere in the background are the samples of Williams, like the roar of the falls. I wanted to speak of the beyond to what is beyond. There is a connection both to place and to oceanic feelings/interstellar space. At the bottom of it all is a question of representation, both canceled out and constructed. I see this intersection/canceling of forms as generative.
Barrett Watten
March 2009
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audio here (thx andrew)
ARTIST'S STATEMENT -- ARIANA REINES
hi
i guess i don't know how to write this statement; it seems like an opportunity to say what one's life is like and also what one is working on, a generous opportunity. a person like me might overdo it: speaking for oneself usually includes, like, getting over the anguish of speaking for oneself, i think. right now i'm translating baudelaire and putting together (designing and editing) a book that is actually two books by two friends. i'm making something called MERCURY and something called PURCHASE and the possibility that PURCHASE will end up inside MERCURY. the feeling of something converging, and trying to align with an energy like the sense for an end of a world. last year was very full and difficult. somebody i love died, i fell in love, and i wrote a play that took a year to write. as i write this, i think, 21 grand, it's so nice of you to ask. and i feel sorry for saying all the wrong things, which ultimately turn out to have been right, isn't it always that way with the errors one makes of one's own accord. as i write this, i need a place to live. it occurs to me that there is more space between objects and, thereby, more space, which is the same as the possibility of more space, between ideas-- in california. have you read the case of california by laurence rickels? i haven't. i'm totally listening to ein deutsches requiem. i enjoy to read what a person thinks and feels, i always find it self-indulgent in the encouraging way that's like a gesture toward deferring suicide: i want to know what grooming products a person uses, what she eats when she feels complicated, what she becomes when she's alone, like in the bathroom, or what it's like for her to wake up in the morning. like amy goodman or kathy kelly. what i love right now is the care and slowness in gentle commentaries that do not, will not intoxicate themselves upon the energy of their own proceeding: that go slowly. i bought gold hightops at the thrift store today: they don't really express my personality is the feeling i have about them; nevertheless something happens when i have them on (as i write this i have them on) that, though not wholly convincing, produces a mild sensation of erroneousness that i guess i find stimulating. i don't know what poetry is; i almost typed anymore, i don't know what poetry is anymore, that's an antique, or vintage, statement that used to carry real emotion around on my behalf when i employed it back in the day, but now i'm too far away to know. once and a while there's a twinge. see you soon.
xxariana
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audio here (thx andrew)
3/18/09
3/3/09
Sunday, March 15, 2008
The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand presents
Ariana Reines & Barrett Watten
6:30 pm
5 USDollars
ARIANA REINES is the author of THE COW (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks: 2006) and COEUR DE LION (mal-o-mar: 2007). Two translations will come out in 2009: MY HEART LAID BARE by Charles Baudelaire (mal-o-mar) and LITTLE BLACK BOOK: DAYS AND NIGHTS OF A REVOLUTIONARY WHORE by Grisélidis Réal (Semiotext(e)). Ariana's first play, TELEPHONE, just ended its run at The Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. Right now she's Holloway Lecturer at UC Berkeley.
BARRETT WATTEN is the author of two long poems, Progress (1985), and Under Erasure (1991); Frame (1971-1990), a collection of eight previous works. He is also the author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003), Bad History (1998); former editor of This and publisher of This Press, and author of Total Syntax (1984), essays on modern and contemporary poetics. He teaches modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University, Detroit.
2/17/09
POETICS STATEMENT -- BRIAN KIM STEFANS
It would be absurd for me to write an artist's statement at this point in time as I've not been making much art lately. I suppose, if anything, I am exercising a certain patience that some of my favorite artists -- Carl Dreyer and Scott Walker, for example -- have exercised in the long, though never "empty," time between bursts of creative activity. There's no drama here -- I've merely been busy, moved around quite a bit over the past years, and have had some highs and lows. I've wanted to make a change in the way I do things anyway (hence the title of my recent book of essays) -- more disciplined, less frantic in that New York School manner (though you can't take New York out of the boy -- or is that New Jersey?)*. My work has also been divided between "digital" and "proper" print poems for some years now, and I'm trying to take both sides of the project up a notch, which requires a sort of concentration I've not had recently. So I guess I'm excited to see what will happen next; I hope someone else out there is too! Could happen in half a year, or right after I hit "send" on this e-mail.
* Or is it just Mickey Rourke?
Postscript: I can say that my "research interests" -- which is code for what I hope to see in my poetry -- have veered off into all sorts of quasi-academic concerns such as video game narrative studies and the role of algorithm in the creation of cultural objects, the Rabelaisian aspects of internet culture before and after Web 2.0, and the somewhat vanquished poetic tactics of the "90s," trying to acquire some substantial sense of what's happening now and why (as Juliana Spahr seems to agree) a whole gamut of discourse from that time seems to have disappeared. On that last note, I'm hoping to take advantage of my newly minted status as an academic to take a closer look at a range of poetry that I more or less experienced as a writer and reviewer in the New York scene up until 2005, when I left for Providence; of course, I wish to situate myself again in the community of poets from my lofty perch above La Brea Avenue, with no bets on how that will play out. In a phrase: I'm in a transition.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT -- LAURA ELRICK
Dear Kaia,
Sounds like you have a busy weekend ahead of you...leafblowers and bell-chimes and talks poems texts walks! I feel my imagination of your current projects like a foreshadowing delay or something utopian on the cusp of becoming concrete. Well, in any case, you're already there, in SF!
I read your talk on the B48 bus last night, as it made its slow way from Greenpoint to Lefferts Garden in the gleaming Brooklyn night, on my way to a meeting at the Belladonna office. I like what you're saying about tactics, and will be trying to think about that more in the coming weeks, between the jerk and grind. In terms of the difference between framing and distancing, my gut tells me there is something about the kind of space one is in that must co-determine the tactic. I mean, the high-density sign grove of the suburb/highway median or the grove of signs that has become the city itself, stretching its plastic bubble-time controlled-climate over the isle of Manhattan. Distance=Brooklyn? Is this distance aesthetic?
Questions I have—what is or is not possible "here" (for me I mean, my here) in this monstrosity of global finance in the middle of free-fall. The jumpers against a 15 second duration of laced steel. (I mean, maybe the compressed urban daily experience simply is NOT the focal point of progressive possibility right now. I am trying to consider what that might mean for my nonetheless very located, daily praxis. How to contend with the mediation.) Another question might be: How is dailiness (and the distancing from it) different in different space-times? Distance is relief here sought after, hard to achieve, and can feel like warm lovely rain, this interval on a city bus (distance in time and through space). Or, and I take this possibility seriously, might my longing for the lull be a retrogressive clinging to a by-gone mode of being. I don't know, I really don't. My exact dilemma is that it feels like frames are obliterated as soon as they are formed in New York. That for a frame to establish even a momentarily fructive register, an interval of distance must be briefly constructed from the detritus that gets dropped by all that movement… then move on.
Could Katz's concept of the contour help me here, in thinking about this? (And I really really love the reference to Cindy Katz's concept of the topographical contour! I'm so glad you reminded me of her important work.) Contour might actually be a really interesting and useful way of bridging poetic thinking to a spatial plane that allows for both a located grounding and a sufficiently theoretical engagement with the abstraction of global social relations. In her 2001 essay “On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement,” Katz discusses topographical knowledge as “a means to develop a politics that works the grounds of and between multiply situated social actors in a range of geographical locations who are at once bound and rent by the diverse forces of globalization.” And further, in defining topography she writes, “The thing itself as much as the description of it are produced, and unraveling the processes of how they came to be can reveal the powerful interests vested in topography and topographical knowledge.”
I would like to think of Stalk as a step toward the creation of an oppositional topography of post 9-11 New York. The June 17 act, a poem without words, was a “framing” intervention (an irritation to the slick skin of the naturalized polis). The text which mediates the visual record of that act tries to come to terms with the always-already aesthetic distance between what Katz calls “a local that is constitutively global but whose engagements with various global imperatives are the material forms and practices of situated knowledge.”
Anyway, these are just some of my initial thoughts. Thank you so much for sending me your talk! This quickness of the blood all around. This groping toward something sensed, but only vaguely known.
Hope you are having a brilliant time. And that I will hear more from you after the dust settles.
With love,
-L
1/26/09
Please join us on Sunday, February 15 at 6:30pm as we welcome...
Laura Elrick and Brian Kim Stefans
LAURA ELRICK lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her books of poetry include sKincerity (Krupskaya 2003) and Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School 2005); some audio pieces and an interview can be heard on the Ceptuetics radio show here. She has been a contributing editor to Future Poem Books and is currently on the organizing committee for the Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism conference to be held in New York next Fall. On Feb 15, Laura will be performing her video/poem Stalk, which includes documentation of a recent spatial-poetic intervention into several prominent Manhattan commercial districts.
BRIAN KIM STEFANS' recent books include Kluge (Roof Books, 2007), What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006) and Before Starting Over: Selected Essays and Interviews (Salt Publishing, 2006). Recent digital projects include the interactive Kluge and a series of digital projections called "Scriptor" that are intended for gallery and environmental settings, one of which appeared in the shown "Contranym" in New York City's ABC Gallery in September, 2008. He is presently Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at UCLA and lives in Los Angeles half a block away from Scarlett Johansson ('s face on a billboard).
12/16/08
Stefani Barber
Jasper Bernes
Lindsey Boldt
David Brazil
David Buuck
Geneva Chao
Del Ray Cross
Chris Girard
Michael Nicoloff
Eleni Stecopoulos
John Sakkis
Jerrold Shiroma
This event is a TAXT FUNDRAISER. All proceeds will go towards the printing, stapling, & mailing of the 2009 series of TAXT chapbooks. TAXT appreciates your support!
About the press:
"TAXT works to make visible the work of contemporary Bay Area poets, writers, & artists previously under-represented in publication. The chapbooks are produced at home in Oakland, on an irregular but consistent basis & will continue to appear thus until I get tired of folding pages. This editor's role is to provide a physical space in which writers & artists may do whatever work they choose: the site is always 24pgs, in the 5.5 x 8.5 framework. This publisher's desire is to work with each contributor to produce a simple book that makes its consideration as both object and container.
TAXT chapbooks are ALWAYS FREE. Keep yours or pass it on. Share the wealth; there will never be more than 100 copies of each book. Sorry."
If you can’t come to the KISSING BOOTH, but would still like to support TAXT, or would just like more information about the press, please visit http://www.taxtpress.blogspot.com/ or email the press directly: taxt@mindspring.com
11/21/08
Please join us on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 as we welcome
KEVIN KILLIAN, born 1952, is an art writer, poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer(1996), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), two books of stories Little Men (1997) and I Cry Like a Baby (2001) and a collection of poems, Argento Series (1997). With Lewis Ellingham he has written a biography of the poet Jack Spicer—Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). For the San Francisco Poets Theater he has written 37 plays, including Stone Marmalade, with Leslie Scalapino, and Often, with the late Barbara Guest. His most recent book, from Hooke Press, is a volume of his Selected Amazon Reviews, edited by Brent Cunningham, and now there is Action Kylie.
STEPHANIE YOUNG lives and works in Oakland. She edited the anthology BAY POETICS (Faux Press, 2006) and is currently at work on the collaborative website DEEP OAKLAND. Hey, you should propose a project for DEEP OAKLAND! Her books of poetry are Picture Palace and Telling the Future Off. She is here very sometimes: www.stephanieyoung.org/blog.
11/17/08
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
The Perfume Recordist (Lisa Roberton & Stacy Doris)
The Feast
All honour to the anal cavity.
All honour to mighty pungent couplings of the rose of political imagination.
All honour to the entrails of language.
Someone took a turd to a sage and said: “Look, he is being corrupted by women.”
And the turd said: “Women are always actresses, no matter what they do.”
And the sage said: “Truly, a hard law buggers you.”
The Perfume Recordist butts right up to the edge of the rose of waste to strut in the sewer of womanhood. Where the rose becomes turds and cacophony, we hurl ourselves into the putrid bouquet.
There, we lift our complicated indivisible arses and breasts like complaints and discharge an expanse of rotting petals. Oh, disagreeable Master! Here is our rosy manure.
Perfume’s history is the record of shit.
We have been excrement, filth on opulent paper, ecstatic quiddity of defecation judged profitable.
Perfume is matter out of place, aka shit: a revolt against the exorbitance of boundaries. Waves of roses flow though the sewers. We’re out in more than we can need. We’re matter out of place.
The rosy waste increases, migrates, vomits, beseeches, refutes, despairs, invades, carries us in a flatulent rose tide of spontaneous imitation, ah we are sub-rosa fishermen of spasms, our little skiff afloat in the fetid fervor.
Shit protects one from the moral majority within.
Eight-o-clock at night. Let us now examine the eighteenth century, our cunt. It let loose an extreme jollity and extreme impertinence. It poured out erudition, filth and boredom. Not a pavement in the place, and everything gutters for miles and miles, and a stench to it that plucked us by the knick-knacks. And we were twenty leagues out.
To return to pollution behaviour, avoidance is a process of tidying up. The essential ingredients of our poetry will be revolting.
O rose the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to prayer, the incomparable fascination of maturation and rot.
And the turd said: “I’m a fart in a mass of wind, a humble bud under a cow-pad.”
Roll on in shit, traverse this absurd age.
The coming musk rose started excreting fell upon our ear and started excreting like the sweet south stealing and giving odor fell upon our ear and started excreting the murmurous haunt of flies started excreting.
With perfume too the excremental juice applied to body and garments is carried across wild trajectories. We are all invasive species.
All value is waste.
Oh, and thank you for your virginity.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Jaime Cortez
(aka, my Five Commandments)
Worry about the truth but do not sweat the facts.
Humor that floats atop dark, horrible, curdled stuff is the best.
Look at the world around you and take dictation. This saves you the trouble of inventing stuff.
Write cleanly and directly. Avoid formal sleight of hand. Be simple, but hopefully not easy.
Know that your greatest artistic strengths and weaknesses are usually the same thing.
That’s all, folks!
