More poetry and politics. Fun debate last night in Stephen's course- something still bugging me. For folks not in (or often in) Listening to Poetry, several of the folks we've been reading have echoed the idea that the language itself structures thought and thinking, and not the other way around. That is, instead of an extant material world coming into our senses which we then represent in words, all we ever see are symbols and systems of symbols organized in pre-determined ways- i.e. in grammars. Which is to say, there is no raw, unstructured world to appeal to in our talk about reality- only linguistic entities.

Dan wanted to say, and I think Heidegger, Cassirer and many others agree, that this shows how language is in control of us, how we can't escape its influence, how it structures us and our thoughts. If all we get are symbols, and the symbols are systematized for us already, and all we can do is manipulate the symbols according to the rules of the system, then all we can think is what language tells us to think. Put like that, and I think it could certainly be put even better, the view is pretty persuasive.

There are two arguments, however, that I can't seem to shake. The first: is it so obvious that we think in language? That's kind of a puzzle, so I won't muddy it up by exploring it any here, but I do kind of want to know anyone's take on it. Do you think in language? All of the time, some of the time? Do you think only in language when you think about language? Can you think about language in something other than language?

Number two, suppose we do think in language, does the kind of deterministic picture sketched above really hold true? How, on that account, would inventions and changes in language take place? If no one in the whole system has any free will, if we are all just causal effects in a chain whose first cause precedes us in time, why does the shape of the thing change any, which I think we would all have to agree language does, and often? As an analogy, if you started running a mathematical algorithm through a computer, and all of a sudden it started spitting out things outside the defined set, say a Joan Retallack poem, wouldn't you be a little curious as to how it happened?

I think it's consistent to say that the world is constructed and not given to us, and even constructed by a symbol system like language, but that we take part in the construction, as agents with degrees of free will (and I think this is what Waldrop is saying about com[position, even if she places most of the agency in language). I also think it's consistent to say we think in language sometimes, by other means other times. It's possible that a non-symbol system, the workings of our organic brain, gives rise to a symbol system, language, and that the two continue to coexist. It's possible that one could respond meaningfully to language with a non-representational gesture, such as a tear or a guffaw. It's also possible that non-linguistic phenomenon could give rise to a linguistic response, like a spring morning causing us to write a nature poem, and that is even consistent with a constructivist picture of the world, as long as you don't take language to be the only conceptual scheme which constructs the world.

Of course, being merely "consistent", or "possible" isn't the same as being true.

hey all--i emailed you all about this, but just in case it doesn't go through or i have the wrong address (cathy i gotta bounce back from you) or ghosts in the machine:

i'm having a little get together at my house on friday evening & i want you all to come! since we never go out as a class you should come over. email me for directions ETCETERA.

partners & what have you are welcome!

hey, 3 cheers for the lunar eclipse.

While not sleeping last week I read Eleni Sikelianos' The California Poem. Beautiful, utopian, love poem to California. I'm interested in what gets in to the book and what does not show up. And also wondering how it might be different if Eleni had been living in California recently. Not much about dot com and everything else that has spawned the age of Arnold. Not that much about politics really. And not much about California's complicated identity politics (although these show up at moments). Just a lot of nostalgic love. Here is how it ends:

California keep
on, beneficent
as the sun and sea, I ask you leave
to roll on the first inch

of its shady territory; I believe a hundred dollars
and a year would support me in California
The rest I would pluck from the avocado & lemon tree & the sea

where there is no heavy snow but it is "raining behind my back . . . [and] your rain
will be my rain," in the discovery of apposites that are not bicoastal

California utterly more sky of the looking everything in the mouth of tidelines
the tip of the snail's horn caught in the eye & ice plant poppy bright by the highway deeps

of bituminous, "how do I notice
while being Am, am reading rocks
nothing and riding the surface" my arm rising
out of the dead ring
with rain
over the
veering.
Earth.

At moments it is too much: "California / gives sqwoosky kisses one by one." But in general just a really sweet book. I adore it. Can there be too much love of place?

from stephanie young....

You're invited to a book party and reading in celebration of what Dennis Cooper calls "one of the most important novels of our time."

That's right: THE LETTERS OF MINA HARKER is being re-released by the University of Wisconsin Press with a new foreword by Dennis Cooper. You can go here for more information on the book:

http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/3736.htm

And then you can come over on Saturday night, November 6, for the party and readings by Dodie and Kevin.

Note: There *won't* be a chiropractor doing adjustments at this reading, but there WILL be a very small film crew. Red Queen Productions is making a documentary about straight women and gay marriage, and they'll be here all the way from Canada to film for a section on Dodie and Kevin. If you don't want to appear on film, just let the filmmakers know when you arrive.

THE DETAILS:

Saturday, November 6
7:00 Potluck
8:00 Readings
@ Stephanie Young's house
434 36th Street
Oakland, 94609

FROM 580 EAST:
Take the Broadway/Webster exit and stay in the right lane towards Webster. As you loop off the exit, go right at the stop sign, under the underpass. 36th is your first left. My house is approx. 5 houses down on your right. (see house description)

DRIVING IN THE EAST BAY:
36th runs parallel to MacArthur. Cross-streets are Telegraph and Webster. It's behind Mosswood park - email me if you need more specific directions.

WALKING FROM BART:
I'm within walking distance of MacArthur BART. Go out the back of the parking lot and take a right onto Telegraph. At the light (MacArthur) cross to the other side of the street. Continue down Telegraph. 36th is the second left. Walk up the street, my house is near the top on your left side.

HOUSE DESCRIPTION FOR EVERYONE:
It's a white/cream colored house. We are in the lower flat, so *do not go to the front door of the house*. Instead, walk up the driveway to the right of the house, our door is to your right, up a few grey cement steps behind a red piece of wood. You'll see a shed at the end of the driveway which is how you'll know you're in the right place. I'll put up some signs, too.

***

More on the poetics of the President. I know this looked like a snide comment, but the more I thinnk about this, the more entrancing it becomes. The idea of poetic persuasion in politics, following also upon the article Juliana posted, had me turning to the Greeks and a lecture I heard at UCSC on the history of the Greek polis. The gist of it was, pre-democratic Greece was ruled by a kind of folk oratory, wherein the Homeric epic and the virtues it extolled went a long way to informing the thought of local people, who were fractured into provincial households, something like the situation described in Yemen. But somewhere in the 7th century, the city itself started forming around a central meeting place, which became a venue for a new kind of oratory. Here's how the text for that class (Vernant's "The Origins of Greek Thought") described it:

"Speech was no longer the ritual word, the precise formula, but open debate, discussion, argument. It presupposed a public to which it was addressed, as to a judge whose ruling could not be appealed, who decided with hands upraised between the two parties who came before him."

So the picture emerging is of a move from the one-sided narrative of Homer, to the dialectic of Socrates. It's a glib history (which is my fault for being lazy) but it has me stuck on something: It doesn't look like we're doing debate anymore in politics. You or I might have knock-down arguments from the heights of reason about health care reform or foreign policy, but our representatives merely spit out platitudes. And crucially, it's not the most reasoned platform that wins, but the most poetic. That's a dirty way to use that word, but it's in line with the original critique of the poets levelled by Plato: that they reason softly, and worse, are complicit to moral atrocities by singing the songs of the powerful without critique.

Now I'm not saying that characterizes poets today (or even necessarily that it was accurate then), actually just the opposite, as contemporary poetry puts narrative into question and most certainly does critique. The thought that got me excited is this: political philosophy is now out of the loop. You can't have a policy debate with Dubya because he's not doing policy, in the sense of reasoned discourse about the best and most just way for our nation to proceed- he's doing poetics. But is it possible to have poetic debate with him? Is it possible that the best people to take on the rhetorical juggernaut that is the incumbent-terible are poets? Maybe that's not revolutionary and you've already thought of it. Maybe it's just dumb. I don't know- it's what I've been thinking about.

I just put Charles's poems in everyone's mailbox in the graduate lounge. If I missed you, then there are extras in the box outside my door.

I'm exhausted after Big Poetry Weekend. I've got Charles's poems. I will put in yr mailbox tomorrow a.m.

Meantime, Walter Lew pointed this out to me...

Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2004 Monday
A Bard Against Bullets ; Yemen is using poetry, a potent tool of mass persuasion in its culture, to try to stem tribal lawlessness and the harboring of terrorists.

by Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer

JERIF, Yemen. The men squat along the walls of the salon with daggers strapped against their bellies and pistols on their hips, bathed in the buttery light of a low sun shining through stained-glass windows.

The days in this remote village run through a simple cycle: In the mornings, the farmers work their fields, growing almost nothing except qat, the narcotic leaves Yemenis chew as a sort of national pastime. When the light grows long, they bundle some of their fresh-cut leaves and gather to get stoned, recite poetry and talk politics.

This afternoon, the farmers have come to hear Amin Mashrigi, an itinerant poet who has traveled miles across the mountains, past homes of mud brick and through scabby orchards, to see them. His voice rings out, proud and acrobatic, gliding up and falling low to perch on a single, long-stretched syllable.

Shame on you, kidnapper

Take your clothes and leave from here

Don't be mad or extreme

You've gone too far and there's no honor there

His audience listens, rapt.

Now the ships can't come to Yemen and the country is suffering

The World Bank is paying the debt

Neither New York nor Texas banks paid the price

Your victim is not the right one

Wrapped around the Saudi Arabian outback on the lowest tip of the Arabian Peninsula, this rugged, remote country is best known to the outside world as a lawless badland where tribesmen kidnap foreigners for ransom, Islamic extremists find haven in desert villages and terrorists bombed the USS Cole.

But Yemen can no longer afford the lawlessness. Under massive American pressure and backed by infusions of U.S. cash, the central government has been forced to attempt a daunting task: taming the violent underside of Yemen's storied tribal culture, which exists in relative autonomy from the rulers in Sana, the capital.

Mashrigi's poetry tours are part of the campaign. Funded by the government, the 32-year-old bard travels tirelessly through Yemen's rough countryside, using tribal logic and honor codes to dissuade the locals from kidnapping foreigners, toting heavy weaponry or sheltering fugitives.

To an outsider, the idea of fighting terrorism with poetry may sound naive -- even a little desperate. But in these ancient farmlands of rock and dust, spoken verse still holds a power that's hard to fathom in the e-mail-driven West.

In rural Yemen, illiteracy is rampant, and chanted poems remain the language of power and politics. A man is judged more noble if his tongue is suave, his vocabulary supple. Poetry has the power to wed and divorce; to protect or condemn. It is a fundamentally political tool, applied to everything from water rights to vengeance.

Tribes craft poems to settle quarrels over grazing rights, land boundaries and the honor of women. When tribesmen make their way to mediations, they come chanting odes to advertise their stance on the issue at hand. Listening to the singsong of the various tribes' poets helps the sheiks gauge the mood before starting negotiations that may stretch for days.

"This is a very vigorous way of debating issues," said Steven C. Caton, a Harvard University anthropologist who spent years in the countryside researching his book on poetry, "Peaks of Yemen I Summon."

"Talk about a democratic discourse -- this is it for tribal elements," he said. "This is a highly controlled, complex, witty medium of debate."

But the same tribal traditions that have nurtured Yemen's poets have also bedeviled government efforts to root out armed extremists. In many of the remote areas, tribal sheiks wield far more power than the federal government, and militants have long been able to exploit tribal codes to gain "protection" -- a promise that a tribal chief will fight for his visitor's life against any foe. Even if that means taking up arms against government soldiers who come looking for a suspect.

Finances also figure strongly in the equation, as Yemen's tribes have fallen on hard times. Descended from raiders who lived off their booty, they are now struggling to feed, clothe and provide water for their people. The combination of desperation and the ancient codes of hospitality has helped turn northern Yemen into a haven for illicit activity and a comfortable nesting ground for extremists.

"If you give enough money to the sheik, he'll protect you," a Western diplomat in Sana said recently. "If you're in the area and under his protection, that's it."

It is still fairly easy for terrorists to find shelter among the tribes, said Sheik Faisal Aburas of the northern province of Al Jawf, an impoverished wash of desert and mountain along the Saudi border. Aburas said he knew of many such cases. Once a tribe takes payment for protection, they have to shelter the guest or lose face.

"If a terrorist comes to my area, the thing that binds me to him is not ideology. It's [financial] need," Aburas said. A hospital in his region has been closed for three years, he said, and men spend whole days fetching water for their dusty villages. The province is known for gun-running, he said, but "try to convince them a living could be made differently."

Firearms are carried as casually as a wallet in this country of 20 million, where there are an estimated three guns for every person. The government has cracked down on the sale of heavy arms at Yemen's famed open-air gun markets, and launched an ambitious buyback program. But some Yemeni officials quietly concede that surface-to-air missiles and grenade launchers are still widely available.

Struggling against the inertia of tribal tradition, poverty and staunch independence, Mashrigi is badly outmatched, but conventional solutions have caused trouble here. Government soldiers have sometimes tried to force their way into tribal regions, only to spark bloody shootouts.

So Mashrigi presses on, rambling through the country. He recently organized a massive poetry competition at which 1,000 poets recited meditations on the question of terrorism. The 100 poems judged most favorably were printed in one of Yemen's popular poetry anthologies.

"Folklore involves all aspects of life, especially for people in remote areas," says Mashrigi, a long, thin man with mournful eyes. "Poetry has always been used to solve tribal conflicts, revenge and arbitration. From this I got the idea to shift the focus onto terrorism."

Because Yemen remains a fundamentally oral society, its poetry holds the role given to drama in ancient Greece: It entertains, and teaches social mores and molds expectations along the way. Poems are recorded on scratchy cassette tapes and peddled in markets.

There are poems for death, and poems for visitors, easily translated from the Arabic:

The unending greetings from my voice reach the sky

And from the sky should fall every perfume on you, guest.

Dusk is thickening outside the qat-chewing salon in Jerif. Mashrigi falls quiet, and looks around at the ring of men. "Who else is writing poetry?" he calls out.

An arm shoots up; it belongs to a young farmer near the back of the room. Cupping his chin in his elbow and resting his fingers on his cheek, bulging with a wad of qat as if he had a golf ball in his mouth, Hussein Hussein Sheikh begins to recite:

The sky is clear for me

And all the universe is my shield

And the sun is my light

Better not to kill but to seek justice

In justice I will find refuge

Fantasy bleeds seamlessly into reality here in this room: The men tell stories that are not necessarily true or false; they are simply accepted, woven swiftly into the collective lore of the tribe.

Many of the tales hinge on the feats of clever poets. They say a man in this village recently defended his land from would-be confiscators by standing on the soil and chanting:

Oh God, mountains, valleys

This is my land and I'll die fighting for it.

The men fell back in deference to his quick thinking.

"There are strong beliefs about language and the power of poetry which have to do with the idea that if you're a human being, there are certain skills you should have," Caton, the Harvard professor, said. A Yemeni man, Caton explained, should be a good Muslim, dance smoothly, shoot cleanly and have a fluent tongue for poetry.

"To be able to rise to a challenge with a verbal reply shows wit, intelligence. One's moral compass, really," he said.

Here in Jerif, the men recite poems about global affairs and hoot appreciatively for poems that deride Arab governments and American intervention, cheering at lines such as:

For dollars we sell our brothers to the States

We used to love Saddam; now we step on his picture.

And this one:

The Arab army is just to protect the leaders

They build their rule on the pain of the people

Democracy is for the rich

If the poor man tries it, they'll call him a thief.

Mashrigi believes he was born to be a poet. He started young: His parents had quarreled, and his mother had stormed back to her childhood home to live with her father. Mashrigi's distraught father herded six sheep to his father-in-law's house, and asked for his wife to come home. His father-in-law refused the offering, and he came home dejected.

Mashrigi, then 9, made the weary journey to his grandfather's house with a single lamb in tow. He stood before the old man, and ad-libbed a few lines of poetry. He still remembers the poem:

My grandfather, you are wise, you are like a castle

If my father is mistaken, I am here to please you.

I should have brought an ox, not a lamb,

But you can forgive me, and so you can forgive my father.

It worked: The old man relented, and Mashrigi's mother came home. From that day on, the villagers began to call Mashrigi "Amin the poet."

"Almost all Yemenis," he said, "will trust a poet."

Thank you all for the commentary and the reactions to the work. I'm sorry if I was corralling the discussion too much or came off as defensive. I guess in some way I am, as this project is at least as perplexing to me as it is to the reader, and I'm at a loss as to how to manage it (I kind of wish it would just go away- but this is actually how and what I think about all day). I'm typing up notes to myself about your insights and am trying to reapproach this thing usefully. I can't promise 50 pages, but I'll try to push it to some kind of fruition.

It's funny, writing obviously biographical poetry in the past made it very easy to bear elements of my life, but now that I'm trying to move away from that mode, I find the presence of the personal twice as revealing and scary. Maybe this mess should be accompanied by a legit memoir, which I just realized would actually include a car crash, as I have actually crashed a car. Anyways, thanks as always for enlightening me, especially William and Dennis, and thanks Aimee for sharing such palpable poems. I love workshop.

Cheers,
Dillon

Aimee--
http://webpages.ursinus.edu/lantern/archives/Fall99/first.htm
(it's the very very first multivoiced piece but only one available online. things got more interesting after this.)

this weekend, in addition to Cabinet of the Muses

(and if you only go to one of these events I would recommend Saturday night:

Saturday 8 p.m at the LAB (with reception following)
Brenda Coultas (poetry)
KJ Holmes & Edwin Torres (dance/poetry)
Critical Mass (Hollis Frampton) (film)
Jerome Rothenberg (poetry)
Shelley Senter with Isabelle Cristo (dance)
Heriberto Yepez (poetry)

The LAB
2948 Sixteenth Street San Francisco, CA 94103
(The Mission - 16th St. BART)
(415) 864-8855
www.thelab.org

on Friday night James Thomas Stevens and Will Alexander are reading at Small Press Traffic. We read James's work in the craft class last fall. Bring your knitting, Will is known for long, transformative readings.

Friday, October 22, 2004 at 7:30 p.m.
Will Alexander & James Thomas Stevens

Two magical poets, each invoking the complexity of the postcolonial experience in compelling and necessary ways. Poet, essayist, playwright, and visual artist Will Alexander's books include Asia & Haiti, Towards the Primeval Lightning Fields, and Exobiology as Goddess. He has written widely on many aspects of African American poetry and surrealism. He is currently the Lead Artist, and Artist-In-Residence, for Theatre Of Hearts/Youth First in Los Angeles. James Thomas Stevens is the author of Combing the Snakes from His Hair; his long poem, Tokinish, appeared in the anthology Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours. He teaches at SUNY-Fredonia and was a participant in our conference, Coordinates 2002: Indigenous Writing Now.

also this from Sarah Riggs...

www.speakfirst.org

**Merci de jeter un coup d'oeil et d'envoyer
ce site à vos amis aux Etats-Unis.**


This is a collective reading across the U.S.
anytime on October 26. A couple of us
thought this up as a way to shift the election
focus a little onto a celebration of free speech,
books, and individual reflection.

Based on the requests for postcard invitations
from 2,200 independent bookstores, it
looks like many people will participate.

I hope that you, or friends of yours, will
be among them.

Thanks,
Sarah

And, hey Voters, this same project sent me in the mail a # of posters about voting. Why not come by my office and take them off my hands?

Here's why I'm voting in the nationals:

ELECTION AT THE CROSSROADS
SUPREME COURT: Aging judiciary heralds historic transformation
(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/18/MNGJR9BL8B1.DTL)

"The U.S. Supreme Court, like the nation, is closely divided on a host of issues -- abortion, race, religion, sexual orientation, the roles of judges and juries, and the powers of the federal and state governments, to name a few.

It is also a court that, by historical standards, is long overdue for change. The justices have been together for 10 years, the longest uninterrupted tenure since 1823. Only one justice, 56-year-old Clarence Thomas, is younger than 65. Three have been treated for cancer.

It adds up to a formula for potentially historic transformation: Whoever wins the presidential election Nov. 2 could reshape the court, the world's most powerful judicial body, in ways that long outlive his presidency (SF Chronicle, 10/18)."

The argument that there is no appreciable difference between the candidates withstanding, I would rather not live for the next 20+ years with the appointees of the guy who made Ashcroft attorney general. I'd rather the pledge of allegiance not be switched with the Our Father, or have presidential term limits lfted just in time for a 2008 Bush re-election (although, to be fair, Clinton tried the same trick).

Just a thought,

Dillon

love poems--i'm not always exactly writing about a specific person that i'm in love with when i write one. they get called love poems because of the i-you construct, which juliana said was never innocent. so if you use i-you it becomes one beloved to the reader, even if it isn't so.. this is my experience. but then again, i'm thinking how impossible it would be for me to write a poem in the way i write poems thinking & writing about one concentrated beloved subject. even though i might think i am writing about the beloved, so many words & slipperinesses of language get in the way. i have been thinking lately about how much i get description wrong & it turns into a description of something else, not usually what i thought i was writing about.

even if you don't want to vote for president, consider at least voting in the local elections/measures/propositions. i'm following all the local/state stuff pretty closely. especially in your county, your vote makes a big difference. i love voting. i can't wait to do it. i like when they give me a sticker that says i voted so i can feel proud of it. is this smug? i can't wait till this election is over so i can stop thinking about it & watching cnn.

John Zuern, a friend in Hawai'i, did this web poem project, which I find excellent mix of poetry and critique:

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~zuern/ask/ask.html (it requires flash)


Also interesting article by Alexander Cockburn in most recent NLR that somewhat relates to Dan's question of several weeks ago.
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26301.shtml

some highlights:

Many attest to a slack political tempo this campaign season. A simple refusal to vote at all on the presidential candidate could see the turnout drop below 50 per cent, as bleak a register of popular cynicism about the realities of the democratic mandate in the us today as the Venezuelan turnout was exhilarating. The next us president could even be denied a majority ‘mandate’ from the sliver of those voters going to the polls. By the same token, the shape of resistance in the coming years will not derive from a vote for Kerry, or even one for Nader, but from the harnessing of those vital, idealistic energies that always move through the American firmament, awaiting release.

Here is an addition to the slam discussion. Or maybe not...it's not exactly slam but more like a performance poetry.

I have a group of work that I wrote for multiple voices to read. (I have to give the credits to Jena Osman, my former teacher, for this...) On the page, the "text" looks like music scores, which could be visually interesting. And when read, it seems like the work wants to go toward being a band. Only they were all words and words and words. Music is read, not played.

To me this kind of performance, first of all, was very fun and also difficult to write. You get to be like a movie director. You get words scattered on the page, and on stage, the piece usually grabs the attention of the audience primarily because there is a group of reders, not one reader, up there.

What's particular about this kind of work in terms of "poetics," I think, is the multilayered voices. So much can be expressed through vaqueness when several voices speak at the same time, as well as clarity when a single voice speaks or voices speak simultaneously. The experience is also multi-dimensional both on the page and on state.

Picked this up from Dillion....The Poetics of the Presidential Debate. Sounds like an excellently heated topic to discuss! I listened to the whole debate on local radion right here in Bangkok, no commercials, no interruptions whatsoever. People around me and I started to wonder where we were exactly...

Kristin, thanks for the introduction. I'm half the world away but hopefully can virtually join the group. How is everyone?

All right, someone's gotta post about the debate. All I want to say is, I'm concerned about Kerry's poetics. It seems he's being outstripped by Bush in sheer lyrical force. Where is his "army of compassion", where is his "their Freedom is a gift from the Lord". The discerning voter wants more out of his candidate than the simple-minded moral of what happens to after-school programs when you give 89billion to the top %1 of the country, or why we need a living wage for single moms.

Not to mention the complete lack of eclesiastic fervor. When Kerry looks into the camera. its like he recognizes that it's not a real person and that the people watching are only seeing what gets transmitted across their cables and antannaes. Where is the religious faith that Jesus is looking directly at him and hearing his cry for bunker-busting deliverances of God's groovy justice.

Frankly, I'm voting for Nader- at least he's crazy enough to ditch his own party and argue with Peter Camejo in the national press (just kidding).

Thanks Aimee,

I stopped SLAMming recently for a number of reasons, more personal than poetic, but I was just chuckling thinking of something that seems to happen to me at every SLAM. I go up there and read, usually something I wrote an hour ago at the bar, get polite applause, and then the MC (usually Charles at the Berkeley SLAM) says, "Imagine someone trying to win SLAM with poetry", which is a joke about how squarely "poetic" my writing is, in contrast to the hyper-performative nature of what seems to succeed at SLAM.

I really like what you had to say about silence and turning up the quiet instead of the loud. As a fellow (or sister?- funny how English has no convention for partnering oneself across a gender line that doesn't favour one or the other) musician, I am fascinated by what you can do with dynamics to engage an audience, like taking a bashing, loud drum solo down to a quiet scratching on the floor. This kind of thing takes a sort of technical mastery to achieve, which often is impossible in performance poetry venues: the PA always sucks, the venue has bad acoustics, the bardtender is on the phone. I've seen some really clever performers get by this and command all the aspects of a performance, but this is few and far between. The solution may be to up the ante on the technical aspects of performing, more preparation, better equipment, etc. but it seems like this would reduce the egalitarian nature (or theory, anyways) of an open-mic, where you just set it up and let everybody take their shot. However, it is a shame to see how often this egalitarian venue gets taken over by a bunch of aggressive dudes, whether they're poser white MC's or the educated urban elite, to turn it into a penis fest (which is to say I agree with Erika a bit as well).

On that note, did anyone see The Yes Men. The corporate leisure suit is worth the price of admission (I won't ruin it), but there's a particularly poignant moment where the group (who do guerilla satire at WTO conventions) are writing a serious denouncement of the WTO to deliver in Australia, and they turn to eachother and say, "do you get the sense that sincerity is less fun than satire.- Yeah, I think you're right, sincerity really is less fun". Maybe even the New kind.

CABINET OF THE MUSES
A Festival of Poetry and other Curiosities
Thursday October 21 - Saturday October 23
The LAB, San Francisco and UC Berkeley

Cabinet of the Muses is a three-day inter-arts poetry festival celebrating poetry in an array of curious guises. Please join us for a spectacular weekend of experimental dance, film, music, performance and poems.

THURSDAY, October 21
8 p.m. at the LAB, $7 - $15 sliding scale
Charles Amirkhanian (duet with prerecorded tape)
Laynie Browne (poetry)
Ray Chung and Alex Artaud (dance)
Tony Coulter (sound poetry/electroacoustic DJing)
Covert Action (Abigail Child) (film)
Linda Norton (poetry)
Radio Adios (Henry Hills) (film)
Waterworx (Rick Hancox) (film)

FRIDAY, October 22
Friday 1 p.m. - 3 p.m, UC Berkeley,
Wheeler Hall, 3rd Floor, Maude Fife Room, #315, Free
Translation Symposium
Laynie Browne
KJ Holmes and Ray Chung
Claudia Rankine
Elizabeth Robinson
Jerome Rothenberg
Juliana Spahr

Friday 8 p.m. at the LAB, $7- $15 sliding scale
Gently Down the Stream (Su Friedrich) (film)
The Making of the Americans (Roberta Friedman & Graheme Weinbren) (film)
Roxi Hamilton and Mobius Operandi (poetry/music)
Hoa Nguyen (poetry)
Randee Paufve and Beth Murray (dance/poetry)
Photoheliograph (Jim Flannery) (film)
Claudia Rankine (poetry)
Dale Smith (poetry)

SATURDAY, October 23
10 a.m. - 1 p.m. at the LAB, $15 Dance Improvisation Workshop with KJ Holmes,
"Dance as a Second Language" Saturday, October 23 2 p.m.- 4 p.m. at the LAB As artists, we usually go under our verbal abilities to find expressions that resonate from other places than where we usually "think". We are not stopping our mind, but thinking through other parts of ourselves. This class will explore physicality as the language we speak from, through somatic
explorations engaging the body as the communicator and as the conveyor of our thoughts. We will use experiential anatomy, and play with senses and perceptions in relationship to time and space. At the end, we will write from this place, retranslating action into thought/poem.
To pre-register for this workshop contact Julie Carr at carrjuli@aol.com or at
(510)597-0185

All other Saturday events $7-$15 sliding scale; only one ticket necessary all
day, so come early!

Saturday 2 p.m.- 4 p.m. at the LAB
David Buuck (poetry)
KJ Holmes (dance)
Kevin Killian (poetry)
M. Mara-Ann (poetry/music)
Schlafbau (Helen Mirra) (film)
Sometimes My Feet Go Numb (Lourdes Portillo& Wayne Corbitt) (film)
Juliana Spahr (poetry)
Edwin Torres (poetry)
Videograms (Gary Hill) (film)

Saturday 4:30 p.m.- 6:30 p.m. at the LAB
Ray Chung with Alex Artaud (dance)
Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Anne Waldman & Ed Bowes) (film)
Jean Day (poetry)
Stacy Doris (poetry)
kari edwards (poetry)
The Floating Series (Konrad Steiner & Leslie Scalapino) (film)
Junk Box Warrior (Preeti AK Mistry & Marcus Rene Van) (film)
Elizabeth Robinson (poetry)

Saturday 8 p.m at the LAB (with reception following)
Brenda Coultas (poetry)
KJ Holmes & Edwin Torres (dance/poetry)
Critical Mass (Hollis Frampton) (film)
Jerome Rothenberg (poetry)
Shelley Senter with Isabelle Cristo (dance)
Heriberto Yepez (poetry)

The LAB
2948 Sixteenth Street San Francisco, CA 94103
(The Mission - 16th St. BART)
(415) 864-8855
http://www.thelab.org/
UC Berkeley
Wheeler Hall, 3rd Floor
The Maude Fife Room, room 315

This event is supported by the generosity of The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, The UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Department, TheUC Berkeley English Department, UC Berkeley's Consortium for the Arts, and Poets and Writers, Inc through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation.

Also interesting that I read this weekend was Mark Nowak's Shut Up, Shut Down. I think Kristin mentioned this book earlier. It is a series of poems in the documentary tradition about labor and factories in the upper midwest. Mark is from Buffalo originally and several of the poems are about Buffalo's intense decline after the steel markets folded in the late twentieth century. The book is very devoted to the leftist/communist tradition of US poetry (this tradition that Cary Nelson's work has done so much to bring back into focus; I highly recommend his work if you haven't read it yet). It has a wondeful retro feel about it. No avant garde word spew here. And it has a clear position. I wish this is what was meant by the term The New Sincerity(tm). Or this is what I want out of my Sincerity.

I recommend it for anyone who wants to think about getting more voices into their poem or how to sort different linguistic registers. He has different sorts of quotes in bold and italics and Poem in roman. Etc. All are embedded in a Poem structure (ragged right margin; wandering, shortish lines; sometimes prose sections at the top of the poem). Also good for thinking about tradition, about who you write with and what sorts of forms you use to write with them (as in who are your poetic people? Mark is clear on his.). And for those thinking about writing about place. Great stuff on local: "The local must / engage / past / its past." (p. 25)

Curious, Kristin, how you see this in comparison to the work done on Detroit that you are sometimes complaining about?

Great poem here: "Capitalization" which puns on capital the money and capital letters in poems.

I confess though that I keep wanting part two of this book. The book chronicles what happens in parts of the US post-70s globalization. Which is basically that organized labor no longer is labor because there are no jobs. The jobs go elsewhere. I guess I'd like to see a little more global discussion. About both US privilege (those without jobs in the rust belt still eating more than many in other places). And what happens when these jobs go to other places (which tends to be exploitation of labor with low wages and no benefits and environmental disaster).

Among this weekend's reading, I recommend Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. It is more in prose than in poetry. Writing that moves between personal stories of relations with others and also the news moving into it. I really loved it. It is quiet. And it isn't like other things I've read recently. I think it is trying to go someplace else.

This at the end struck me...

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different than a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem--is how Rosmarie Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that--Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive. p. 130

Also want to make note that she does an interesting annotation system at the back of the book that Dennis and Aimee and others who are writing poems with deep histories and references and allusions might want to check out.

It's me. Hi. :)

I recall how much time I spent on the blog when I was at Mills. And how engaging that experience was--I think I have said somewhere that blogging could be a full time job for me. But now that I have a fulltime job, that thought becomes dreamy as it sounded. I think we should blog when we can. I'm missing it. And I missing Thursday nights too, Meg and everyone.

So far, I have been pressing myself a bit harder (when time allows) on the question of global English, something that has fascinated me for quite some time now. I would love to hear people talk about it if there's interest out there.

Do you think the English language that we speak give us privilege? What does it mean that the world tries to speak English? What does that do to writing, to poetry, in the English language as well as in the native language of the writer (if his/her first language is not English)?

Can you imagine that one day there might be but only one language in the world? Can that happen?

Asides from these issues, I am also into Post-Colonialism, which is undeniably related to the questions of the English language. Recently, I heard the news from Korea, I think, that they are setting up a new program that aims at producing future perfect English speakers in order for the country to become competitive. A while ago, I was teaching ESL at an elite language school (I quit already, yeah!) and it's amazing how this language slips into every single bit of the society--7 years old kids learning the language to foreign executives managing the school. What a world.

And of course, in this kinna world, poetry has so little room if not regarded as sweet and cute.

Several thoughts on Aimee's post.

On who is posting or not... I thought about counting up who has posted and how many times and then decided against it. In part because last semester I realized that some people can't handle the blog and doing it makes them tense and then they get mean sometimes. And then I thought several things. 1. It isn't that hard for people to do the blog and so I don't feel bad asking people to do it a few times (and I do think everyone should take some risks in terms of talking to others; it is just the generous and kind thing to go). 2. I don't want to torture people who can't handle doing it regularly so I don't want to mandate regular participation. 3. It is graduate school and everything about graduate school is optional. One has the right to barely engage if one wants to. But also because it is graduate school, everyone has the skills to take back the blog if they don't like how it is going because everyone is an adult. However if anyone feels disempowered, I encourage them to come by my office and talk about it.

Also, I highly encourage students to socially pressure each other to post. And to also switch conversations. I'd love to see a blog takeover.

Why the smirk about Mills community? Is it b/c institutional community is smirk-y and silly, transitional and necessarily complex? Or some other reason?

I think several things about page and stage.

1. My favorite page and stage poets today are: Tracie Morris, Edwin Torres, and Cecilia Vicuna. Tomorrow, who knows who my favorites will be. Of these, Cecilia's work has the most page meaning to me. I haven't seen Tracie Morris do anything with the page that gets at the wonderfulness of her stage. Edwin sometimes gets it on the page; sometimes baffles me. (Which reminds me that I want to put on reserve one of his "essays.")

2. As a critic, I'm interested in issues of the institution and performance/slam/spoken word poetry. Several times at job interviews I've been asked, so what do you do when someone writes a slam poem? I'm fascinated by how this sort of poem is supposed to be an institutional problem. (Also interesting is that when I first went out of on job market the question was, what do you do when someone writes a language poem? how do you help them edit it? and this question seems to have gone away in the last 10 years and be replaced by this slam poem question. Unrelated, once someone asked me what I would do if someone wrote a poem about a cat; a question with an agenda that still puzzles me.)

I'm interested in how a series of articles about the death of poetry came out in the national media (Dana Gioia's book was just one) at the exact same moment that performance/slam/spoken word poetry was thriving in bars across the nation.

I'm interested in how this poetry has had an easier time entering into the secondary schools than into the post-secondary schools. And wondering what that means.

I'm interested in watching it as it slowly enters post-secondary schools and wondering whether it will change the poetics and/or the pedagogies of the colleges and universities as it enters. (Also interesting comparison with language poetry which has fairly recently entered syllabi and english departments and has somewhat changed things and somewhat not.)

I'd love to hear other people's favorite page/stage moments.

To Charles and Dan re: reading group next week, then in response to Aimee,

Since it's such a hot property all of a sudden, I thought we'd go over the Nealon article in reading group next week. My computer's acting a bit funny and I may not be able to print copies off for 'yal, but let me know in class if you DON"T have it printed or accessible and I'll go do it at the library and put 'em in your boxes. I'm also going to check some of his references, See you in class.

On performance: There are a lot of people my age, University educated people, for whom listening to someone read a poem is just the most excruciating thing imaginable. It doesn't matter if it's good, or of a certain genre, or what have you, if they believe they are listening to a "poem", they shut off. A slightly smaller number of those folks will have the same response to a bit of drama, and a much smaller set will have the same response to a music performance, depending, paradoxically, upon whether or not it "has singing" in it (interestingly, I can't think of any acquaintence my age who doesn't have a collection of music recordings they love to listen to in the privacy of their car or cubicle). I think this is one of the preformance realities that SLAM and related venues (I don't really want to call them genres because think what is happening genre-wise at a poetry SLAM is way too interesting and demands its own analysis). SLAM attempts to speak to a culture that is divorced in some ways from a continuous poetic tradition, in the sense of being able to think of what the poetry of its ancestors was like and what is going on with that tradition today. It is not the poetry of our generation (I don't think any poetry fits that bill in any definitive way for contemporary culture), but rather poetry's response to a non-poem (though not an unpoetic) generation.

I say all this by way of observation of what goes on at SLAMs and what I feel the implicit motivations of performers are. Also from having bombed at so many of them I hardly care to count. What works at a SLAM are poems that embody, and not merely reference or satirize, other media and genres. Where a post-modern poem might take the tone of an voice-over or a comedian, a SLAM poem embodies it, sometimes ironically and sometimes not. In that sense it is like theatre, for it only works by way of full commital to the mode of communication, and can less afford a level of critical remove from which to comment on it (although certainly some theatre has incorporated modes of criticism into its production). If there is irony in a SLAM poem, the irony has to exist in that room, as the affect of the audience, and not as a context within the piece. So sometimes you have white MC's who will referene and poke fun at their race, and sometimes you have those who will refuse to acknowledge it; and the corollary is that sometimes the irony of the latter is present in the audience space, and sometimes it is not, no matter how obvious it might be outside that room.

I didn't want to limit myself to SLAM when I started writing about this, because I've thought a lot about all kinds of performance/poetry questions, but I should probably shut up soon anyways. I think I'll end on a personal note, in keeping with the mores of SLAM. I've gone through periods of getting little satisfaction out of writing to finding it devotionally funfilling. I've gone through periods of craving performance oppurtunities to avoiding them at all costs. The motivations for the two seem different, and one of the only differences I can point to right now is that in performance, the existence of an audience as context for the work creates possibilities not present in the act of writing (which is not to say anything about possibilities for other dimensions to a poem present in the act of reading). The concomitance of these possibilities with the experience of performing is a really precious thing. I've only been able to explore those possibilities with any success as an improvising musician. As a performing poet, I'm kind of a wooden stick (the reason why I'm going to go bomb tonight at the Berkeley SLAM). I do feel the potential of that kind of serendipity in a poetry performance and I wonder if anybody else has had more luck accessing it. So there's my parting question: what kinds of possibilities have folks explored for utilizing what's unique to a performance situation for the poet? What kinds of successes or failures have people encountered? Why do you perform and what good is it, anyways?

good questions aimee. more later, i'm off to the library at berkeley.

but just got this (also good place to submit work/subscribe)

Tinfish has launched a new section of its website, devoted to reviews, essays, and more poetry:



www.tinfishpress.com/tinfishnet.html



Among the contributors are Jules Boykoff, Deborah Meadows, and Rob Wilson.

yes, jessea, the reading is what suzanne stein was talking about at her reading. but i didn't understand the complaint, if it was that.

hey juliana-does that reading have anything to do w/what suzanne stein was talking about (the necessary new stance of pliancy)? what do you know about this that you're not telling? clarify!

i read the nealon article & am not sure what he is really saying but i'll take a reductivist stab at it. for me, the most resonant claim was that these post-language poets are reclaiming waste. they are "rescuing" the lost materials, and this "stance" is one of nostalgia & camp. what are they rescuing? real things like abandoned military bases and antique computers & goodwill dresses, as well as the ornaments of literature from all periods. this sounded very "postmodern" to me. right? wasn't that the big deal for awhile? like i can reference homer & andy warhol and computer programming language and it's all ok, everything is removed from its context, etc. i am not sure what any of this has to do w/vagueness, since the readings he did of the poets referenced in the essay seemed to claim that these post-language poets ARE making arguments in the work. he calls it "testamentary, expectation-laden materiality." i guess it all has to do with CAPITAL and MATERIAL. oh, these marxists. i was with him for the history lesson of language & new york school contextualization, but when he got to the main thrust i was slightly bewildered.

camp & kitsch-->is this still happening? i guess it is, but what about The New Sincerity (tm)?

COMPLIANT NONCOMPLIANCE, or complicit noncompliance


Small Press Traffic presents a 30th Anniversary Reading:
Noncompliance
Friday, October 8, 2004 at 7:30

"I discovered I couldn't go along, with the government or governments, with radicals and certainly not with conservatives or centrists, with radical poetics and certainly not with other poetics, with other women's feminisms, with any f----g [fucking in original--spt edit] thing at all; belonging to any of it was not only an infringement on my liberty but a veil over clear thinking."
-- Alice Notley, "The Poetics of Disobedience"

with David BUUCK, Sarah Anne COX, kari EDWARDS, Judith GOLDMAN, Cedar SIGO, giovanni SINGLETON, & Juliana SPAHR

David Buuck lives in Oakland, where he edits _Tripwire_ and coordinates BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-Aesthetics. He is Contributing Editor to _Artweek_ and a student at the History of Consciousness program at UC-Santa Cruz. He is at work on _Operation Desert Survivor_, a musical.

Sarah Anne Cox is the author of _Arrival_ (Krupskaya 2002). Recent work is forthcoming in _Conundrum_. Besides writing and teaching writing, Sarah windsurfs, snowboards and looks after her 2 children. Tonight she will be reading from her new manuscript, _Fragment_.

kari edwards is author of _iduna_ (O Books 2003), and _a day in the life of p._ (subpress collective, 2002.). hir work can also be found in Scribner?s _The Best American Poetry 2004_, _Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action) (Coffee House Press, 2004), _Narrativity: Investigations by Writers_ (Coach House, Toronto, 2004), _Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others_ (Hawoth Presss, Inc. 2004), and elsewhere.

Judith Goldman is the author of _Vocoder_ (Roof Books 2001), which won a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award in 2002. She has recently served on the editorial board of Krupskaya Press and co-edits the journal _War and Peace_ with Leslie Scalapino. She is currently co-composing, with Joel Nickles, a dystopian rock opera entitled _Force Majeure_. She is also writing a dissertation on eighteenth-century philosophy and literature in the Department of English at Columbia University.

Cedar Sigo's first book of poetry, _Goodnight Nurse_, was published in 2001 by Angry Dog Press; his second, _Selected Writings_, in 2003 by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is the editor of _Old Gold_ magazine and his most recentwork appears in the anthology _Evidence of the Paranormal_ (Owl Press, 2002). Raised on the Squamish Reservation near Seattle, he studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, moved to San Francisco in 1999, and recently starred in the video "Kevin and Cedar."

giovanni singleton is the editor of _nocturnes_, an annual (re)view of the literary arts dedicated to innovative critical and creative literary art from the African Diaspora. She is a former recipient of the Bay Area Award in Literature from New Langton Arts.

Juliana Spahr's books include _Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You_ (Wesleyan U P, 2001), _Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity_ (U of Alabama P, 2001), and _Response_ (Sun & Moon P, 1996). _This Connection of Everyone with Lungs_ is forthcoming from U of California Press. She co-edits the journal _Chain_ with Jena Osman (archive at http://www.temple.edu/chain) and she frequently self-publishes her work (archive at http://people.mills.edu/jspahr).

$5-10 sliding scale

Juliana--although the website is on and off and sometimes the links don't work, but it is a good place to start. I'll keep looking for more...

http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/poetry/poem.html
http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/poetry/index.html

I want my Mills time back more than anything...
Cheers.

I'm trying to get back to my read a book of criticism a week plan. It is making me itchy to not be reading much. But it has been hard for some reason. Probably too many events. Among notable events this weekend, I went to Beverly Dahlen and Peter Gizzi reading and also to Kevin Killian's play about Klauss Nomi. Got my palm read at the CPITS reception. All great fun. This thursday Ron Silliman and Judith Goldman are reading in the SFState series. This friday is the Small Press Traffic noncompliance reading.

But birders (aka Kristin and Romney) and others, I recommend this week's reading... Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. With a title like that... I've been reading it with an eye for assigning parts of it in special topics class next semester. Has wonderful discussion of how birds show up in Kaluli lament and which birds and how they get represented. Feld is an anthropologist. He got some notoriety a few years ago when he began protesting deals that U of Texas had with a company that was mining in Papua New Guinea (the area in which he does research). Ended up leaving U of Texas. I saw him give a talk a year or so ago at UH on folk music and another on gold mining in Papua New Guinea (which convinced me to never buy gold things, not that I was planning on doing so but am now more convinced than ever).

Also finished up Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in Bedouin Society which I had been meaning to read for years but never did. Great quote that made me think about how we think about poetry so differently than anthropologists (and how some of the anthropology approach, cultural studies?, might help think things through):

What are individuals symbolizing about themselves through expression of these non-virtuous sentiments? What is it about poetry that allows it to be used to express sentiments contrary to those appropriate to the ideals of honor without jeopardizing the reputations of those who recite it? What are individuals communicating about themselves and the society they live in through poems that express sentiments suggesting defiance of the moral system? Recognizing that both sets of responses are conventional, what is the significance of having two cultural discourses for the articulation of individual sentiments? To the extent that what people say, either in ordinary discourse or in the conventional and stylized discourse of poetry, can serve as a window into their experience, what does the discrepancy between the two modes of discourse tell us about the power of the ideology of honor and modesty to shape experience? Finally, what does the extraordinary cultural valuation of the poetic discourse tell us about the relationship between the ideology of honor and not only individual experience but also the organization of Bedouin social and political life as a whole? p. 35

Some of these questions are obviously specific to the Bedouin poetry she is talking about in the book, but I like to think that the distance she mentions might help us think about own poetries. Maybe rephrase like this:

What are individuals communicating about themselves and the society they live in through poems that express sentiments suggesting defiance of the moral system? Recognizing that [all] sets of [poetry] are conventional, what is the significance of having [so many] cultural discourses for the articulation of individual sentiments [in the U.S.]? To the extent that what people say, either in ordinary discourse or in the conventional and stylized discourse of poetry, can serve as a window into their experience, what does the discrepancy between the two modes of discourse tell us about the power of [language] to shape experience?

Padcha, question for you, can you think of good intro to Thai forms of poetry that is in English?

Has anyone read that Chris Nealon essay yet? Discussion please!

got a copy of ted berrigan's THE SONNETS which for some reason i have never read before & it is utterly paralyzing, almost impossible to read, i keep putting it down & then finding it on pieces of furniture & starting again. it's just too good.

i think i am going to have a drink with some paleontologists i know.

SF Library Book Sale,

um, I know I said I was going to go away for a while, but my friend who works at the Magic Theatre just reminded me this is going on again: SF Library Book Sale, where they empty out their unshelved books, most of which are in great condition, some rare, lots very cool, for extra cheap (like a dollar cheap). It's in the Fort Mason center (near the Marina) in one of the old Army hangers and it's fun (for people for whom browsing books is fun).

bye