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hi megan & jared,

i'm back from montana. as usual trying to post in scraps between working on poems & a forgetting keys frenzy out the door to work. this'll be sketchy.

megan, goodness! well, thanks. i am lucky to have you read my poems. i wish i could write yours. and jared's. jared, i love your posts on slow & political art. i love the way you put your vantage into them. you are in quite the tone evolution on this blog.

the types of metaphors you're using for endarkenment are very interesting. patina & corrosion, now mask/lid. i remember talking on the phone at some point about the occult aspect of pattern-making. i have questions for you.

why isn't the paglen work about uncovering?

do you see it as like the lombardi work, as covering and uncovering at once?

(uncovering a network of hidden or occulted relationships.
uncovering the presence of spy satellites.
covering w/the formalism of diagrams that leave out the incoherence of relationship.
covering with the reintroduction of satellites into the mythological sky.)

i don't really know the lombardi or the paglen, i have to say. so this is third-hand commentary. for formalism in political art, i also think of ellen gallagher. i look forward to looking into.

it strikes me that a lot of political art incorporates vantage. (is that the 'fantastic gap' in political art?) i'm thinking of brecht, so much power in his restructuring of looking. that he wants to reconfigure the viewer's looking to prevent it from dissolving into individualized emotion.

political art watches itself cover/uncover. (i am thinking about juliana spahr's 'the transformation' also.) the scrutiny & depiction of incompleteness is part of it. brecht seemed to inspect a whole system of representation & emotion-formation (catharsis) & watch it cover-uncover itself.

on slow, i am thinking about the slow poetics. i am interested in it as a type of potentially useful orientation (slow sports). i guess the problems in it are the types of problems that jordan davis identifies on lime tree, but those are general problems w/having 'a poetics', i.e., (quoting jordan davis):

"There is an undercurrent through most discussions of poetics I've ever seen, that whichever method or set of beliefs about writing is under discussion, it is either more or less efficacious toward the goals of the side of the angels. (Scratch an American, find a cop.)"

and problems of vantage. i don't see why a poem that is produced fast or engages with a trash aesthetic couldn't be looked at as slow equally as much as fast, because it's disengaged from the whole competency/polish thing, which zips poems into the brain and registers them as 'Poems'. mess can be slow as well as craft. does using 'fast' words slowly make you fast or slow?

i am also bothered by the idea in the slow poetry post of 'too much bad poetry being produced'. i don't think poetry will suffer by having badness in it. i think poetry could go on continuing to have more in it. i am reading some 'love and rockets' comics currently. lots of dinosaurs. wonderfully good at subsuming badness & making mysterious timeliness. produce now, judge some other time. but i am in favor of enlarging the field toward the past as well as the future.

jared, can you go into your comments on merced? why does it need more slow? what are the politics of slow in cities? (and/or in poems?)

ok, incoherent as is will have to do. i have 8 minutes to shower & get out of here!

xo, lauren