Text Message From Inguito

new art movement 'hopeless grostesquerie' - an art in which the artist knows that nature is laughing at his/her crudity.

And Again, Back

Hey Hey,

Phew - back from the big bicycle trip. My legs feel like stumps, and I have a persistent sore throat from inhaling diesel smoke, way out in "nature." In a state park, in a redwood grove, someone was watching a sitcom in a tent with the volume way up high. Scratch an American.

Getting back into the questions and answers:

Lauren writes:

why isn't the paglen work about uncovering?

As an X-Files fan, I'll just say that uncovering and uncovering do nothing. There's no power in it, just paranoia, and I think Paglen's reportage and romanticism are winking at it. "It's not a secret weapon if no one knows about it" &c. &c.

It's just that the romanticism of the night sky seems to keep that stuff 'endarkened.'

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And, on to the subject of having a poetics.

Boy, those posts, esp. D. Bellamy's were pretty awe-inspiring. I think I prefer D.'s take on things. That Gossip then becomes history. It reminds me of Stein's hilarious "Remarks are not literature" - which really should be on a post-it above every blogger's screen.

As a quick, and really inadequate, response, I guess, in general, it's probably good and healthy not to make too many pronouncements. On the other hand, making a pronouncement gives you a side to be on, and then you can be a double-agent. I do want to say that 'negative capability' persists, despite Johannes' statement, and who cares? I think things can be simple and negative c. at the same time, probably.

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can we be pragmatists about it? Is there a practical poetics?

It's probably fine to have a speculative poetics, but I think it would be fun to look at specifics and see how practical problems of poem making are ventured by a given poets. I think Rhubarb is Susan can be kind of dumb and really bro, sometimes, but the guy is specific. I've been teaching scientists too long.

Yikes, Yeeks, Great Scott

am i the only person who didn't know about link +?

in case there is another semi-recent california arrival who feels that she can't find the books she wants without teaching at or attending a college (or begging her university friends to cart them over from merced or san jose), and that person reads the mrs. maybe blog, here it is again, link +.

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

Lauren reads 2-nite at Artifact!

add

dear catherine, jared, & megan,

i want to add this to the discussion:

i'm reading Wars, Threesomes, Drafts, & Mothers by Heriberto Yépez & found his statement on ethnopoetics.

and i am going to talk about poetics statements so here are a few things i was reading and considering in that context by Dodie Bellamy and Laura Moriarty and Johannes Göransson (thinking specifically of the "Poetics of Overdeterminacy" post)

so, sorry for the move to the meta, but all yesterday i kept thinking about ways of constructing discourse around poetics/project statements. i bothered claire on the phone w/it for much time. anyway, i worry that i sounded too flip/dismissive when i gave that off-hand mention of 'problems with having a poetics'. trying to think it through, i think the deal is more a tonal one for me, i appreciate in poetics statements or articulations of positions or whatever when there is a acknowledgment of other types of thinking.

i don't mean that people should say 'every way of thinking about poetry is equally the same'. actually, i was trying to articulate this to jared a while back, i like when the rhetoric of manifestos is over-the-top oppositional, because there's an element of performance and excess there that lets some air into the situation. (j and i evolved a short-hand for this element of excess in performance of a position. it's called robert duncan's cape. based on a cape worn by robert duncan.) i also appreciate when people articulate what is personal in the evolution of an aesthetic - what is personally being responded against.

Or when there is a sense of access to information being built up, for others to use. Like when Stephanie Young was talking about ways to bring 60s and 70s feminist art practice back into contemporary thinking - that seemed like an open question to excitedly glom onto - or what Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson do w/Action Books in giving access to all this work in translation. It's about a certain aesthetic, but also about bringing all this work into view. Seems to be also what Dale Smith might be doing in bringing all these strands like performance and ecology and conceptual poetry into his discussion of slow poetry.

In short, I like when there is effort made to puncture the mantle of authority that comes with 'having a position,' within the articulation of that position. I also think of Tyrone Williams' and Bhanu Kapil's talks at the SPT conference making that effort in different ways, I figure Andrew will have that panel up on his blog soon. I also don't think that that effort (to puncture one's own authority) is incompatible with support, even fierce support, of one's own position or with taking an ethical stance. I hope not anyway, maybe that's something we could talk about as I'm interested in that (possible) contradiction.

i hope this isn't taking us too far off-track. jared, you should totally return to slow cities or political art or any other topic. also hope what i'm writing isn't just belaboring the obvious...i just realized after writing my last post that i had done the annoying thing of writing some random complaint casually dashed off in...uh...'authoritative voice'. so trying to rectify in thinking about what i am thinking about.

xo, lauren

back

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

Why Love Lauren?

Well, a million reasons. One might better ask: Why love her poems?

"Why not admit a baseball bat, a donor card?
To own down all that decision? Why not admit of it?
While I admit I think a hanging curtain system (upside down, I think).
While I have the knack of time the year is getting glossy."

Let me count the ways!
Megan