The Southwark Anthology of Noise

Brought to you by Tom Wallace at Resonance104.4 FM out of London, England, The Southwark Anthology of Noise was a 12-part series of hour long radio shows that aired last year which documented and discussed the history and evolution of noise music. The playlists were created by Wallace as well as by several guests who came into the studio to take part in the show. The radio station’s mission statement picqed my interest too.

You can download all of the shows off their website. I’ve just started listening to the first one now. Happy listening to the rest of yall.

Still Unemployed (or Underemployed, If You Prefer)

More joining the ranks all the time, too. And I still try to look for the decent jobs, for now.

Here’s a good article from BusinessWeek (“Shrinking U.S. Labor Force Keeps Unemployment Rate From Rising“) to put the December unemployment numbers in context. Take note of the “underemployment” number and the number of people without jobs that have been dropped out of the “job market” altogether. You should know the 10% number is skewed, and the article shows you what’s been left out.

SSDD & ICRGAF Illustrations

While working on my chapbook submission to the Boom Chapbook Contest, I decided that I wanted some illustrations for the text. In the last week or so, I decided against including them in the chapbook (they distract from the text, in my opinion), but I still like them. Here they are for your amusement. As the text is heavily appropriative, the illustrations are created entirely from images I found through Google image search, which were then run through various filters, cut and paste into each other, etc., using the GIMP image editing program (the open source Photoshop).

If I get some positiver response from this, I may keep going with it. It’s a lot of fun.

Enjoy!

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The Mistress Decress (page 2: "She is my / master / if I ask her")

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Interstate Pile-Up (page 3: "A fog sat on the interstate and cars started flipping and twisting all around me and ended up all piled together.")

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Look What I Have (feat. Lynndie England) (page 8: "Love you so much / It's okay baby / I am horny / Look what I have")

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Tank, Man (Perspectives) (page 9: "That the tank is more evident than the teleprompter")

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9/11 Luggage Set (page 9: "That the suitcase can be filled with more suitcases")

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Hoop / Poop (page 25: "It is thus God accorded to go off but he fixed it / It is no longer a problem / In a world of Best Friends Forever!")

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Head Up Ass With Dead Flies (page 26: "It crawls up its ass / & dies like flies")

Merry Christmas For Us Newlyweds

Merry Christmas everybody! I’m celebrating it in Lafayette with my beautiful new wife, her parents and her best friend Avril. My Aunt Dyan has put together this nice photo collage of the wedding and the reception on Saturday the 19th. Best to everybody for the holidays!

Rachel Zolf’s Tolerance Project: In the Belly of the MFA Beast

[Thanks go out to Chad again for pointing this out to me.]

Go to Rachel Zolf’s The Tolerance Project, read her Statement to MFA workshop. In October, some problems began after some peers in her workshop became aware that some of their negative comments had anonymously been posted on the blog above the poem that they were critiquing. Charges that Zolf was “violating the ‘privacy’ and ’sanctity’ of the MFA workshop” were made–exactly the kind of attitude that began to annoy me so much when I was in an MFA program.

The blog itself, which Zolf describes as being “kind of a like a reality tv show for poets,” documents and functions as a source of feedback and critique for her proposed thesis project in the MFA program she started this Fall. It is conceived as a large scale collaborative project which is an examination of the MFA institution from her position within a program and using the contributions of more than 80 poets who are teaching in MFA programs as the material for the poems (the statement describes it in more detail).

Here’s an excerpt:

The focus of my project is not this particular MFA. The blog doesn’t even name where the MFA is taking place, as what is most important for my project is that it is a collaborative take on the MFA as an institution within larger state apparatuses. That is the key concept behind my project, a deconstruction of how “authors” and “voices” are created through the process of the MFA, linked with how difference is “tolerated” (or not) in general in the US. I wanted to provoke a look at how the MFA works as a process, by deliberately blowing up the authorial creation and feedback process beyond this room. There is a long tradition in the art world of looking at the workings of art institutions such as art museums and art collecting practices and the creation of the artist as a commodity. In fact, if you remember the poem I brought last week about Adrienne Rich and the form letter…that is from my book Human Resources that looks at capitalist and corporate structures and even has a poem about famous American conceptual artist Andrea Fraser videotaping herself having sex with a collector for $20,000 and displaying the tape in an art gallery. How’s that for an exposure of art as a commodifying institution?

We need more writers like her actively challenging the stagnating culture of poetry workshops and the dominance of mainstream Romantic ideas propagated within them. And we need more poets who think of themselves as artists and their poetic activity in relation to the rest of the art world, within which poetry undoubtedly belongs.

“Appropriation, Intertext and Authorship in 21st Century Poetry”: 12-5-09 Guest Lecture

A friend of mine in the PhD program at Purdue kindly asked if I would come into her ENGL 407 class (Introduction to Poetry Writing) and give a lecture on something related to my own experimental work and/or anything relating to Flarf and conceptual writing. I of course accepted.

Read the handout of my Lecture notes here (PDF)

Something which prompted her asking me to do this was her decision to teach the July/August issue of Poetry Magazine to her class the following week. She hoped that I might provide some context for their reading of the Flarf and Conceptual Writing section of that issue, edited by Kenneth Goldsmith, which is online at the Poetry Foundation website.

My lecture was centered on Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” which none of them had yet encountered in their courses. After a brief discussion of the major division in contemporary English-language poetry between the Mainstream (official verse culture, School of Quietude) and the experimental (avant-garde, post-avant, flarf, conceptual, Oulipo, Language School, etc.) and some relevant vocabulary, we read and discussed excerpts from Barthes’ essay and two other poetics essays by Marjorie Perloff (“The Pleasures of Déjà Dit: Citation, Intertext and Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry”) and Craig Dworkin (his introduction to The UbuWeb :: Anthology of Conceptual Writing).

We used the ideas generated from this discussion to read several poems that eschew traditional ideas of authorship by various means of appropriation or constraint, all of which are available online:

1. Andrei Gheorghe – The Longest Poem in the World
2. Christian Bök – Eunoia
3. Jen Bervin – Nets
4. K. Silem Mohammad – Sonnagrams (and some more here)
5. Eric Elshtain, Gregory Fraser, Chad Hardy, Matthew Lafferty and Eric Scovel – Gnoetry Daily

The discussion went very well, and it seemed that many students in the class had interest in these types of poetry. We briefly discussed at the end the issue of appropriation and whether one is “really writing” when using such techniques. Using Barthes you can respond that even traditionally authored texts are still intertextual and respond to all kinds of cultural texts, even if this appropriation is implicit not explicit as in most of the texts we looked at. Also, using Mac Low’s argument that Pleasure is the purpose of making poetry (read an excerpt from his “Pleasure and Poetry”) or any kind of art, why would the means of textual production exclude it from judgement based upon whether the texts are relevant, meaningful and/or pleasurable to the writer and the audience?

The whole experience highlighted for me even more clearly my desire to teach issues of poetics and experimental poetry to students, and to ask them not simply to admire and replicate the poetry of the dominant Mainstream poetic figures of our times (what creative writing workshops do), but ask them to think about what poetry is, what texts are, what the role of the author is or might be, and how these ideas might factor into the way the write and live in the world. I think a curriculum that focused on the idea of writing first and the craft of writing later would better prepare writers to make timely and original works of art instead of lyrical reproductions of Romanticism superimposed upon our Techno-PoMo landscape.

Gnoetry Daily Has Moved!

Update your links and bookmarks. Gnoetry Daily has moved over to WordPress and been given a makeover. There’s plenty going on over there now: I’m writing several serial works, Chad’s pumping out the Zapatagraphy, and new posts by Eric Elshtain, Gregory Fraser and Matthew Lafferty go up often.

New members are always welcome! If you are interested e-mail me at escovel@gmail.com. The software is free, although some assembly is definitely required (see my howtos at Markovian Parallax Generate).

AAAARG!!! (.org)

No, it isn’t Talk Like a Pirate Day (Wait, is it? Did I miss it again?). More like Read Like a Pirate Day, I suppose. If you’d like to read a lot more theory (literary, philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, etc.) and share some with others, go to AAAARG.org and register. It’s free. Amazing resource. Enuf sed.

Power to the PDF!

Read EUNOIA if you haven’t yet

A friend of mine (and fiction writer) asked me to give some suggestions of contemporary poetry books to read, and I was a little surprised at how easily my first suggestion came. Hands down, it’s Christian Bök’s Eunoia. A bonus too: it’s online for free. Not only does it break the conventions of the publishing world by giving itself out free (and before it was in a print version, too, for that matter); but it can be heard performed in its entirety by the author, too [visit Christian Bök's page at PennSound].  If this is new to you, and you’re curious about new poetry, start here. Unfortunately, a lot of what is labeled as poetry and is available in bookstores will likely disappoint you after this, but hey, there’s always EPC and UbuWeb, and they’re free, too.

To be plain, this book is a masterpiece and gift to (and from) the English language. If you want to demonstrate how poetry can be delightful and not just dumpy, and how poetry can serve the language, the reader, and the listener and not just end up as a neo-Romantic lineated letter from a perception-perceptive, experience-experiencing, feeling-feeling author.

If only it was normal that poems create experience and not merely relate it!

They Want Everything: UCSC and the Seeds of a Student Occupation Movement

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.  This bankruptcy is not only financial.  It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.  No one knows what the university is for anymore.  We feel this intuitively.  Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.  These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Something truly amazing has started in California that may be a sign of a growing movement in the U.S. Even more interesting than their activities so far (see Occupy California for updates, and this IndyMedia page for photos of the first occupation on September 24th, and We Want Everything for the “critical theory and content from the nascent ucsc occupation movement”) is the manifesto behind it, which lays out the vacuousness and banality of the current system and of our lives trapped in it.

The words above open that manifesto, and they are just the beginning of an effort to disillusion University students (graduate students particularly) and jumpstart a real movement of protest and resistance that aims to spread outside of the University and throughout the nation. Behind their occupation is the growing awareness since the 2008 financial collapse that everything is bankrupt, “Everything is Broken,” as Bob Dylan put it, and that there is no hope in fixing anything without changing everything.

Reading their manifesto, Communiqué from an Absent Future, is exhilirating, especially for someone who has just struggled for more than a year to figure out how to say all that was wrong with graduate student life and work in this country so as to convince grad students to get out of their ivory tower fantasies and stand up for better conditions and wages, and maybe even for a better world in general. Although the GEO campaigns at Purdue did pressure to the University to marginally reduce the ridiculous fees they were charging graduate students, they did not contribute to any greater change or more than a marginal improvement in the financial shithole that they are placed in by the University. But all of the deeper issues and problems are all spelled out in this Communiqué, and at a pregnant time for change. Now almost everybody is being fucked over by or shut out of the system; everybody except the super-rich are feeling the pinch, are losing jobs or homes themselves, or watching people they know falling off the precipice that looms closer and closer.

There are too many potentially quotable sections in this essay, so just go read the whole thing if you feel it resonates with your situation. It is openly Marxist/communist in its language and sentiment, mostly in the anti-Capitalist sense, though the calls for a “free society” echo the Declaration of Independence more than the Communist Manifesto. Below is the opening of the third section:

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.
Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms.  We demand not a free university but a free society.  A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.

I hope something comes of this, and I hope it doesn’t just degenerate into calls for reform than end up changing nothing. I hope more students, workers, professionals and unemployed come to see the mutual grimness of their situations, shed their feelings of hopelessness and/or delusions about “making it” and work together for some common good–something sorely missing is our politics and our society.