A Pelt, a shrub, a soil sample

First question of my crowsourced interview.

2011-07-14T21:00:00.000+12:00

Aindriu Macfehin

Why are artists afraid of making political work?

Thanks Aindriu - that's an awesome question.

I think this question is going to explode into several directions, but I need to interrogate it (as that is, in a way, what answering a question is): Firstly, in the question, there is the assumption that (some) artists don’t make political work, and then there is the idea that art can be apolitical. From my asking about these you can probably gather that I consider my work political, though it is not, on its face, overtly so - in the "realist" sense of, say, post-beat slam poetry or Brechtian social realism....

May I ask what you mean by "polictical"? It is a slippery term - I follow Guy Debord in believing that "every speech act is a political act", and treat the social and ethical - and art is, at its core, a social practice - as political; but many would dispute this - the common usage of "political" is tied to ideas of governmentality and large-scale social issues.

In a sense, my politicality (or that of my work - to conflate "me" and what I produce would be an error) stems from what I think of as the "avant-garde impulse" (though I know that many have issues with the term, for example Lyn Hejinian, who is wary of the military metaphor -and I can understand that) which is, in my case, directly tied to socio-political radicalism. Radicalism in one field goes hand in hand with that in another, and the boundaries become blurred.

Until quite recently radical artistic work was largely driven by politics, or had a very large political component - one need only look as far as dada, surrealism, fluxus, the Franco-African poets of negritude... language writing was/is based on (post-)Marxist/radical socialist theory (see Bruce Andrews' "Writing as Social Work and Political Practice").

Though there have been debates surrounding the efficacy of such, it isn’t really until the 70s, and the birth of minimalism and conceptual art that the politicality gets overshadowed or swept away (there could well be a political element to such work, but I don’t see it… I’ve got holes in my knowledge of art history). In the 80s through the 90s you have work like that of the pictures generation, hyperminimalists/post-minimalism (I still don’t know exactly what that is!), post-pop-art, the YBAs (with the notable exception of Tracy Emin), where much of it seems to be meant as a reflection or comment on the reality of living under capitalism, but there’s a kind of schizoid joy to it, a reveling in that depthless isolation and commodification – expemplified by the massive amount of money made by people like Jeff Koons and the like.

You’ve also then got the birth of ‘hipster irony’ and the growing marginalisation of sincerity – which is one of my personal pet peeves… this particular brand of irony holds little purpose, compared to dramatic irony or the ironic distancing of someone like Joyce in Portrait – it seems to me like little more than an excuse for people to not invest anything in their work, to shelter themselves emotionally. All you’re left with is a mirror that, rather than reflecting the real, reflects capitalist realism, the world as constructed by the apparatus of capital.

I suppose this is where the answer to your question comes in – capitalism has become the only imaginable ‘reality’. It is, so often, uncontested, because an alternative is unimaginable. There is the quote attributed to both Slavoj Zizek and Frederick Jameson that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. And it’s easier to report ‘reality’ or our experience than it is to contest it, challenge it, or try and do something different.

This leads to the difficulty though – is change possible, and what role does art play in this? I have to say that I honestly don’t know. I just know that capitalism treats people badly, and cannot in good conscience support that. So I make art that I hope opens lines of flight, or spaces in which things opperate (I hope) differently to the current hegemony. This may or may not be successful/effective, but it is, I think, worth while (and not the only thing that I do). I think, for instance, that “/k/” has some interesting things to say about ‘madness’, language, and the experiences and power relations that relate to these.

People can (and do) level critiques at my work saying that it is ineffective, elitist, too fringe etc… but I think that there is (or should be) a space for such. It’s worth remembering the debates between Adorno and Lukacs on similar points, Adorno arguing for the political efficacy of Kafka, and Lukacs disagreeing, and proposing Brecht as a more effective alternative. It seems history has proved Adorno right, in the effectiveness of Kafka’s anti-realism as an effective means of both describing and problematising the dehumanising experience of capitalist oppression.

On the other hand, everything may be futile, but I’d rather not give up. And art is an enjoyable means of subversion as well – and in a way that’s where people like Beckett come in – the horrible absurdity of the situation – you have to laugh, and do something, or else it’s too much to bear.

A caveat though – I want to say that my writing isn’t solely a political project. It is obviously an aesthetic one, and is also deeply personal (one of the reasons for working with Artaud’s work…). Alan Loney has said that he writes “in order to keep the world from falling apart”, and I feel the same – or more to stop myself from falling apart. If I stopped I’d fall into a hole that I don’t know I could get out of.

Information as Material, Theory as Practice

2011-04-11T13:11:00.003+12:00

So, I've been thinking about some things. I am working on a series of pieces largely dealing with duration - with the experience of differing levels of (dis)interest and expenditure while forcing one's reader-self through longform, largely a-significant texts (think much of Beckett's work, Kenny Goldsmith's No. 111 2.7.92-10.20.96 Tan Lin's BLIPSOAK01, Jackson Mac Low, Bruce Andrews' longer works, etc). I was also talking to my therapist this morning about the (normative) dichotomy between 'emotion' and 'intellect' - how most people divide their experience or understanding into these two poles (cf. Nietzsche's romantic construct, opposing Dyonisus and Apollo) - this also seems to correlate to the Platonic oposition between information and material, and between theory and practice. This is one of the things I really like about the Toronto Research Group's work (the TRG being Steve McCaffery and bpNichol). In the introduction to the Collected Reports, wonderfully title Rational Geomancy, McCaffery outlines the project as fundamentally practical - that the work is about doing and exploring as a means to the end of explaining, or as explaining in action. Such processes are also intrinsic to the work of Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino (who is sorely missed), Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, William Blake, Bruce Russell, and Cecil Taylor.
This conversation arose out of a discussion of "work". I seem to have a similar problem with my work as Paul Celan did with his - he thought of his poems as accessable, and could not understand those who didn't, inscribing a volume to his English translater Michael Hamberger "nicht hermetisch". Similarly I sent a copy of A Pelt to a relatively prominant NZ poet, who described it as "too intelectual" (aside -another writer explained this in the following terms:
"whenever someone in New Zealand describes your work as "too" something, what they mean is what they say, but without the "too"), just as a girl who had been in a creative writing class with me drunkenly lectured me at a party about how I should "stop thinking about things so much" and "not be afraid to just write what I feel". I consider that book to be pretty close to the traditional lyric, and primarily 'emotional' - very much a work in which 'feeling is first' - although not quite, as, at least to the reader, the word is first, as ink on paper. This is something that many people forget, and which I find myself unable to. In this way I would find verse that reports the internal thoughts and feelings of the poet as "too intelectual": the poet would then be paying attention to, and thinking about, and carefully manipulating language as a code, as a means to an end, rather than as an object that is beautiful in and of itself.
All of this makes me think about information, and language, as existant prior to my engagement with them. Kenny G, riffing on Douglas Huebler: "The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more". What we as writers do is intercept and alter the flows of desiring-production that are active in language, aggregating, manipulating, filtering, altering, deforming. This is probably why I'm more active on Facebook these days then I am here - it is the perfect medium for tapping this vein of hypersemiotic joissance: the divertion of links, sedementation of information, manipulation/appropriation/deformance of image and sound - something which my former flatmate, Matthew Ward, knows all about. He's got a show, "The Ghost / They can speak for themselves" coming up at None Gallery in Dunedin - if you're anywhere near there, you should check it out.

A Return of Sorts. Questions. The Durational

2011-03-29T00:54:00.002+13:00

Hello.... If there is anyone out there... I'm returning, kind of, in a way. With some questions, but first announcements. Last year I managed to complete my BA(hons), with 1st Class hons., and am now undertaking a Masters in Creative Writing, also at UOA.
I've got a self-published chapbook out, A Draft from BIRDS, wich is the inaugeral publication of my micropress, &then&then, which will aso be publishing a chap by the great rob mclennan and launching a website very soon. There are also some very, very exciting names who want to / have agreed /have been bulied into participate in this venture, and I'm very excited.
I'm also teaching, which is really cool. I'm tutoring an introductory English/Writing Studies paper, and it's great, and I think a lot of my students are more on to it than I was in 1st year!

But down to the nitty-gritty - the masters project(s)..... here's the connundrum. I was planning on /trying to mash up various strands of my practice into some kind of agrogate, but it wasn't working. And my advisor was talking about lack of cohesion, or an affective center.... it was largely turning into a mushy blob.... but then I'm not sure of (or comfortable with) the parts as seperate.... and the idea of something happening in a poem seems strange to me... the point comes down I thin to this:

I'm a little bit worryed that my "taste" in things my be developing in such an absurd direction I'll lose connection with any kind of meta-discourse, or audience, or community.... things are getting kind of wierd.

Everything I like seems to be massive and largely centreless, flux instead of progression, or drone, poetry as both ambiend and psycho-traumatic(etymology is important here) experience, with an emphasis on duration.... reference points:Pierre Guyotat, Samuel Beckett, Tan A. Lin's BLIPSOAK01 (I've got to get the rest of them!), Kenny Goldsmith's No. 111, Artaud, Bruce Andrews more prolonged pieces, Karen Mac Comack in places, Steve McCaffery in The Black Debt or parts of Panopticon, the kind of psych-scapes of flux Auckland poet and mystic Jarrad Dickson constructs, the dronescapes of Swans, Earth, Campbell Kneale's various projects, late Coil, and Handful of Dust; much of the latest wave of US/Canadian blackmetal weirdness, the weirdest work fo Tricky, The Shadow Ring, the jagged, staccato time-fucking of grindcore and microgrind (ie 8sec songs one after the other) or rapidly moving polyrhythmic free-jazz or jagged post-musique-concrete composition-by-assembly... and internet hip-hop sensation Lil B "THE BASEDGOD".
Long form repetition that seems to go (k)no(w)where, other than the movement as an EMBODIED, EXPERIENTIAL ACT OF DURATION.
I need to perform this. How do you do it in a codex? Can you?
I'm leaning more and more toward sound-work as a possible answer.

Gap Filler Poetry

2010-11-22T16:16:00.003+13:00

Hello. I haven't posted in a long time because I've written 40 000 words this year, not counting reviews and poems. The idea kind of scares me. But I just got an email from my friend Micah, who is organising this really cool event in earthquaked Christchurch, called Gap Filler, where there are poetry readings and all kinds of awesome stuff in the vacant spaces left by quake damage. More details here. If it all goes well, I'll hopefully take part when I'm down for xmas-new years times.

Thank You For Telling Me Vodka is a Ponsy Drink

2010-09-11T20:38:00.005+12:00

I Went and saw Xiu Xiu play last night. It was really great. You should buy their albums. The show made me all swoony like a schoolgirl. I got emotional. My medication was making me shaky. I talked to them afterwards, and made a dick out of myslef I think. But they were really nice. I talked to Angela about how music and writing destroy ego and Jamie about how other people's horrible stuff can make your horrible stuff feel less, becuase there's less lonelyness, some kind of community..... I'm not sure. I'm typing maybe kind of like Ariana Reines with some kind of naïveté and direct sentences, because I don't know how else to say things at the moment. I really like her writing but don't normally write like her. I hope it doesn't make me sound like a dick or a hipster. I don't understand the idea "hipster". The people who would be them hate them. It confuses me. I don't have enough money to be one I think. This writing is going nowhere. I really like Xiu Xiu anyway. Here are links to some of the songs they played.

Grey Death
Dear God, I Hate Myself
Chocolate Makes You Happy
Save Me, Save Me
Sad Pony Guerilla Girl
Fabulous Muscles
Crank Heart
I Luv the Valley Oh!
Boy Soprano

A PELT A SHRUB A SOIL SAMPLE has sold out

2010-09-10T12:52:00.001+12:00

Yes, that's right. I'm both happy and sad to say that there are no more copies left. That is, until someone want to reprint it. I would, but I'm poor. However as the previous post attests, there's more stuff coming......

Forthcoming

2010-09-05T22:09:00.004+12:00

Ok so I've got three things forthcoming. My latest volume, /K/:HAVEDONEWITH will be out by the end of the year (hopefully) from June Gloom, a new micropress in Christchurch run by the wonderful Timothy J Andrew. I would trust anyone with a tattoo of Arthur Rimbaud with my life, trusting him with my work comes naturally. The book is a long poem drawing from a mutilated text of Artaud's "Pour En Finir Avec La Jugement De Dieu".

I'm also publishing a small volume, tentatively entitled Draft from "Birds" as part of my (BA) Honours dissertation in an edition of 26 hand-lettered copies. I'm not sure how much they'll cost yet, but if you're interested chuck me an email.

Lastly, I've been asked to take part in the latest Dusie Kollektiv, which is really awesome, I'm a big fan. Susana Gardener is one of that rare breed of super-awesome people. I've got a manuscript lined up called Tempral Maze Denture. I'm proud of that title.

So stay tuned. I may have quietened down on the blogging front, but there's still things happening.

More on Unemployment

2010-08-30T23:01:00.002+12:00

Last k-punk link. I promise. More on unemployment, that I hope will be appreciated by any who have had experiences like mine last year - Incidentally when I had the resources to blog at a rate that I liked. Long-term unemployment sucks, and is, by its very nature, demoralising and worse, psychologically damaging (and, as Mark points out, ontologically alienating). A piece I particularly like:

"For a number of reasons, during my twenties I believed then that I was unemployable - too feckless to do either manual work or retail, and nowhere near confident enough to do a graduate job of any kind. (The ads for graduate jobs would fill me with despair: surely only a superhuman could do the job as described?) I won't deny that eventually getting employment was important - I owe so much of what I am now to getting a teaching job. But equally important was the demystification of work that gaining this employment allowed - "work" wasn't something only available to people who belonged to a different ontological category to me. (Even so, this feeling wasn't rectified by having a job: I had a number of depressive episodes when I was convinced that I wasn't the sort of person who could be a teacher.)

"But surely the importance of Virno and Negri's work is to have undermined the distinction between work and non-work any way. What precisely counts as non-work in post-Fordism? If, to use Jonathan Beller's phrase, "to look is to labour" - if, that is to say, attention is a commodity - then aren't we all "contributing", whether we like it or not? As Nina argues, "[i]t is as if employers have taken the very worst aspects of women's work in the past – poorly paid, precarious, without benefits – and applied it to almost everyone, except those at the very top, who remain overwhelmingly male and incomprehensibly rich." In these conditions - in which unemployment/underemployment/perpetual insecurity are structurally necessary, not contingent accidents - there's more case than ever for a benefits saftey net."

More k-punk: Morrissey and Unemployment

2010-08-30T22:36:00.002+12:00

"Is there anyone who has caught the agony of this state of worklessness better than Morrissey? The useless jouissance of refusing what was anyway impossible: "No I've never had a job/ because I've never really wanted one" "No, I've never had a job because I'm too shy" ... I do sometimes think that the implicit political position in those handful of early Smiths songs was one of the most powerful of the 80s. Singing "England is mine and it owes me a living" at the time of 3 million unemployed and the Miners Strike ... Rejecting the masculine destiny of Fordist worker at the very moment when that destiny was being denied to the working class ("No, we cannot cling to the old dreams any more") ... Rejecting, that is to say, all of those working class homilies about the dignity of labour"

CYBERNETIC POST-CAPITAL

2010-08-30T22:02:00.002+12:00

It's been a while since I've posted, I know - in my defence I'm writing 20 000 words a semester of coursework, no counting all the (too much) variousness I do on the side.

It's also been a while since I've linked to k-punk, and too long since I've read. Straight off I found this, which looks very cool - I wish I was in the UK.

Accelerationism:

This one-day symposium will think through the implications of accelerationism in the light of the forthcoming publication of Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 and Benjamin Noys’s The Persistence of the Negative.

More here. Along with an awesome picture of a cyborg.

From an essay on Johnson's RADI OS, drawing on Steve McCaffery's Levinasian Poethics

2010-08-23T18:22:00.004+12:00

Steve McCaffery, in his description of John Cage’s mesostic poems, coins the term “parasitography” as a descriptor, describing the work as “utterly dependent [on the host text] for its existence”(217). I dispute the implication that the “parasite” does not contribute to the “host”, that there is an unfair exchange that is detrimental to the "host". The paragramatic reading strategies enacted by the like of Cage, Jackson Mac Low and Ronald Johnson illuminate heretofore elided textual potentialities already existent within the texts they draw from. In this way the relationship can be described more accuratly as symbiotic. This release of potentiality is most obvious in RADI OS, or other physically enacted works of performative reading such as Tom Phillips “treated Victorian novel” A Humument. The partner texts, such as, for example Paradise Lost and RADI OS , begin as Same to one another, yet through the process of excision or etching, the newly formed RADI OS gains alterity from its progenitor, without violent disinheretence – indeed, the poem functions as a loving tribute while still maintaining its difference. Furthermore, as a reading of Paradise Lost, it contributes its own (albeit idiosyncratic) interpretative work to the corpus of possibility that constitutes the possible responses to the poem. Johnson’s RADI OS performs and makes physically manifest these processes through its literalisation of erasure, thus enacting the process of its composition. Through the differentiation of the poem from its parent-text RADI OS gains its own alterity, while at the same time maintaining its obligation to the Otherness of Paradise Lost and its polysemy.

National Poetry Day

2010-07-26T22:03:00.003+12:00

It looks like it's going to be a big one. As well as the reading I'm performing at out in Titirangi, there's the lauch for the late Leigh Davis' collection Stunning debut of the repairing of a life at the at the University of Otago's Auckland Centre, 385 Queen Street, Auckland from 6.00–8.00 pm. At the Auckland City Library is a continuation of the "Million Poems for Matariki" project, with Selina Tusitala Marsh, last year's poet laureate Michele Leggott, and current Laureate Cilla McQueen.

And Christchurch - I haven't forgotten you! There's a reading at the University Bookshop, for the launch of Guarding the Cellar Door by Linda Connell, published by Steele Roberts, with readings by Roger Hickin, Tusiata Avia, my good friends Jeffrey Paparoa Holman and Micah Timona-Ferris, and writers from the School for Young Writers. I think there may be something at the central city library as well, but I could be wrong.

More events can be found here.

Reading at Lopdell House for National Poetry Day

2010-07-24T22:54:00.003+12:00

I'm reading at this event alongside Selina Tusitala Marsh; Kevin Ireland; Raewyn Alexander; Doug Poole; Courtney Meredith; Mark Pirie; Janet Charman; Daniel Larsen and Ila Selwyn.

I will be reading from my forthcoming book /K/:HAVEDONEWITH, coming soon from June Gloom. I have special plans.

From the website:

This event is always a sell out so book early.

Hot mulled wine will be available.

This event is made possible with support from Creative Communities and National Poetry Day's sponsors, National Post and Booksellers New Zealand.

Venue: Top Floor of Lopdell House, 7.30pm, doors open at 7pm

Corner Titirangi & South Titirangi Roads, Auckland 0604

Entry: $10

Booking: phone 817 8087 x201 or call into the Gallery Shop.

Myung Mi Kim’s Penury

2010-06-23T16:05:00.002+12:00

Two reviews in two days. I'm still on course-work mode, and need to relax. This one is Myung Mi Kim's Penury, a fantastic title by an amazing poet, published by the company with the best name ever: Omnidawn.

review of Bruce Russell's Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009

2010-06-22T15:23:00.001+12:00

I've just posted my (incredibly late) review of Bruce Russell's Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009 over at Tarpaulin Sky. You should read the review, buy the book, then read it. It's very good.

Reviewers wanted!

2010-06-08T22:32:00.002+12:00

Interested in reviewing for Tarpaulin Sky? In NZ, preferably Auckland? (I don't have much money for postage, so would rather deliver books by hand - though rest of the country would be good to, if you've got the right stuff....) Then give me an email!

Also, if you're looking for a flat, a couple of rooms becoming availible soon...

Steven Karl has good taste.

2010-06-06T02:06:00.003+12:00

He's got my chapbook on his recomended summer reading list over at No Tell. Furthermore, he is not just a man of impeccable taste, but furiously great words as well. Both State(s) of Flux and (Ir)rational Animals are wonderful - and the former is one of my favorite book-objects as well.

This is not praise out of obligation! Buy his work!

LOUNGE 14

2010-05-24T20:09:00.004+12:00

Just a reminder to all that I'm reading at LOUNGE 14 on Wednesay evening - 5:30, Old Government house , University of Auckland City Campus off Waterloo Quadrant. Come down!

particularly unconventional

2010-05-15T19:41:00.002+12:00

I just got mentioned on Canadian Radio. Emma Healey, editor-in-chief of the Incongruous Quarterly, was asked on "Here and Now" on CBS's Radio One, about any "particularly unconventional" submission that they'd recieved - their mission is to "publish the unpublishible". She just emailed me saying that my submission, all 150 of Shakespeare's sonnets run through a bank or randomisers and algorythms, was "one of the first that sprang to mind." I'm very happy to have that dubious honour. Go Inconguous Quarterly!

COMA

2010-05-12T21:21:00.002+12:00

BUY THIS
FUCK
SEMIOTEXT(E) YOU ARE GOOD {GO HERE}

COMA BY PIERRE GUYOTAT

Long ago, in childhood, when Summer reverberates and feels and throbs all over, it begins to circumscribe my body along with my self, and my body gives it shape in turn: the "joy" of living, of experiencing, of already foreseeing dismembers it, this entire body explodes, neurons rush toward what attracts them, zones of sensation break off almost in blocks that come to rest at the four corners of the landscape, at the four corners of Creation.
—from Coma

Upcoming Readings

2010-05-03T14:46:00.002+12:00

I will be reading at LOUNGE #14 Wed 26 May at 5.30 pm, at the Old Government House UOA City campus, on Waterloo Quadrant. Full details of that still to come.

I'm also reading on Friday July 30th at Lopdell House in Titirangi for National Poetry Day. the details of that too are to come.

I'm working on doing something interesting for both of them, so stay tuned.

Urs Alleman Interview!

2010-05-01T00:06:00.002+12:00

The author of Babyfucker (translation recently published by Les Figues) interviewed by Elizabeth Hall over at the TSky blog.

It's a fantastic interview too, well worth reading. More than that, even.

New Reviews at Tarpaulin Sky

2010-04-30T16:14:00.001+12:00

nick-e melville's Selections and Dissections reviewed by Stephen Nelson and Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton reviewed by Micah Ling

.

The Kearney is great, I haven't read the melville yet - but I googled him and checked out some of his work and like it a lot.

A poem by me

2010-04-26T18:35:00.000+12:00

is here. Thanks Charlotte!

HEGEMONY IS TRANCENDENCE

2010-04-23T01:50:00.003+12:00

Amy is doing the good work of puctuation. She's breaking art. People probably don't like her [that bitch] becuase the ideas of the aesthetic the sacred the objective QUALITY get knocked about in the tussle. "I would publish more women/fags/indigenous writers if their wor was good enough" here's the page.
and what I said
bearing in mind I'm not quite here as it's 2am the day has been caffine and nicotine and milton and johnson with theory as a condiment

THUSLY:

God damn all this talk of “gender blindness”, “language over body” “quality” etc makes me ill.
“women can’t paint; women can’t write” [VW, to the lighthouse] I suppose that goes for crazies (and dykes can’t fuck w the heteronormative either)
it implies that vaginas get in the way of writing well if you look for quality and don’t publish girls
same agenda as assimilationism
erasure of difference
fucking easy if your on the side with the bigger stick (so to speak)
heh the biopower of writing
(necropower of erasure?)
FIT THE AESTHETIC

why is the aesthetic homogenising, a hegemony?
aren’t people who break that awesome?
Joyce, woolf, genet, guyotat, mansfield if she’d lived long enough
killed the novel – it comes out of the ashes something new, with blood on its face, and eyes aflame – what if that never happened?

all of this shows the fact that poeple get really uncomfortable about reading difference, reading
poems (or whatever) that aren’t mirrors (if I want that I’ll go to the bathroom)
I want poems to break me
(and amys do)

ignore this is the rant of a crazy if you want i should be asleep but no.
do i make sense myself clear? [cf end of preceding line]

I love you all.

Bureaucratic Biopower

2010-04-12T21:17:00.001+12:00

Compare this with the bureaucratic regimes imposed within the tertiary system (performance assesment, PBRF, continual justification of work in financial terms etc):

"At the core of Foucault's picture of modern “disciplinary” society are three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control over people (power) can be achieved merely by observing them. So, for example, the tiered rows of seats in a stadium not only makes it easy for spectators to see but also for guards or security cameras to scan the audience. A perfect system of observation would allow one “guard” to see everything (a situation approximated, as we shall see, in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon). But since this is not usually possible, there is a need for “relays” of observers, hierarchically ordered, through whom observed data passes from lower to higher levels." (source - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy)

Good reference here at k-punk , also Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism: is there no Alternative? has a great breakdown of the culture of surveylance in bureaucratic institutions.

Abyss

2010-04-09T00:45:00.001+12:00

I was looking through the Archives of one of my favorite bloggers, k-punk (aka Mark Fisher, who writes regularly for Wire, and is the author of a great little book called Capitalist Realism: is there No Alternative) trying to find a post on Margret Atwood, when I stumbled upon this piece. Well worth a look. "An abyss that laughs at creation"
. Great title, no?

Kristeva, Psychosis, Text.

2010-04-07T13:32:00.001+12:00

“What Kristeva brings, in a manifold way, into direct relation with (the language of) psychosis is not the pre-oedipal abjection that is constitutive for the subject, but the post-oedipal modes in which the constituted subject strives to repudiate the repudiation that founds it and to seek out, once again, a connection with the corps maternel. For here, the jouissance of the primary process prevails against the reality principal of the symbolic order and thus entails the danger of a “psychotic” disintegration of ego and (paternal) world. To this extent, the literature of the “abject” – for Kristeva, the cardinal form of such second-order repudiation – is structurally psychotic” (Menninghaus, Winfried. Disgust: the Theory and History fo a Strong Sensation. Trans Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. Albany: SUNY Press 2003. 375)

Discussion regarding Pro-/Anti-choice groups, and reactions thereto (spurred by UOA Feminist Collective activity on Facebook

2010-03-30T16:22:00.002+13:00

[Feminists UOA, of which I am a member, invites me to join group enititled "Anti-choice groups are NOT welcome at University of Auckland", with the sub-header "We don't want you so go away!!"]

Discussion that follows:

Ross Brighton 30 March at 13:29

While I agree with the sentiment, I'm not sure of the methodology - does censorship/antagonism communicate the kind of ethico-discursive stance that a group such as this exists to promote?

Such can lead to a cementing of positions; preventing, rather than promoting, progressive movement.

designating the university a site of conflict/contention has uncomfortable parallels to the designation of the procreative female body (or the female body in general, or the body in general) as such....

That's my stance at least

Feminists Uoa 30 March at 13:40 Reply

It is our university and we get to say if we want a group to affiliate or not. If we find it offensive we are permitted to vote against it. Just the presence of an anti-choice group at university will cause trauma to students. In my eyes that is reason enough to vote against them affiliating. We believe that the university should be a safe space for all students. Having an active anti-choice group on campus will make it an unsafe space for many people. They want to take away my rights to decide what to do with my body. No other club is trying to do that.

Ross Brighton 30 March at 13:52

Ok. If it's a question of voting then I'm totally in. It is a colonisation of the body, an assertion of proto-property rights in the name of "morality" (would an anti-gay group be permitted?).

Though I would hesitate to employ (discursive) violence against anything other than their (totalising) discourse (unless provoked by the same)

Ross Brighton 30 March at 13:53

May I post this discussion?

Feminists Uoa 30 March at 14:25 Reply

Sweet. I'd like to point out though that the person having this discussion is Alana (me).

Reply:

Questions

2010-03-28T23:54:00.002+13:00

A Question for all the girl-poets out there: What are your feelings regarding writing and hysteria? I've just read a paper by Elaine Showalter ("Hysterical Narrative", in Narrative 1.1, Jan '93), that argues that it's association w "women's writing" is counterproductive, because of it's history of negative connotation and as a tool of oppression (the obvious counter-argument would be analogies with the "N-Bomb" and "Queer", etc). My interest in H. comes from my experience of the pathologization of the psychologically non-normative, reclaiming madness as a positive sight of production/expenditure, so I'm not totally clued up on gender here (though I wouldn't consiter myself normatively masculine.... but being a hetrosexual male this becomes a very foggy zone where there is no camp (no pun intended) - I've been both gay-bashed and straight-bashed - would you believe it?))

Any Thoughts?

Home & Away Poetry Symposium

2010-03-24T18:23:00.001+13:00

H O M E & A W A Y 2 0 1 0
A Trans Tasman Poetry Symposium

about

HOME & AWAY 2010 at the University of Auckland

your two islands seemed fragile and vulnerable. In humor, but also in a curious
seriousness, I wondered if one might not extend oars from either side of each,
and row them about in celebration of some appropriate festival
(Robert Creeley, 1976)

Programme | Speakers | PDF version

PROGRAMME

Monday 29 March

7-8 pm	Pot luck dinner at Michael King Writers’ Centre. Bring a friend and something to eat or drink
8-9 pm	Michael Farrell and Jill Jones talk and read from their 2009 anthology Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets. Chair: Martin Edmond. Venue: Michael King Writers’ Centre, Mt Victoria, Devonport

Tuesday 30 March

11-12 noon	All Together Now / Kia Kotahi Rā. Poets and students from Poetry off the Page and Masters of Creative Writing make collaborative text for the digital bridge
12-1 pm	Performances and shared lunch with students Venue: Pat Hanan Room (Arts 2, Rm 501. Cnr of Symonds St & Grafton Rd)
1.20 pm	Welcome / Whakatau
2-3 pm	Session 1 Jill Jones, ‘Poetry’s latitudes: “scope for thought and action”’; Ann Vickery, ‘Beyond a National Paradigm: Travelling Poetics.’ Chair: Brian Flaherty Venue: Pat Hanan Room
Afternoon tea
3.30-4.30 pm	Session 2 Martin Edmond, ‘The Fictional Genealogies of David Mitchell’; Nigel Roberts, ‘Expanding The List: Dave Mitchell in Wellington, Auckland and Sydney.’ Chair: Peter Simpson Venue: Pat Hanan Room
4.30-5 pm	David Mitchell Live at the Globe. Film screening introduced by Genevieve McClean Venue: Pat Hanan Room
5.30-7 pm	Launch of Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems of David Mitchell (Auckland UP) and David Mitchell nzepc author page Venue: Gus Fisher Gallery at the Kenneth Myers Centre, 74 Shortland St, CBD

Wednesday 31 March

12.30-1.30 pm	Lunch. Senior Common Room, Old Government House. Cnr of Princes St and Waterloo Quadrant
2-3 pm	Session 3 John Newton, ‘You Kiwis are really eccentric, aren’t you?’; Ian Wedde, ‘the sound of one hand typing.’ Chair: Murray Edmond
Afternoon tea
3.30-4.30 pm	Session 4 Cath Kenneally, ‘Not revenge: eaten cold and its debt to Janet Charman’s cold snack’; Mark Young, ‘Widening the Community: Otoliths and how.’ Chair: Selina Tusitala Marsh Venue: Pat Hanan Room
5-5.30 pm	Launch of Jill Jones’ Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press) and Mark Young’s Genji Monogatari (Otoliths) Venue: Old Government House Lounge
5.30-7 pm	LOUNGE #12 at Old Government House. Featuring Serie Barford, Janet Charman, Michael Farrell, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Jill Jones, Jan Kemp, Cath Kenneally, Genevieve McClean, John Newton, Vivienne Plumb, Nigel Roberts, Ian Wedde, Mark Young. MC: Michele Leggott

Thursday 1 April

Day:	Trip to Waiheke Island, tbc
Early evening	Planning for September symposium
7.30 pm	Genevieve McClean’s Projector Project 2: poetry and film collaborations. Te Karanga Gallery, K Road

For more info visit the NZEPC

Variousness

2010-03-23T20:45:00.004+13:00

Man, I think it's nearly three weeks between posts - the longest so far, at a guess. But moving, and starting postgrad work I think are good excuses.

In case those of you who have not abandoned me (dear readers, dear reader) did not know, I've moved to Auckland, and am now studying at the city's eponymous university. It's great. So far there's five hours of theory a week (three tought, the rest is a discussion group) and there may be more in the works.

I'm working on a trans-tasman semi-aleotory massively excessive (the source-text I've built through processing Home and Away scripts and Abel Tasman's Journals is over 150 pages) work that I'm hoping will be part of the digital bridge being constructed for the Home and Away symposium curated by the NZEPC.

I've also met, for the first time in the real world, Scott Hamilton, Jack Ross, and Tony Green, all of whom are good people (in my estimation at least, for what that's worth).

I've developed an unhealthy infatuation with Antonin Artaud.

Also, Amy King was good enough to send me copies of two of her books (both published by Blazevox), and they're awesome. I highly recomend them to anyone, especially those who like the kind of affect in Lara Glenum, Johannes Göransson, Kate Durbin and Kate Zambreno (And their theoretical work - I'm thinking graphorrhea (there's my Artaud obsession again - he was diognosed with such) , vomit, hysteria, excess of affect, general awesomeness....

Jaques Lacan treated Artuad during his 11 month stay at Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris (one of the five hospitals he was incarcerated in over the 8 year, 8 month period between September 30, 1937 and his release from Rodez in 1945. Artaud described him as a "filthy, vile bastard" (Curtosy of Clayton Eshelman's introduction to Watchfiends and Rackscreams: Works from the Final Period).

Helen Cixious isn't a fan of Lacan either:
"Here we encounter the inevitable man-with-rock, standing erect in his old Freudian realm, in the way that, to take the figure back to the point where linguistics is conceptualizing it "anew," Lacan preserves it in the sanctuary of the phallos (ø) "sheltered" from castration's lack! Their "symbolic" exists, it holds power-we, the sowers of disorder, know it only too well. But we are in no way obliged to deposit our lives in their banks of lack, to consider the constitution of the subject in terms of a drama manglingly restaged, to reinstate again and again the religion of the father. Because we don't want that. We don't fawn around the su- preme hole. We have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the negative. The feminine (as the poets suspected) affirms: ". . . And yes," says Molly, carrying Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing; "I said yes, I will Yes."" ("The Laugh of the Medusa").

I saw Kate D. has started a Journal of Gaga Studies. I'm very, very impressed, and will contribute as soon as I am able.

Posts soon: Textual Body Politic: Hysteria, Abjection, Expenditure

Review of Myung Mi Kim's Penury

Review of Bruce Russell's Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound

Swans: Abjection, Misogyny, Capital

New Action Yes

2010-03-04T17:18:00.001+13:00

Here.

There are three poems by me.

Poetry NZ 40

2010-03-02T18:06:00.003+13:00

is out now (available here), including my essay "Recent Developments in American Poetry" - covering the Gurlesque and related poetries, Flarf, and Conceptual Writing. Here is the section on Johannes Göransson:

"The phenomenon of grotesquery as a means of questioning gender norms and identity isn’t confined to women. Johannes Göransson is a male poet working in this field. He relies on the Julia Kristeva’s framework of the Abject, which centres on the othering, fracturing, exploding and mutilating the speaker’s body and consciousness through a regime of continual violence and transgression:

My girlfriend is gasping for air; she’s going catatonic
in this bargain bin of a winter, she’s scared of pigeons.
I own a shoddy collection of pigeon skeletons.
I never thought I would be able to fit so many
disparate parts in my mouth at once. (35)
and:
I keep mentioning my torso because I wish I were a zoologist. I wish I were a surgeon. Or Darwin. Or a ballet impresario in Paris. Or a mole in the ground. Or a reptile collector. Or 5000 accidents. Made of Swans. Or Darwin. Or an injury. Or going home in a wheelbarrow. Or moving into the Hotel Fuck. Or bleeding slowly into a silver bucket. Or plundering. Most of all I wish I were Darwin. (17)
Here the text becomes a battleground for competing desires and pulsions, the ‘so many disparate parts’ of language that emanate from the ‘mouth’ compete as vehicles for the assertion and explosion of self. The humanist distinction between human and animal, and the rationalist distinction between subject and object collapse as zoologist and mole become one and the same. Darwin is conjured as the archetypal destroyer of epistemologies and metanarratives (as in his impact on Judaeo-Christian cosmology). In this respect Göransson is a Darwinistic regressor, a user of the name as a vehicle for becoming animal. Being is discarded in favour of movement. The body, both personal and political, becomes the site of conflict and abjection as in the titles of some of the poems in the collection:
‘Shotgun Wedding in the Ribcage of the Bourgeoisie’ (9), ‘Ronald Regan Brought Me to this Country – Me and the Anti-Abortion Movement’ (29), ‘I Write Like a Girl, You Read like You’re in the Closet’ (68).
Such titles appear as interruptions to the flow of a longer poem reading like catch-phrases or shouted announcements as a result of their large, bold typeface, all-caps formatting or pop-up ads announcing what’s coming next on the network."

2010-03-01T20:01:00.002+13:00

I'm looking for a flat in Auckland. If you can help, please email me. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I have a large library if that's any incentive!

2010-02-28T17:24:00.002+13:00

I think I'm going to call this piece "Revulsion in Poetic Language".

I find puns too funny for my own good.

RDU show

2010-02-27T18:00:00.003+13:00

Here.

First Semester Research Proposal: Ariana Reines

2010-02-25T17:27:00.001+13:00

I propose to write on Ariana Reines’ appropriations, weaponisation and redeployment of a hybrid of confessional and language-writing techniques against the semiotic and epistemological constructions of what Mark Fisher calls “Capitalist Realism”; largely dealing with inter-related questions of gender, selfhood, the body and power.

Several things should be noted here. Firstly the political deployment of confessionalism (indeed the politicality of confessionalism itself, a la Plath) is nothing new, and also maintains a strong presence in pop music (and this is often complicated by either anti-realism or anti-naturalism: cf the Smiths, SWANS etc). Like poetry (until recently – though it could be argued that this is discursively still the case) , however, this is largely male-dominated. In this context a discussion of the function of SWANS’ misogyny as means of abjection of the male body, anti-masculinism, and capitalist critique would be pertinent, and the exploitative nature of this. Lydia Lunch would also be a useful touchstone. Secondly the similar treatment of langpo, and subversion of Perloff’s ‘indeterminacy’ and the project’s selfconcious ‘high art’ aspirations (or the academic estalishment’s territorialisation of langpo though interpretation and high art designation). On this point I would like to cite Johannes Göransson on kitch, aestheticism, and the hipster. Also worth mentioning here is the concept of the hybrid (through Göransson review of the recent American Hybrid anthology) and the differnect conceptions of this, and their relation to the political content of the work. I propose a difference between the Grotesque (and politically effective) hybrid and the Hybridization that occurs when the subversive is co-opted by the capitalist machine and rendered impotent (cf New Wave, what has (largely) happened recently with hip hop, ‘alternative rock’ etc).

I would also write on the context and state of the avant-garde impulse/project in this context, and its relationship to both popular and high culture, especially in light of the growing currency of the term ‘post-avant’, and what this means, both in terms of Reines’ work, and the wider poetic community.

The kind of socio-political project Reines pursues is shared by many younger contemporary poets, a large number of whom are active participants in the online poetics community and blogosphere (including Göransson, Lara Glenum and James Pate at Exoskeleton; Nada Gordon, Kate Durbin, Anne Boyer, Kate Zambreno, Danielle Pafunda, Sina Queyras etc), and there is a large network of cultural studies bloggers doing interesting work in aesthetics that is also applicable (Fisher being one, also Dominick Fox (whose Cold World I wish to use as a theoretical text for this essay), and Ben Woodward).

Further writing would be done of the relationship between Reine’s work and the aesthetico-political framwork thus explored and the body (largely feminine). This would involve the intersection of the body and the text, and the violence within, the relationship between violence, sex and childbirth; and the interaction between these, the creative process, and collage. I would also like to look at Reines in Performance, and the way this is linked to the presentation of her books.

Finally I would like to draw conclusions about semiotic warfare.

Kate Zambreno on the "rules of fiction"

2010-02-23T12:22:00.001+13:00

"Oh, fuck you Joyce Carol Oates, fuck you and your Marilyn Monroe novel. Seriously, it makes me crazy when mass market authors get so uncomfortable about experimental or postmodern writing, writing that is about ideas, that is wild, political, plays with form,not meant to be consumed in a paperback at an airport bookstore. You know who's on this Guardian list, for the most part? People who write "fiction" who treat it as a "craft" who play cult to the sentence (looking at you, Zadie Smith) and the tired ideas of dead babies."

Also - I'm fling out at 10:30 tomorrow morning!

Wild Boys!

2010-02-18T16:52:00.002+13:00

Now that I have your attention, who was it out there who wanted my Raymond Carver?

Leaving Party (of sorts) and other stuff)

2010-02-18T02:10:00.003+13:00

As I am flying out for Auckland on next wed (24th), there will be festivities at Goodbye Blue Monday sat (20th) eve, followed by the Tiger Tones (who are leaving too - it's their do I'm highjacking) playing at midnight (i think).

I've got a b-day barbecue in the arvo, but will endeavour to be there 8-9ish.

These organisational skills are why I'm an academic, not an engineer or surgeon.

On another note, I'm on a radio show tomorrow night (all things being equal); The Dark, Camp and evil ATROCITY EXHIBITION, where I'll be poeticising and spinning tracks of wierdness. 1-3am fri morning (or thurs eve if you're anything like me) of RDU98.5.

Lady Gaga, Lady Lazarus

2010-02-16T00:17:00.003+13:00

another reading of Bad Romance, to supliment Steve Halle's (link courtesy of Johannes).

This one starts near the end, or my idea of it does, with Gaga in the bedroom with a the guy on the bed, obscured by her advancing, dragging a train of polar bear fir behind her. She disrobes, and fire engulfs the bed (and presumably the guy), then the shot cuts to Gaga in profile, emenating power and glory, her head sillioetted against the rising flames.

My immediate thought:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

(Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus")

And then a line earlier, which resonates with the posthuman construction that is (my conception of) Gaga:

You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

And Gaga's continual mantra of the competing pultions "I want your love ... I want your revenge" and "I don't want to be friends" ... If i may be permitted to project myself, this is the lack of self - the desire for complete posthuman trancenence of the "I", to become-other, reach out and touch the body without organs. "friends" is not enough, love has to be augmented with "revenge", "ugly", "dis(-)ease" (not that the negative aesthectic is neccessary in this specular world of fashion, striptease, etc - the oversize eyes of Gaga's 'baby' incarnation, the reptilian spine, the masks.... it is the excessive hypersaturation that is neccessary here - the symbolic regime of the Real must fall, and the "I" must be deterritorialized into a specular multiplicity (though that may be the Triazalam speaking - cures for one ailment (insomnia) cause others (hysteria in the writing of critical prose(and paretheses in parentheses in parentheses)))).

And with the continual statement of the specular, there is always the spectacle, and the image, and the concentration on the Gaze. And the Audience. The "peanut crunching crowd". Us.

(I've (still, I think) got an essay I wrote on Plath's LL for a 100 level paper - with a rewrite, I might post it here. What do y'all think?)

The Female Body is a Semiotic War Zone

2010-02-15T01:09:00.003+13:00

Australia is insane. Via Boing Boing: "Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them."

The fascism of "Normality". This pathologises women for not adhering to 'morally' dictated codes over biology, and what is worse, pathologises both these women and those who love them.

I'm not pro- or anti- porn, as I don't have a strong understanding of the theoretical discourse surrounding it (and it tends to be mechanical to the point of farce), but this imposes even more stringency from the signifying regime that already governs value imposed on the female form from outside.

Late Resolutions / Aspirations or somesuch

2010-02-15T00:45:00.004+13:00

In addition to my earlier post on awesome books people should buy, trade or at least read, I was thinking about stuff I'd like to write on. Reviewing Square Root was a great experience (I'd love to write more on the vehicle for the text as part of the text - because it is), and I'd love the opportunity to write more on vispo, as well as sound work, fringe/fluxus publications and basically anything that doesn't get the attention/respect it deserves (I'm thinking respect might be the wrong word there).

As with the Beaulieu, so with the Russell essay collection (review coming)- I want more theory books. I want to review stuff that will cha(lle)nge my thinking while i am thinking about it - dialogic criticism.

And, as many while by now know, I'm a pop-culture fiend. There may be posts coming on stupid big-budget horror films, sci-fi, hip hop and the like.

I want dialogue as well. Chip in. And if you know anyone who is publishing any of the stuff I've mentioned, email me, or get them to.

Unrelated note - who was it out there who wanted my Carver books? 'cause they're yours if you want them.

Poem at Flowers of Sulphur

2010-02-14T17:59:00.002+13:00

I've found a lot of work scribbled on pieces of paper while cleaning / packing for the move.

I'm not sure what to do with them.

Some I'll stick over at FoS, the first is there now.

2010-02-14T16:27:00.001+13:00

Recent Books I Love.

2010-02-13T15:11:00.002+13:00

I didn't do a "best of 2009" or any such thing, so here's something informal.
I love all these books massively, and highly recommend them to anyone.

Alan Loney - Day's Eye (Rubicon Press)
Susana Gardner - [Lapsed Insel Weary] (the tangent press)
Sandy Florian - The Tree of No (Action Books)
Brandon Downing - Lake Antiquity (Fence Books)
Myung Mi Kim - Penury (Omnidawn)
Bruce Russell - Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound (Clouds)
Michael Steven - Bartering Lines (Kilmog Press)
Joyelle McSweeney - Nylund the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky)
Lara Glenum - Maximum Gaga (Action Books)

I am currently reading, and loving, The Plot Genie by By Gillian Conoley (Omnidawn) and The Black Automaton by Douglas Kearney (Fence). Both are awesome.

Visual Works by John Wiese at Spratt's Medium

2010-02-04T19:13:00.001+13:00

Need I say more?

Check them out.

Derek Beaulieu Review at Tarpaulin Sky

2010-02-04T19:06:00.002+13:00

My review of √¯¯¯ is up now. It's shorter than normal, but I'm in the process of moving, so please forgive me.

Have a look.

More soon.

2010-02-04T18:12:00.000+13:00

I'm moving to Auckland on the 24th!

2010-02-03T11:52:00.001+13:00

"Last night I was thinking about [Lady Gaga]'s sexuality, and the relation of that to discources on evolutionary biology (God I can't believe how ridiculous that sounds, especially if taken out of context), such as Dawkins' dogma of the selfish gene, and how she destroys that (though not only her) - Fame is fetishised and sexualised (and sex is as well), but as means of self-erasure..."

[me in the comment stream over at Kate Durbin's blog. I'm quite proud]

Kate Durbin at Delerious Hem

2010-02-02T09:57:00.002+13:00

Delerious Hem once again has it's "this is what a feminist [poet] looks like" forum up and running. Kate Durbin's contribution is especially good. "It is kind of this post-femme-something vomit of the medusa" (Kate Zambreno); "[she] brings in Plath and why she has to be dismissed: she is not disinterested enough. This is also related to why kitsch has to be dismissed: it is everywhere" (Johannes Göransson).

"Say melodrama is the gaudy arena in which teenage girls perform their angst—often in the garb of flamboyant (“aggressive”) and/or over-revealing fashions, and histrionic poetry—which is dismissed by society and the church, including, as these girls turn into women, the church of the academy. However, like Plath’s much-maligned insistences that her despair was on par with the Holocaust, melodrama is the teenage girl’s sadness on steroids.

Say nothing is more melodramatic—and pisses off Mom and Dad more—than claiming to be possessed by the Devil himself.

WHISPER: And the Ouija spells: A T T E N T I O N (Is not all feminist writing some form of noisy attention?)

Say, like the demon, the teenage girl’s body is unearned—and therefore claimed by everyone around her. Stigmata, lipstick mark of Cain’s slutty girlfriend, branded by parents, the government, Urban Outfitters and Teen Vogue. Is there any wonder that her body must turn itself inside out, must vomit upon the world in revolt?"

OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS: TARPAULIN SKY LITERARY JOURNAL (February only)

2010-02-02T09:45:00.001+13:00

OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS: TARPAULIN SKY LITERARY JOURNAL

Hola and howdy, readers and friends,

During the month of February we will be reading submissions for the next paper edition of Tarpaulin Sky. We hope you'll give it a go, and send your best, as this is the only submission period for the magazine this year.

We're trying something new, too--well, new to us--the online submission manager. So you'll be able to keep tabs on the status of your submission throughout the process.

Also new this year are many of the journal's editors: Blake Butler and Joanna Howard editing Fiction; Laynie Browne and Karla Kelsey editing Poetry; and Sandy Florian and Lily Hoang editing "Other"; presided over by Editor in Chief Colie Collen, with all submissions shepherded through the process by Associate Editors Duncan B. Barlow, Jamey Dunham, and Christine Wertheim, as well as Assistant Editors Michael Tod Edgerton and Brian Mihok.

Please visit our guidelines for all the deets.

SEE YOU AT AWP DENVER?

We hope so. TSky authors and editors will be reading from new books and selling them as well, and we'll be joining our favorite presses for various kickass events: readings with Action Books, Apostrophe Books, Astrophil Press, Black Ocean, Featherproof Books, and Slope Editions, just to name a few. Events Coordinators Michelle Puckett and Megan DiBello invite you to keep on top of our events blog for forthcoming details.

IS YOUR BOOKSHELF NOT SO FRESH?

We can fix that. Subscriptions to Tarpaulin Sky Press's forthcoming Spring titles are still available--as are huge savings on forthcoming titles. If you're looking for some of the most exciting literature being published today, you may want to have a look at our catalog, or take a look at some of our forthcoming Spring 2010 titles: Traci O Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species, a book of short fictions that Brian Evenson calls "a marvelous debut. . . . moving fast enough that you could end up anywhere, Connor’s thought about every single word, every gesture, and she can turn each story on a dime" or Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, book of interlocking short fictions / prose poems that Joyelle McSweeney deems "twisted," and Norma Cole calls "Irresistible.... with its incantations of quantum teleology, its footnotes & sources.... it is a magnificent work." Also on the way, Joanna Ruocco's book of short fictions, Man's Companions; Shelly Taylor's book of interlocking short fictions / prose poems, Black-Eyed Heifer; and Emily Toder's poetry chapbook, Brushes With.

& Let us not forget the three chapbooks we just picked from the last reading period: Lara Glenum's The Hotling Chronicles: A Horror in Trans; Sarah Goldstein's Fables; and James Haug's Scratch. Plus forthcoming full-lengths-with-really-long-titles, Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

LOOKING TO SCORE FREE BOOKs?

We can help. We have Advanced Reader Copies of all Tarpaulin Sky Press's Spring full-length titles, and we have hundreds of review copies from other publishers, from Ahsahta to Vagabond. Want to review a brand new title from Fence Books? We got 'em. Burning Deck, City Lights, Dalkey Archive, FC2, Graywolf, Salt, Sarabande, Shearsman, Ugly Duckling? No problem. Or how about Counterpath, Dusie, Ellipsis Press, Essay Press, Subito? Or Canada's positively stellar BookThug?

Our Reviews Editors Ross Brighton and Jared Schickling read review and interview submissions all year long. Writers whose work is accepted for publication receive any two Tarpaulin Sky Press trade paperbacks of their choice. Send a brief cover letter and your previously unpublished review to reviews[AT]tarpaulinsky[DOT]com, and be sure to include "Attn: Review Editors" in the subject line. Click here for a list of review copies currently available. Publishers may send review copies to Book Reviews ~ Tarpaulin Sky Press ~ PO Box 189 ~ Grafton, VT 05146

Write some reviews, yo. Get paid. In books.

GOT SOME NEWS TO SHARE YOURDARNSELF?

If you have something to say about a new journal, new book, new press, new reading series; and if said newness will be of interest to the people who read TSky Press's books or journal, or--better yet!--includes TSky Press authors or journal contributors; and if you'd like to share this newness and can do so in a way that includes some chewy content and few superlatives, then please send your brief shoutout, sidebar, or feature article to our News Editor Amish Trivedi at news[AT]tarpaulinsky[DOT]com

OKEEDOKEE

We're probably forgetting as much as we're including, but we hope you'll forgive us.

Send some work!

Cheers,

Christian Peet, Publisher
Colie Collen, Editor in Chief
& Editors, Tarpaulin Sky Press

Catalyst Open Mic

2010-02-01T23:42:00.001+13:00

Catalyst's Poetry Open Mic Nights are returning in February 2010.

The first one is a little unusual with a slightly different date - for this month only we'll be on the first Thursday of the month (normally it's Wednesday). That means the date and details are as follows:

First Catalyst Open Mic for 2010
Thursday 4th February, 8pm entry is free
Al's Bar, 31 Dundas St Christchurch (behind Pak n' Save Moorhouse)

I'll try and make it this time, I've been slack/busy as all hell. And it'll be my last, as late feb it's Auckland bound for me!

Otoliths 16

2010-02-01T10:03:00.002+13:00

Thanks to Mark Young:

planetX
Carlyle Baker

Otoliths rounds out its fourth year with another issue that maintains the journal's reputation for excellent offerings across a variety of disciplines & styles. Included in issue sixteen, the southern summer 2010 issue, is work from Thomas Fink, Satu Kaikkonen, Nate Pritts, Jane A. Lewty, Craig Foltz, Michael Basinski, Stephen C. Middleton, Márton Koppány, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Raymond Farr, Jeff Crouch & Sheila E. Murphy, Joel Chace, Caleb Puckett, Philip Byron Oakes, Ed Baker, Tom Beckett interviewing William Allegrezza, William Allegrezza, dan raphael, Alyson Torns, Jeff Harrison, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Michele Leggott, PD Mallamo, Ray Craig, Mark Cunningham, Cecelia Chapman, David-Baptiste Chirot, Vernon Frazer, Helen White & Jeff Crouch, James Yeary, Robert Lee Brewer, Michael Brandonisio, J. D. Nelson, Scott Metz, Geof Huth, Corey Wakeling, John M. Bennett & Thomas M. Cassidy, Sheila E. Murphy & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett, Rebecca Mertz, Felino Soriano, Cath Vidler, David Wolach, Carlyle Baker, Stu Hatton, Jenny Enochsson, Robert Gauldie, Rebecca Eddy, Joe Balaz, Bobbi Lurie, Andrew Topel & Márton Koppány, Hugh Tribbey, John Martone, J. Gordon Faylor, Evan Harrison, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, Bob Heman, Guillermo Castro, & sean burn.

maybe stupid and unrelated to anything

2010-01-31T03:04:00.002+13:00

(curtsey of Reynard in the comment stream at HTMLGIANT)

Literal answers to rhetorical questions.

I also apreciate that this is hosted by a university.

A Collection of Essay's by Bruce Russell

2010-01-28T23:53:00.003+13:00

Bruce Russell launched his book Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009 tonight. It's really, really good - and not just in terms of sound, but culture in general; production, resistance, the possibility of radical action; the understanding of one's position within a semantic economy. There's a lot of material in there that is going to be very helpful to me - I'm writing on improvisation and text at the moment, and one of my intentions (they are various....) is to look more at artistic economies as wholes - media-centred distinctions are counter-productive (as Bruce states in the introduction to the show Towards a Cinema of Pure Means currently at the Physics Room gallery).

I've got a review copy - so a write-up is impending. I highly reccomend it - and anyone who is not familliar with Bruce's work should look into it - here's his Wikipedia page.

2010-01-28T00:55:00.003+13:00

I was invited to join Flowers of Sulphur a while back. It's a poetry blog. I felt a bit bad as I hadn't got around to putting anything up there, but now I have. Check it out if you want.

(it's an endless sense of amusement for me that the spellcheck in blogger tries to correct "blog". and "blogger" for that matter.)

k-punk: Spectres of revolution

2010-01-27T01:03:00.002+13:00

Great follow-up to the last k-punk link I posted.

"The terrain - the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects - is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the nostaglic 68ers, the hay bale agragrians, or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization."

Also: Records for Sale/Trade

2010-01-26T12:55:00.000+13:00

Here:
The Creatures. Boomerang LP. VG+. Wild Things 2x7” VG. Miss the Girl 7”. G.

Siouxie and the Banshees. Tinderbox LP.G.

Dali’s Car. The Waking Hour Gatefold LP G+.

Peter Murphy. Deep LP VG. Cuts You Up 12’ VG. Holy Smoke LP VG. Should the World Fail to Fall Apart LP. Sleeve worn.

Einsturzende Neubauten. Haus der Leuge LP. Reissue. EX.

Sex Gang Chldren. Song and Legend LP. VG. Sebastiane 12”, sleeve v. Worn, record fine.

David J. Joe Orton’s Wedding 12”. VG.
Christian Death. The Only Theatre of Pain LP. Reissue. VG.

Tones on Tail. Pop LP. G-VG. There’s Only One! 12”. VG.

The Young Gods. L’Eau Rouge LP. VG.

The March Violets. Natural History LP. VG.

Fields of the Nephilim. Elysium LP. VG. Earth Inferno LP. VG. Fallen LP EX. From the Fire 10’. EX. One More Nightmare/Darkcell AD 10” EX. Psychonaut 12”. VG. Moonchild 7”.

Crypt of Kerberos Cyclone of Insanity 7”

These if someone makes a good enough offer:

The Nefilim Zoon 2xLP, with engraved disc VG+. Penetration 12”.

The Leather Nun Primemover 7”

Books for sale or trade.

2010-01-26T12:08:00.005+13:00

As my moving to Auckland grows ever closer, I'm cleaning out. The amount of stuff I have to do, and stuff I've accrued, is scary. As such here is a preliminary list of books I have to get rid of. Please enquire for better grading of condition, or if you want anything. Make an offer. I've also still got copies of my chapbook.

Without any further ado:

Aeschylus. Oresteia. PB, good.

Baxter, James K. The Labyrinth. HB, 1st, DJ Sunned and chipped, otherwise fine.
__________. Ode To Auckland and other Poems. 3rd printing. Stain to back cover.

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Hights. Small HB, w DJ, good.

Brown, David Lyndon. Skin Hunger. PB, VG+.

Carver, Raymond. Catherdal, Elephant, What we talk about when we talk about love, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?. Vintage PBs. VG+.

______________. All of Us: The Collected Poems. PB, VG+.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and other Stories. PB, VG

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. PB, VG.

__________, Only Revolutions HB, 1^st (upteenth printing) EX.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. PB, good.

Di Prima, Diane (trans). Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin. Chapbook by the Poets Press. Stapled binding, spine worn.

Doctorow, EL. The Waterworks. 1^st Australian. Ex Libris. HB, w DJ. Good reading copy.

___________. Ragtime. Book Club ed. HB, WJ. Good cond.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. HB, binding loose.

Drumheller, Doc and Fox, Ciaran (eds). Catalyst 6. PB VG+

Eliot, TS. Collected Poems. HB, w DJ, EX.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. PB, worn.

Fitzgerald, F Scott. The Great Gatsby. PB, VG+.

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Mass market pb. Good reading copy.

Hall, Bernadette. Heartwood. PB, Good.

Heinlein. Robert A. Starship Troopers. PB. Worn, spine damaged.

Homer, The Iliad and the Odyssey. Trans. Chapman. PB, Good.

Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. PB, good cond. Winner of the Booker Prize.

Ihimaera, Witi (ed). Where’s Waari? Collection of fiction dealing with Maori identity. PB, VG+.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. PB, Good.

_________. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. PB, worn.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. One of those fake leather fancy binding edition things. HB. Good.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. Sumerian Mythology. PB, Good.

LeBas, Jessica. Incognito. AUP, poetry, VG.

Lee, Corrine. Pyx. PB, Spine damaged.

Levertov, Denise. With Eyes at the Back of our Heads. PB, worn.

Martel, Yann. The Life of Pi. PB, good.

Maupassant, Guy de. Short Stories. PB, good.

McQeen, Cilla. Wild Sweets. PB, G.

___________. Soundings. PB, G.

Morrisey, Michael (ed). The Flamingo Anthology of New Zealand Short Stories. PB, VG.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. HB Lib binding. Fair.

Plato. The Republic. One of those fake leather fancy binding edition things. HB. Good.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. PB, good.

______________. Gravity’s Rainbow. PB. Good

_____________. V. PB, worn.

Sims, Laura. Stranger. Fence. As New (double up!).

Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. PB. Good reading copy.

Stein, Gurtrude. Selected Writings, ed. Carl van Vechten. PB, Good.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. One of those fake leather fancy binding edition things. HB. Good.

Swenson, May. Love Poems. PB, Good, a bit rough.

Swift, Jonathan. Gullivers Travels. Small HB, good.

Taylor, Apirana. Soft Leaf Falls of Moon. PB, VG+

Tolkien, JRR. The Lord of the Rings. PB set in box. A bit battered, tear to edge of box.

__________. The Hobbit. HB, ex libris, no jacket. A bit bumped.

__________. The Silmililion. PB. Good.

Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. PB, VG+.

Undset, Sigrid. Kristin Lavransatter. PB, worn.

Virgil. The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. Trans. C Day Lewis. PB, worn.

Weaver, Donna Karen (ed). Caketrain 2 Fall/winter 2004. Good.

Wedde, Ian. Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos. 1st, v. scarce. VG+.

Graham Lambkin on A Journey Round My Skull

2010-01-26T00:31:00.004+13:00

Three Posts, with art. 1, 2, 3.

Graham Lambkin is a multi-instrumentalist, artist and author. He fronted the wonderful and enigmatic Shadow Ring, of which a retrospective is now available. Follow the links, and get me one while you're at it.

More great things

2010-01-23T17:01:00.003+13:00

This time by Kate Zambreno over at the new and fantastic Frances Farmer is my Sister. Title: "Tis Pity She's A Whore: The Prostitute in Henry Miller & Sade + Best Cinematic Hookers".

Very good writing (good? that's too moral. this is destructive. Evil. Which is better. I want to cut through things.)

Kate Durbin is right in her link to Johannes' article that I also link to in the previous post:

"I think I've mentioned this on my blog before, but Exoskeleton has by far been my favorite poetry blog since I discovered it last Spring (though Frances Farmer is climbing up there too..."

Johannes Göransson: Fasion, poetics, narrative and the politicality of aestheticism

2010-01-23T16:26:00.002+13:00

Fantastic piece, as always. Johannes is fast becoming one of my favorite critics/theorists - in the "hip" and "inauthentic" world of the blogosphere. To poetry what Mark Fisher, Dominic Fox and Ben Woodward are to music. Excerpts:

"But I'm more interested - as everyone who reads this blog knows by now - in the use of fashion in this rhetoric, to suggest that there's a superficiality in poetry. This came out - as readers of this blog also knows - when Mark Halliday freaked out over Josh Clover's "lettrist jacket." Halliday was upset that Clover's poetry was not engaged in the real/genuine. Grieving one's father's death I think was Halliday's example. Or maybe that was my own wishful thinking because that's too perfect: "fashion" is the death of the father in some way, the end of patriarchy comes from multiplication, exchangeability, shallowness, flimsiness. That is a funny reading of Halliday. I'm pleased as pancakes."

***

"It seems Aesteticism is threatening. And this should explain why people are wrong when they assume aesteticism is apolitical. Or those who equate it with mere formalism."

Enough of that - read it.

At High Street Project

2010-01-21T11:55:00.009+13:00

Two Events.

the first:
TAKEAWAYS

Various Artists
22 January - 13 February
Opening Reception: Friday 22 January, 6pm.

The Second:

Velvet Hour, Slit The Throat Of The Assistant,
IRD, Jack Hooker

23 January, 9pm
84 Lichfield Street
Entry By Donation.

I'm contributing some visual works to TAKAWAYS.
Scans follow.

Also: Johannes Göransson on Aase Berg's Forsla Fett as Minor Literature

2010-01-19T10:26:00.002+13:00

I'm annoyed I didn't see this post when it went up - Minor Literature is something I'm very interested in - and "Transfer Fat" (as the title reads in English) is (along with "With Deer") one of my favorite of Berg's collections. I can't wait for a complete English translation (there are selections in Remainland, which is available from action books).

bpNichol's Snore Comix 2

2010-01-19T10:22:00.001+13:00

Thanks to Lanny for the link:

Full pdf of bp nichol's snore comix 2

2010-01-17T18:57:00.003+13:00

My review of Stranger by Laura Sims is up now on the Tarpaulin Sky reviews blog.

It's a fantastic boook - if you want a copy you can buy it from Fence, or SPD, or other places too.

derik beaulieu review up soon, followed by Catherine Meng, and the latest Myung Mi Kim.

New at Spratt's Medium

2010-01-14T10:55:00.004+13:00

Jared has just posted some new vispo by derek beaulieu.

New writing by me soon - including a review of beulieu's chapbook √¯¯, published by Default for the Dusie Collective year 3.

Our Love Will Destroy The World

2010-01-07T12:35:00.003+13:00

Sorry for the silence - will have real stuff within the next week or so.

However this just came in from the boys at aQuarius recOrds, so anyone out there who is in SF/Bay Area, go see this show. I've seen Cambell as both BCM and Black Boned Angel, and he's incredible. so thusly:

Hi folks,
> Sorry for the electronic intrusion. This one's mainly for folks in the Bay
> Area.
> Just managed to set up a last minute show on the THE BUS, aQ pal, and
> Andee's former bandmate John Benson's amazing Bus venue, an actual converted
> city bus, with a solar powered PA, an engine that runs on vegetable oil, and
> of course plenty of room inside to cram in a bunch of folks to rock out and
> bliss out, up close and personal with the performers.
> Some of you no doubt experienced the genius that was Finland's Circle
> performing live on the bus a while back, now we're excited to announce:
>
> OUR LOVE WILL DESTROY THE WORLD
>
> aka Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel and of course Black Boned Angel.
>
> Performing live, tonight, Wednesday, Jan 06th, 2010, on THE BUS. Show starts
> at 8:00 pm.
>
> The bus will be parked at 16th and San Bruno, under the freeway. You can't
> miss it.
>
> There should be a few other bands playing, who have also traveled from afar,
> we're just waiting for the confirmation, to find out more, keep an eye on
> the other aQ thingies, twitter, Myspace, all that jazz.
> But really, it hardly matters who else is playing, cuz we're just so excited
> to see OLWDTW!!!

Kevin Blechdom (USA) feat. Barnwave + Greg Malcolm & Jenny Ward

2009-12-29T18:57:00.002+13:00

Kevin Blechdom (USA) feat. Barnwave

+ Greg Malcolm & Jenny Ward

Wunderbar, Lyttelton

Thursday January 7

$10

Kevin Blechdom is a musician from Tallahassee, Florida, whose solo and collaborative work – as a member of Blectum from Blechdom and Adult Rodeo and as a duo with Eugene Chadbourne – has appeared on labels such as Kid606’s Tigerbeat6 (DJ /rupture, Indian Jewelry, Quintron and Miss Pussycat), Kit Clayton’s Orthlorng Musork (AGF, Akira Rabelais, Ekkehard Ehlers), Sonig (Jason Forrest, Mouse On Mars), Shimmy Disc (Daniel Johnston, Ruins, Shockabilly), Les Disques Victo (Anthony Braxton, Kid Koala, Hijokaidan, Wolf Eyes, Cecil Taylor) and Chicks On Speed Records (Le Tigre, DAT Politics).

Blectum from Blechdom’s first LP won second prize for Digital Music at Ars Electronica in 2001), while the Wire magazine described the duo’s telepathic synergy as a ‘riotous departure from what they regarded as the tight, minimal and earnest tendencies of male-dominated electronica’, approximating the ‘most vivid and literal musical definition yet of the word ‘haywire’”. The 2005 solo album, Eat My Heart Out consisted of a topless Blechdom, clutching the drippy esophagus, heart and lungs of a goat, while the music within was seen as an enactment of this literal evisceration, a confessionalism that has continued to inform her recordings and live performances since. Widely regarded as a retreat from the musical derangements of her practice heretofore, 2009’s Gentlemania is just as harrowingly candid and more unsettling for its ostensible compositional simplicity. A bricolage of Broadway psych, show tune and hillbilly delirium and euphoric faux pas, the album was recorded with Warp label’s Jamie Lidell and stands out as a next-level treatise on interpersonal and inter-species phenomena. Blechdom is currently touring alongside Christopher Fleeger as the duo, BARNWAVE.

http://www.kevyb.com/

http://upfrontonline.net/kevin-blechdom/

http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/6239-kevin-blechdom/#at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSXpg_jp3sc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsSb14p3jzM

Greg Malcolm’s otherworldly abduction of the guitar and re-sounding of its grey acoustic matter has been witnessed across imprints like Kning Disk (James Blackshaw, Machinefabriek), (K-RAA-K)³ (Ignatz, Silvester Anfang, Es, Pan American), Table of the Elements (Thurston Moore, Tony Conrad, Captain Beefhart, John Cale, John Fahey), Interregnum (Robedoor) and Campbell Kneale’s Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Malcolm co-axes his surgically changed instrument into abstract drifts and moiré-like projections, its implanted contact microphones and sympathetic strings embellishing the subtle dexterity and gleaming nature of his idiosyncratic playing. Malcolm’s duo with Jenny Ward is a radically wronged mutation of decadent alt-country and marginal cabaret, equally as virtuosic but extra-demented and as duplicitously innocent-disturbed as Kevin Blechdom’s recent work. Ward equips Malcolm’s pulp ostinato and cringing jackknife Trippelgitaristen reek-outs with a mélange of walkie-talkie soprano, prurient gargles and puppet-like double-entendre ululations, recalling the halcyon of their earlier days as the touring kid show outfit, Such n Such, albeit weathered by the onset of cynicism, genius and transcendental New Sincerity.

2009-12-09T13:09:00.002+13:00

John Wiese
Adam Willetts
LA Lakers

Dec 8
Oxford Terrace Baptist Church
$10

More here

New How2

2009-12-05T15:09:00.002+13:00

is up here. Features on Caroline Bergvall, Carla Harryman, and performance.

My New Job

2009-12-04T13:02:00.002+13:00

Is not being Catherine Wagner. It's review Editor (with Jared Schickling) for Tarpaulin Sky. As such most of my reviewing will be posted here now, but there'll be links from here (the here without a link, so as to say this blog).
First off the bat will be Laura Sims' Stranger (New from Fence) and a selection from Dusie kollektiv, and I'm expecting more from Fence to write on (Lake Antiquity by Brandon Downing and The Black Automaton by Douglas Kearney) and a selection of new titles from Omnidawn Publishing (possibly the most Beautiful name for a publisher ever), including Myung Mi Kim's latest, Penury.

Farrah Field (and me) on Claire Hero

2009-12-04T12:11:00.006+13:00

Farrah Field (and me) on Claire Hero here.

I think that, when Farrah says "She's attune to animal-ness, the meat of it all, the violence of being so bodily body--the sexuality therein, caregiving, killing, the fluids of all that", there is an Artaudian cruelty at work - similar to what Jared White says in the comment stream over there about the Fantastic Mister Fox:
"the way the claymation animals would be so polite and articulate and humanist until a plate of food was put in front of them, at which point they would suddenly tear it to shreds in an orgy of messy teeth and ferocious claws and unchewed swallowing."
This says more (through the anthropomorphism, which, as a porous semantic membrane, allows travel both ways) about the human than the animal - as does Dahl's book, in which the dichotomy of Human/Animal (and all the implications: Good/Evil, Civilised/Barbaric, etc) are turned on their heads - though Hero's work is more subtle than this, exploding the possibility of the binary, as everything infects everything else, and Crackbone, the carnivorous Hunter, is an animalistic force of nature, rather than a site of agency and conciousness.

Maya Heads

2009-12-03T12:09:00.001+13:00

Some very cool vispo from John M Bennett over at the New Post-Literate.

Morton Feldman on Art vs. Craft etc

2009-12-02T14:17:00.001+13:00

Very nice extracts posted by John Gallaher at Nothing to Say and Saying it

k-punk: Post-Apocalypse Now

2009-11-29T14:30:00.001+13:00

New post - very good. As always.

"Alongside Blade Runner and Gibson’s Neuromancer, the Terminator films provided some of the fictional resources from which Nick Land constructed his extraordinary fiction-theory texts of the 90s. Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy + Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia remixed to remove all traces of anti-capitalism and spliced with the inorganic velocities and psychedelic cyber-topologies of Jungle. Accelerationism as inorganic anti-inhumanism: unsheathed Capital as implacable, rapacious death drive; Capital with its mask of humanity torn off, machines not as reified instrumental reason, but as a non-instrumental non-reason, the exorbitant anti-teleology of Capital’s purposiveness without final purpose de-terraforming the planet into a techno-Bochsian scorched earth unfit for human habitation. Capital as Real = Death, with the Terminator machine death’s head as the technological upgrade of Holbein’s anamorphic skull - artificial intelligence as artificial death - not now reduced to a cuttlefish smear blotting the Symbolic, but looming to the fore in a landscape in which not only human beings but the Symbolic itself is close to total extinction, as asignifying data transfer obsolesces . The imaginary-Real of Capital as the automatic autocracy of dead labour, dead production performed by that which never lived, its products the agents of death, for which there is no possible consumer."

New Reconfigurations

2009-11-29T03:58:00.001+13:00

Is up. Find it here. There's a poem of mine in it.
I haven't read it yet, but look forward to doing so - more on that soon.

This is insane.

2009-11-26T17:36:00.002+13:00

A dude is suing Blizzard Entertainment, makers of World of Warcraft, for making him "alienated". He's subpoenaed Martin L Gore, of Depeche Mode, as an expert on alienation and depression. I feel kind of insulted that someone like this shares a love for the band (or so I assume). Intentional Falicy, anyone? He also obviously doesn't know that love songs are not always unrequited, and hasn't listened to much previous to Violator. Winona Ryder is also being called up, because she likes A Catcher in the Rye, which makes me wonder if this chap has heard of literary critics (wouldn't that be more appropriate?), or why, if calling Gore, he's not calling JD Salinger?

It's kind of beautiful, in its messiness and absurdity.

(Courtesy of Blake Butler at HTMLGIANT - coverage here and here)

Ron Johnson on Pennsound

2009-11-26T09:54:00.001+13:00

There's a reading on Pennsound - the only one.

Thanks to Charles Bernstein.

a Collaboration with Jeff Crouch

2009-11-25T11:20:00.003+13:00

So Jeff Crouch emailed me a week or so ago asking if I wanted to do a collaboration (more of his work: in Moria, collab. wiht Diana Magallon; Poems in Abjective, pics on Flickr through Jim Leftwich's TEXTIMAGEPOEM).

Here's a sample of the results (from my poem "Birds").

Nomadism, Pt 2

2009-11-14T14:06:00.001+13:00

Jerome Rothenberg has posted the second part of Pierre Joris' manifesto.

A reply to a fragment, probably taken out of context, from an interview with David Howard

2009-11-12T14:57:00.008+13:00

Tim Jones has interviewed David Howard here. In the course of the interview David states, in the context of a scathing indictment of globalisation, that "Following New Zealand's political reorientation, our poetry has turned from British to American (rather than indigenous) models. This is change but not the liberation that many claim."*

What? Aside from the criticisms of Bill Manhire (which seem to have more to do with the IIML, and by extension VUP and Sport - for which the criticisms should probably be leveled at Fergus Barrowman - than his poetics) there is little or no actual discussion of what this means. Sure, anyone can see the Ashbery influence in Manhire's work (though to be honest I haven't really read much post 1990 - his work seemed to go downhill around then), but what does that mean?Strangely David praises Michele Leggot's DIA, saying that it "deservedly won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry" in 1994. Michele took her Doctorate in Canada, on the work of American poet Louis Zukofsky. Her first work was published in Canada, and she is heavily influenced by US (and Canadian) language writing, and has been instrumental in bringing US poets to NZ to expose students to a larger range of practices (two talks given at the University of Auckland by Lyn Hejinian are available here and here).

As I've already stated the criticism of US influence in NZ is nothing new (and Allen Curnow's beloved Eliot and Auden were Americans, much as Eliot would have liked it to be otherwise), and besides, what, really is the alternative? Politics of regional genesis seem trite and petty. Just compare Auden to, say, Bruce Andrews, and you will see there are a multitude of different "America"'s, and such a matrix of practices extends beyond the US borders into Canada, the UK ... and has it's genesis in Fin de Siècle Europe.

As such, and in light of the fact that any pretence at autonomy (or regional "authenticity" - though Patrick Evans may disagree) is willful blindness - simply the importation of the idea of poetry (and with it the Greek Poesias) renders the attempt futile), what is the alternative to such? The fact that we now have global, instantaneous communication means that any attempt top cordon off the cultural precinct of our corner of the word (while subsequently trumpeting the "world class" qualities of our arts) is regressive in the extreme. I for one would rather join the world than engage in the CNZ brand of platitudinous marketing of "NZ identity".

*Obviously I'm writing this as a Pakeha writer. I would feel very uncomfortable appropriating "indigenous models" for my work, without the kind of full cultural engagement that I do not feel is possible; and even so I feel that such could easily turn into a kind of cultural tourism - cultural practices as commodities for consumption. The same kind of surface use of Maori idiom that one sees used by people who don't speak fluent Maori - meaning that the use of the word does not have the kind of full semantic underpinning and nuanced understanding of connotation as well as denotation that would be utilised if the word was English.

On Ariana Reines' THE COW

2009-11-10T14:20:00.003+13:00

In honour of HTMLGIANT celebrating "Ariana Reines Week" I thought I'd post the following. It didn't make the final cut of an essay ("Recent Developments in American Poetry" - and I had to loose 2000 words) to be published in February's Poetry NZ, replying to Lee Posna decrying the amount of so-called bad poetry being published in the States.

Thusly:

[…] Ariana Reines enacts a poetics of disaster, overflow and obscenity. Her first book, THE COW (Fence, 2006), is “is a voluptuary, a vat of mushy ideals and disgusting feelings” (“Sucking: a Statement of Poetics”). She states that she has often “resented the cleanliness and elegance of tight and perfect writing”, and “felt that writing should be dirtier and more excessive”. Dirt and excess abound in these poems, such as in “Nico Said Excrement Filters Through the Brain. It’s a Kit”:

I’m here to work GO GO so I can’t call you. I’m here to work GO GO so I’m alone. When I’m alone I stink. I shit with the door open because there’s nobody here and because there’s nobody here I can taste my GO GO shit.

There’s no malediction. No thought can poison me. (15)

This work is anti-homogenisation, anti-normalization; an assault on ideas of aesthetic, literature, morality, gender, society and pretty much everything else. As James Pate states in his essay “Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and the Political Grotesque”, Reines is functioning “in a similar vein as Burroughs and Godard, who were committed to stealing from any genre that they might find useful in order to create effects that a more normalized aesthetic … could never achieve”. Reines reinforces this in the acknowledgements page at the back of the book: “This book contains text from many sources”, then lists these as variously coming from poetry (John Ashbery, Paul Celan); Philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari); and religious texts (The Bible, The Koran, Alistair Crowley’s Magick Without Tears); alongside Carcass Disposal: a Comprehensive Review by Auverman, Kalabasi and Ahmed; The Merck Veterinary Manual and the website of bioSAFE engineering – manufacturers of the WR² Tissue Digestor^TM, a system for the “disposal of anatomic and pathologic waste” such as “animal tissue and carcasses from biomedical and pharmaceutical research facilities” (bioSAFE website).

The centre of subjectivity in these poems rapidly shifts from site to site, though a stream of carnage, holes, tearing and animality, in which language fails and falls back on tropes of self-doubt, self censorship and interruption: “I am part of something because my life is so stupid” (25), the eruption of “CROTCH” (26), refocusing attention on the materiality of the process of composition. This foregrounding of tics often associated with ‘juvenile’, ‘bad’ or overly emotional (hysterical) writing is reflected in the choice of an epigram from Stein: “Sucking is dangerous. The Danger of Sucking.” This is echoed in the title of her poetics statement, demonstrating her commitment to a poetics of the distasteful, bad, dirty and excessive, dismantling masculine tropes of wholeness, logic, craft and art. In short, a poetics that “sucks”. The poetic enacted in this book problematizes subjectivity through its scattering and stuttering, its privileging of the emotive, the “mushy”, the libidinal and the disgusting.

Failure, expendeture, Sacrifice - Joyelle McSweeney on Poetics

2009-11-10T14:05:00.002+13:00

Johannes just posted this piece By Joyelle - apparently the whole piece is in Fence.

Exerpt, in keeping with the discussion here (in the comment stream), follows:

"3)Bataille says “the term poetry [...] can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore closer to that of sacrifice.’ By sacrifice he means a loss unto extinction; Sacrifice produces sacred objects. Furthermore, “in particular, the success of Christianity must be explained by [...] the Son of God’s ignominious crucifixion, which carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation.”

"5)Or, put another way, there’s no success like failure."

New ACTION YES

2009-11-05T18:59:00.001+13:00

is up now.

Special section on Canadian writers, edited by François Luong.
At a glance I'm very impressed with the work by glenN robsoN.

2009-11-04T09:43:00.001+13:00

Exegesis of Snoop Dogg

2009-11-02T20:17:00.002+13:00

I've just added a lot to my already massive blogroll (down the side there) - but there is so much amazing writing/writing about writing/post-writing (I'm not sure what else to call it - vispo and the like) out there. Check out, especially, T he New Post-literate, mIEKAL aND's work here, Reed Altemus and Ross Priddle. (New Links came from here - there are more).

Two other online poets who I have been following for some time, and whose work is amazing, are John M Bennett and Lanny Quarles (Lanny has another blog here).

I also just ordered a copy of the Late Great Leigh Davis' Willy's Gazette (The Jack Books reprint) off Abebooks - The first copy I've ever seen for sale (though maybe there are copies floating around up north). I'm eagerly awaiting it's arrival.

New Otoliths

2009-10-29T20:33:00.001+13:00

Issue 15.

"Exotic"

2009-10-29T13:39:00.004+13:00

I've been thinking about Scott's review of my chapbook the last couple of days. While it is mostly positive (and more than fair - I am very greatful for his generous reading), There is one thing that bothers me a bit, aside from the Swinburne comment and general (negative) characterization of Victorian excesses (which is relativly standard, but, i think based on masculinist value judgements privileging the (Allen) Curnow-Brasch brand of muscular, austere modernism. Though I must qualify this by saying this is a general comment, Scott does not (wholly) prescribe to this viewpoint, though there is, I think, a subtle indictment in his description of "the flowery, pre-modernist style of unfashionable female writers like Eileen Duggan and Ursula Bethell").

What I found disarming though was his characterisation of my influences being "exotic overseas poets" (my emphasis). I find this strange. Not only does it imply some novelty value, but also, through the ecological connotations of the word (not neccessarily intended, but nevertheless there), that I am involved somehow in bringing "outside influence" - coded (somewhat) negatively - into the pristine enviroment of NZ lit (which, rather than pristine, i would characterise as somewhat stifling, aside from a few notable exceptions).

Firstly I wonder how the importing of, or identifying with, US/Canadian/Continental precidents/influences (which, as Scott notes with regard to Michele Leggott, I am most definately not the first to do. There was those writers grouped around FREED magazine in the late sixties and early seventies, see Murray Edmond and Michele Leggott's anthology Big Smoke. Many of these writers drew from the US, where the recent developments had been documented in Donald Allen's New American Poetry. Later came the influence of Langpo, poststructuralism and fluxus, reflected here in the work most notably of Wystan Curnow and Tony Green, both of whom are active across artistic disciplines, alongside Alan Loney (who straddles both generations) and Michele Leggott.

Secondly, I wonder how this (especially in light of the precidents cited above), is any different from the earlier generation of Curnow, Glover, Brasch et al. Here I quote Curnow (quoted in Alan Loney, "Entitled / Unentitled: New Zealand Poetry" in Reading, Saying, Making: Selected Essays, p 83): "we all began reading Pound and Eliot, [and] shared our modernity with Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis or Spender”. These NZ writers were hell-bent on creating a distictly 'New Zealand' literature, yet were still modelling there work on old-world (or older-than-us-world, in the case of the Americans mentioned) influences.

Furthermore, in this information age the ability to share influence, theory, thoughts and practice internationally at near instantaneous speed is, i think, something that should be grasped with both hands. No longer is it (particularly) difficult to read diversely. Though most of the shop shelves are dominated my NZ poetry (most of which is published by Victoria or Auckland University Press), that is not all, or even most, of what we have access to. We can read more, and more widely. I find it surprising that more people don't do this - especially when those who read novels tend to read precious little NZ work, and we have such a strong tradition of the novel here.

2009-10-26T20:03:00.003+13:00

I Just bought a copy of Ghost Tantras by Micheal McLure. Its excellent. Here are some for perusal - more here.

GHHHROOOOOO GAHROOOOOOO EEEKA CAR,
cargroooooooo longkarr GRAHHH!
Cowmrooooooose blooooo mewie-weeeep.
VOOOOOOOOOOOO?
Shgrarrr? Yagabb krahr yellow vipt
mwooo? Swooooooooooooo lub byeeee bwack meee!
MAKE LOVE SOUNDS.
HERE SMELL.
Grahh pallid! Gr-aaah love nowhr
bwooooooooo krahh noooo-boooooose!
Saba-groooooh stahr zaboth mwoooo
kakra graaaah grahh grrrrrrrr
mweeeeeeeee melt.

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!
Drive drooor from the frcsh repugnance, thou whole,
thou feeling creature. Live not for others but affect thyself
from thy enhanced interior - believing what thou carry.
Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.
Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you know
and more solid and full of pleasure.
Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr. Grahhrrr.
Grahhr-grahhhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.
Gharrrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Ghanrrr. Ghrahhhrr.
Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.
Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghmhhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.
Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.
Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.
Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

((OOOOGREEEOSH-DRATHOR BUTTERFLY
BEATS AND PANTS DRATHOOOOR ABOUT
THE GROWING RING OF PANSIES
where the earth is dry garhroon nahh dree-
opeth barhoooth nohdresh beethorr noh
I oh thah meeerdown emrah gahrsoon.
Oooomreeeoh ahn drahgnooze. Theeeow!
Water seeps within the earth
between the roots.
The bee faints with bliss of overwork
and curls her leg.
Snail hunger fills the air with rasping teeth
thrown out from the cave beneath the leaf.
Ooor ahm geahzthow fon kalein.
Wah lahg dooohr ohgreeeazsh shtahr.))

Another Review - in good company

2009-10-25T22:14:00.003+13:00

Scott Hamilton has reviewed my chapbook over at Scoop Review of Books, alonside Mark Young's Pelican Dreaming:Poems 1959-2008 (Meritage 2008). If the company wasn't enough, Scott's reading picks up on things others have missed, nameley the presence of Swinburne (who He describes as "rotten-ripe" - true enough, I suppose), and more so Gerard Manley Hopkins. (I also have a weakness for Robert Browning - see Susan Howe's reading of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" in My Emily Dickenson).

I really apreciate Scott's generous and honest reading.

Mark Young edits Otoliths, and has been good enough to publish some of my work.

Fisher on Gordon: More

2009-10-25T19:05:00.002+13:00

"What's interesting, though, is that, in making the logic of racialisation explicit, Griffin stirs the spectre of class. The neoliberal tactic has been to ignore resentment and aggrievement altogether - to maintain that such feelings are a moral, educational or pyschiatric failure of those who have not accepted metropolitan, "modernising" values ("diversity" on the one hand, neoliberal "solutions" on the other). Much of the BNP's appeal derives from its granting of legitimacy to those feelings of resentment and aggrievement - yes, it says, you're right to feel angry and betrayed, you're right to feel that your anxieties are being ignored, you're right to feel that there is something fundamentally wrong. Here, class emerges - because who has done the betraying and the ignoring if not the metropolitan "elite" which Griffin attacked on Thursday? But this brief flash of class antagonism is immediately subsumed by race-logic: the problem is not the class structure itself, the BNP wants us to believe, but the elite's "pandering to minorities". Needless to say, this has it the wrong way round - the real problems, to name only a few of the most glaring, are the precariousness and poorly paid nature of post-Fordist work, the running down of public services, the pathetically low rate of council house building."

Review of Crumb's Genesis

2009-10-25T17:45:00.000+13:00

in the NY Times.

2009-10-25T16:54:00.003+13:00

(a result of Owen's recent post on the sound of Sheffield's architecture - Depeche Mode bender. I keep forgetting how gorgeous this song is.)

(and this is new. Still beautiful.)

Johannes: Hipsters, Kitsch and the Specter of Mass Culture

2009-10-24T22:35:00.002+13:00

Johannes has a great post here. And there's a Laibach video in the middle of it. Those "Slovenian Retrogardists"....

I especially like the "kitching of the image":

"∑ Adorno argues that the High Modern move towards abstraction is a move away from the kitsch of the image (“mimetic enchantment”).

∑ Steven Shaviro: “Behind all these supposedly materialist attacks on the ideological illusions built into the cinematic apparatus, should we not rather see the opposite, an idealist’s fear of the ontological instability of the image, and of the materiality of affect and sensation?”"

Mark Fisher is the Truth: on Nick Griffin and the BNP

2009-10-24T22:10:00.001+13:00

"The fact that Griffin's 'arguments' don't stand up to rational scrutiny means nothing. Since when has racism relied on rational argument?"

Nada Gordon on Flarf and 'generation'

2009-10-22T13:45:00.002+13:00

"Let's discuss this, shall we? Or rather, deconstruct it. Firstly, Flarf is not (in the robotic sense of the term) "generated." Flarf poems are written. Their materials are, in Kasey's term, sought. I almost prefer the word rescued. Some poems may be "generated," like that wonderful "Random Poem Generator" that was hanging around the internet for a while, but Flarf poems are very much willed and constructed.

In a larger sense of the term, I suppose you could say this poem was generated if that is how you think of the mechanism of creation: I do often think of poems as almost biological extrusions, like skin tags or fibroids or, as I posted recently on facebook, reflux."

Read the whole post. It's very good. Especially the thing about "valor sets".

Though I would have to argue that a "generated poem", be it aleotory work like that of Mac Low, or a found text, or even the product of the "Random Poem Generator" Nada mentions, is still "Willed and Constructed", though in various different ways. Cages Mesostics allow for the insertion of intentionally chosen "Wing Words", and Mac Low would carefully recraft the proccesses he used if the initial product did not turn out as he wanted. The craft, the will and the construction are simply removed a level from the text.

In the case of generators and the like (i use various online text-alteration programs in my own work - the two pieces in Brief and the sequence in Otoliths utilised these - these could be thought of as collaborations of a sort; and even on the most basic level there is will and construction inherent in the act of pressing a button, and in recognising what comes out as a poem.

Self and Interconnectivity

2009-10-22T12:58:00.003+13:00

Over at Mez's blog (_knot404_):

"The self that results is actively defined in terms of its connections and
associations, in varying degrees of intimacy and intensity. The emphasis
is not on person but persona: as Mez Breeze has suggested, this self is
an assembly generated through clusters of distributed identity markers,
which does not add up to stable meanings or groundlevel actualities
because it also coalesces in terms of the volume, degree and intensity of
its connections. Less a reductive experientiality than a connective
extensibility."

-Jordan Crandall, Artivistic 2009 Lecture.

She's got a piece in the latest Brief (as do I), and it's got me very interested.

The piece linked to in there is very interesting. Recommended. (hence the link).