Tuesday, March 29, 2011

A Return of Sorts. Questions. The Durational

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.



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