Thank You For Telling Me Vodka is a Ponsy Drink

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

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

I find puns too funny for my own good.

First Semester Research Proposal: Ariana Reines

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.

On Ariana Reines' THE COW

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.