THE NEXT OBJECTIVISTS

Next Objectivists Meeting Thursday 5 January 2012

2012-01-04T06:45:00.000-08:00

Welcome to 2012, Next Objectivists!

Join us this Thursday, January 5, for a workshop on Writing Machines. We will be reading RACTER's "The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed" (RACTER is a computer) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/55618239/racter_policemansbeard-1.pdf and Christian Bök's analysis of the same, "The Piecemeal Bard is Deconstructed: Notes Towards a Potential Robopoetics." http://dl.dropbox.com/u/55618239/03_bok.pdf Some ideas to think about: What is signification in the absence of intent? What are the implications of a poetic machine? Are robopoetics the ultimate Romantic antithesis, eliminating the ego? Will robots ticker tape us into obsoletion? To explore further, we ourselves will become a Writing Machine.

Welcome to the future.

When: Thursday, January 5, 7:00 pm
Where: The Mess Hall at 6932 North Glenwood Ave., Chicago, Illinois in Rogers Park.
How: Free and open to the public!

The Next Objectivists is the world's only 100% autonomous poetry workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. We meet approximately twice a month to read, write, eat & converse together about the poetics and politics associated with the Objectivist Poets and other writers who have refused the one person - one voice paradigm of professionalized poetry production.

2011-12-13T07:44:00.000-08:00

Join us this THURSDAY 15 December for our end-of-the year workshop party!

We will continue our seminar on conceptual poetry with a reading & discussion led by Special Guest Objectivist Michelle Taransky!

We'll be discussing, among other things, the work of Kenneth Goldsmith (prior to his reading at The Poetry Foundation on Friday: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/programs/event/965).

Here are a few resources we might think about (rather than read) in relation to his work:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/201110/?read=interview_goldsmith

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/living-with-music-a-playlist-by-kenneth-goldsmith/

http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Goldsmith/Traffic/Kenneth-Goldsmith_Traffic_WFMU_Sept-2006.mp3

http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Goldsmith/Fidget/01_Goldsmith-Kenneth_Fidget_10-00_2005.mp3

As always, we meet at 7:00 pm at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park Chicago. 6932 N. Glenwood Avenue, half a block south of the Morse Red Line station on the East side of Glenwood.

Next Objectivists 22 November

2011-11-22T14:57:00.000-08:00

Ignore the cold drizzle & avoid the nasty commute by dreaming of the Next Objectivists. Tonight we continue exploration of conceptual writing. This week, we'll look at lipograms,

& other grams (Teddy Grahams?). Texts include Georges Perec's A Void and Christian Bok's Eunoia.

Next Objectivists 8 November

2011-11-22T14:53:00.000-08:00

Come one, come all to the amazing NEXT OBJECTIVISTS!

This week, on Tuesday, November 8, we will be performing astounding feats of Oulipean dexterity and gigantic mathemalinguistic verses! Observe the explosive combinations of equation menageries, formula knife-throwing, and linguistic acrobatics! We will, of course, use poetic restraints as a precaution. Texts include Jacques Robaud on Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau and Inger Christensen's Alphabet!

Next Objectivists 25 October

2011-11-22T14:52:00.000-08:00

On the agenda:

The question of "WE" - is it simply a harmless, unavoidable consequence of people inhabiting space, with its de/formities and inherent hierarchies, or is it the evil, coerced d r a f t i n g of people for a(ny given) mob/crowd purpose while annihilating free-will? Background, readings, conference stories, blog posts, {!refreshments!} will be provided.
We'll regroup on the project of bringing our NextObjectivistMic performance to a public venue, in conjunction with other writing communities in Chicago... Come in and we'll discuss! This is a very exciting project that involves a writing methodology, logistics of voices and text(s), opening the can of worms of authorship (WeeEE?!!), street presence (= leaving the ivory tower of poetry), oh so much more.
...and readings to follow!

If you read this, you're very likely a next objectivist already - you don't even need to know it -, so do join us in the Outsidereal at Mess Hall this Tuesday!

Next Objectivists 11 October

2011-11-22T14:49:00.000-08:00

October 11th - we'll start our next workshop by discussing our performance act presented at Chicago Calling / Myopic Books on Saturday [October 8th]. For people that were there - bring both good and bad points (say... three each) with you to the fore. For those among you who weren't there - think of this as a reenactment. As always, the Next Objectivist discussions around past events (or, for that matter, current or future) are really ardent. Let's just say - this will actually not be a reenactment, but a fully fledged thing!

We'll then take on what the like the second-most (right after writing): reading some poetry. Texts will be made available shortly. Expect some more foreign poetry... Slurp!

Last on our schedule we'll discuss bringing the Chicago Calling performance to a truly public venue. As we've had quite a lot of interesting ideas on what to do during the performance, let's reassess / re-discuss / regroup and take this to the next level. Please look at what you've proposed during the preparation for this (which might have been adopted, assimilated, or rejected) with what you've observed and learned at Myopic, and bring new ideas and vigor back into the fore!

Please join us in the Outsidereal, which - spatially and temporally - is Mess Hall this Tuesday!

Some Next Objectivists read in Philadelphia

2011-07-09T10:48:00.000-07:00

Three members of the Next Objectivists read at Con/Crescent Press' reading series in Philly at the end of June. Here's the introductions to the reading by C/C P editor Nick DeBoer:

Well. The Next Objectivists came and knocked back the birds here in Philadelphia. In that way, my distinct pleasure comes in tossing out the keepsake of their introductions.

Group Introduction:

‘Can you send me the link information for the Thursday Objectivist workshop?’ That’s all it was. I had spent a year and a half in Chicago, unable to find that primeval connection. I had gotten used to that form of hermitage that exists after trauma. It takes its home in you, like a parasitic grief, that knows that with the right tweaks, you will tumble down and deep into your depression.

This didn’t happen. In the early weeks of October 2009, I found myself 24-hrs without sleep sitting across from people who knew poetry, that took it as space in their lungs. But what was more, they wanted to investigate, they wanted to break down and get intimate with the perusal. It isn’t anything new, this has been going on for hundreds, thousands of years. People get together and talk the talk of the arts. But, I could argue. I could get gruff and stumble into my own thoughts without a lot of clever face dancing and glad-handing deliveries.

Yet, what was really happening was a home was in the pipeline. I mean, that’s the great thing about the human race, we make homes on the fly. We get all dumb with excitement and the next thing you know, you too could already be a Next Objectivist. Founded in January of 2009, the mission is, “to live poetry differently…to resist the increasingly intense pressures to privatize poetic practice that result from & help to perpetuate neoliberal hegemony by doing poetry in ways that were captured by the economy in cultural capital as its being regulated today.” Twice a month the Next Objectivists Poetry Workshop meets, a workshop that has and will ‘insist upon being autonomous, free & open-to-the-public,’ where they investigate the processes of poetry.

And through this they are engage n “an ongoing endeavor to produce a new kind of autonomous poetry.” They have, “poetypists (to) transcribe material given to them by ordinary people at public & semi-public events. Workshop members & the public at large work together to revise the transcribed material into poems which have no individual authorship.”

That’s the import. As Roland Barthes points out, “everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.”

But, hey, that’s how it works. All of a sudden it’s 830 in the morning and you are putting up posters, and setting out typewriters on a conference table, helping create the living oral dialogue into a poetry of and by the people that move in and out of the rooms you’re in. What is so magnificent about the Next Objectivists is the engagement. These are the moving bodies, the poetry of the multitude.

Denise Dooley: I like immediacy. A hit to the body, a register that doesn’t level off right away. Dooley writes, “All night there are wolves at/the door and I wake there are/wolves at the door.” It’s a fever rush, that streak of sweat that aligns itself on your brow and waits to pour salt into the eye. There is this availability, where once you start feeling the line, it starts to deepen its motivations, it starts to aim in like a spy satellite. She writes in Drumtops, “rising black/ant hulls in spill shape/parameter of lost or melted/soda,/still the birds/rioting around it open.” Once I’m in, I can see it, this army of black ants, like a ship hull spilling down and over all the lost places of the concrete sidewalks and they rally around the corn syrup of the soda and above them the birds riot, riot open, preparing. I like immediacy, I like it now. Would you please welcome Denise Dooley.

Adam Weg: A frequency, a pulse, persistence, that wobble and flow over riverbed rocks. The things it touches shoots solid bolts up. Weg writes, “Quote something that hasn’t been said before/between us, so it’s just the two of us, and these/elements of another/volunteered in ten different directions. It’s all being lifted into/eating acid and chips fall, but cover our tracks.” It is the stream gone succinct, moments that feel as though they are my own memories. An attachment, quartering off inside a dusty room of a dying grandparent. Weg writes, “the problem, the/erupting off us/the minute/you attribute it/to memory/although though/it’s my neck that’s/is insane/a memory/the etiquette/we attribute to memory/Now put up his eyes’. I read with a breach of my hull and as the water starts riding into the shell of my body, the memory fractures, fucks up, my lungs fill up with fluid and I’m almost there. Would you please welcome Adam Weg.

Matthias Regan:

It’s all too much. Sometimes. Sometimes you have a lot sitting on your vocal chords. And I do. And I could stand up here and commit to synthesizing, but it would be reactionary without the wares. So, what can I say? Well, if I’m going to belly up, this is an engineer, a maker of countless worlds, the action, not a self-actualizing scribbler, not a hip-fat capitalist, but embodiment of a landscape that he is but one voice, anonymous, a multitude or the heteroglossia. He sees because he has sat long and still enough to know, to be of a poetry from the outside. In Code Book Code, Regan writes, “1 shadow/moved darkest/against the river wall – /some sand blown up/the scene was set:/it’s a neighborhood threat.” A little Iggy Pop strewn over the shadows rolling up against the green rust, sand lost to the design of its storyboard.

In some ways, perhaps, what I’m really aiming at, what I can only scratch the surface of, is that this is the good fight. A place to plant a flag. In Gapers’ Delay: A Harmolodic Essay on Unwanted Acceleration, we find ourselves in a meta-universe collapsing. “Our ashcan life whispers its remorse/in the bitter hours of an afternoon//stalled between the last of the lunch rush/& the earliest the shift manager/will ever let us leave -.” And I guess that’s where I come in, a little gift for Saturday afternoon. Would you please welcome Matthias Regan.

BLOOMSDAY CELEBRATION BBQ

2011-06-10T11:17:00.001-07:00

Calling all writers!

Calling all typewriters!

Join the Next Objectivsts on FRIDAY 17 JUNE for a potluck BBQ and epic reading aloud of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses.

Ulysses is set on June 16, and each year on that date, hundreds of Joyce enthusiasts celebrate this most remarkable book. The Next Objectivsts invite you to join us in the festivities! We will read the book aloud in its entirety beginning the next day (Friday) at 7:00 pm. The party will last all night! We'll be BBQ-ing Irish foods & drinking whiskey. We'll transcribe some of what we hear in order to produce collaborative poetry.

Join us! Bring your voice & help us read the novel! Bring a typewriter & help us produce collaborative poetry! Like all events, this is free & open to the public!

Next Objectivists Workshop featuring Allison Gruber

2011-05-31T13:13:00.001-07:00

The Next Objectivists meet this Thursday, 2 June to hear and discuss the work of our very special GUEST OBJECTIVIST

ALLISON GRUBER!

As the concluding session of our Spring Seminar on Objectivism in Short Fiction, we've invited Allison to read and discuss some of her recent work. Ms. Gruber is a cross-genre writer whose poetry and prose have appeared in a variety of literary journals including Pindeldyboz, The Stickman Review, and 580-Split. Her plays and hybrid works have been shown at The Roger Brown Gallery, G2, and The Athenaeum Theater in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute, currently teaches at several area colleges, and is a member of the directorial team for Reconstruction Room literary performance series.

As always, the Next Objectivists will convene our free poetry workshop at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park at 7:00 pm. Please join us! The Mess Hall is located at 6932 North Glenwood Ave., Chicago, Illinois. A stone's short lob from the Morse Street Red Line stop. Our meetings are pot lucks. Everyone is invited!

This Week: Chicago Durutti Skool

2011-05-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

This Week the Next Objectivists join the Chicago Durutti Skool! All are welcome to attend!

THIS THURSDAY our workshop is participating in the week-long CHICAGO DURUTTI SKOOL 2011, which began on May Day and continues through Friday. On Thursday, our regularly scheduled workshop will join the Red Rover Reading Series and other writers, artists & activists to become the site of a larger conversation concerning poetry, social existence, Marxism and Anarchism.

Many Durutti Skools will occur across the country this year, each thinking about poetry itself as a catalyst for social change. The idea for the skools began last summer when a group of poets met in Berkeley, California as part of the 95 Cent Skool. All participants were invited to form their own skools in order to continue the conversation and encourage poets to connect more strongly with their communities and ideas about writing, community, and change.

The Next Objectivists like to focus discussion around objects, and so we have organized our workshop around several short stories, which we are reading as part of a spring-long seminar on objectivist poetics in short fiction. As a way to focus our conversation about poetry, social existence, materialism and anarchist politics, we invite all participants to join in a conversation about short stories by Rachel Glasner and/or Jamaica Kincaid. Copies of the stories can be downloaded from our website (www.nextobjectivists.blogspot.com) or by clicking on the following links:

Rachel Glaser, selected stories: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7387246/RachelBGlaserStories.pdf

Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl": http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7387246/jamicakincaidGirl.pdf

And on FRIDAY, MAY 6th, the Chicago Durutti Skool continues with readings and discussions with Frank Rogaczewski & Michelle Taransky, 7-9pm @ Outer Space Studio. Please join this reading, discussion and workshop which will be investigating the role of poetry and the poet in addressing and engaging social awareness.

Next Meeting 21 April

2011-04-20T11:50:00.000-07:00

The Next Objectivists meet this Thursday, 21 April
at 7:00 pm in the Mess Hall (Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois)
to read & discuss the poetics of the OUTSIDEREAL
in several very (very) short stories by GARY LUTZ.

The stories are available here:

Gary Lutz stories.

The Next Objectivists is an autonomous, mostly anonymous free poetry reading & writing workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. Our meetings are potlucks, open to the public, everyone is welcome, leave your expertise at the door. JOIN US
you may already be a Next Objectivist.

Next Meeting: Thursday 7 April

2011-03-29T10:26:00.000-07:00

The Next Objectivists' Next Meeting will be Thursday 7 April 2011.

As we continue our spring seminar exploration of objectivism in short fiction, we'll meet at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago Illinois to discuss two stories by Amy Hempel: "The New Lodger" and "The Uninvited." A pdf version of the stories can be downloaded here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7387246/Hempel%2C%20Two%20Stories.pdf

Don't forget that the Next Objectivists is the world's only 100% completely autonomous poetry & poetics workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. If that's what you were missing all along, join us! All meetings are free & open to the public. We gather twice a month, usually on Thursdays at 7:00 pm. Our meetings are usually pot-lucks. We read together, write together & collectively produce a number of poetry publications. Stop by! You may already be a Next Objectivist!

This St. Patrick's Day Read Beckett with the Next Objectivists!

2011-03-15T20:10:00.000-07:00

Please be informed that the next sailing of the Next Objectivists poetry workship will be this Thursday, 17th of March, St. Patrick's day.

Our reading couldn't be more appropriate: Samuel Beckett's THE EXPELLED (which, among other things, is the story of a man getting thrown out of a bar). What else it may be about will be the subject of our conversation as we continue our spring seminar exploration of objectivist styles & strategies in short fiction.

Our meeting will begin at 7:00 pm, at the MESS HALL in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois.
A PDF of Beckett's story is available by clicking on the link below:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7387246/Beckett%2C%20The%20Expelled.pdf

Please join us! Everyone is welcome. We are so serious we're informal.

Next Next Objectivists Workshop

2011-02-27T11:43:00.000-08:00

Our next workshop is this next Thursday, 3 March 2011, 7:00pm at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park Chicago Illinois United State of Wisconsin.

We continue our Spring seminar on Objectivism in Short Fiction. This Thursday we'll meet to discuss two short stories by previous objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky. The stories may be downloaded by simply by clicking on this link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7387246/Zukofsky%20Two%20Stories.pdf

All workshops are free & open to the public. The Next Objectivists is an autonomous poetry workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. We approach poetry & pedagogy with a RADICALLY democratic attitude. Everyone is always welcome & you can check out your expertise at the door.

ANNOUNCING THE SEMINAR on SHORT FICTION

2011-02-15T11:48:00.000-08:00

From February through June, the Next Objectivists will turn our attention to prose, in order to discuss the objectivist style in short fiction. The complete schedule can be found on the right-hand side of the screen.

Our first meeting is this Thursday, 17 February, 2011. Our reading for this session is Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Click on the title to access a pdf of this story.

As always, our meetings are POTLUCKS held at the MESS HALL in Rogers Park, Illinois. All of our sessions are FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Please join us! Everyone is invited. You are welcome to leave your expertise at the door.

2011-02-13T16:40:00.000-08:00

Wikilyrics Leak

2011-02-13T16:23:00.000-08:00

The Next Objectivists meet on Thursday 27 January & again on Thursday 3 February to edit & amend Wikileaked materials into the poetry of the multitude. Using workshop methods developed in response to our on-going conversation about the poetry & poetics of the OUTSIDEREAL, we began to draft a chapbook of anonymous poetry based on imperialist cables. It's TOP SECRET material, of course, but a few passages have been leaked to the public:

TWENTY QUESTIONS

Baku Iran Watcher
listening from the crevice, the dark fly
of story-telling.

Each piece set; this one a student,
here a professional, a business man (ordinary Iranians)
w/ a veiled final bullet.

How the interlocutors curve around the immediate circle,
like a fleet of black Mercedes Benz wraps around the finger
of a bride, daughter, lover.

Khameini's circle, a brass ring of survival,
entrenches itself behind the knuckle.
He sits, sunning under the parastatal. Brass & Benz
& business men boiling

Over in Tehran. Turbulent water floods Kermansah, Isfahan, Shiraz.
And a re-galvanizing of metal,
of sermon, of people
sends a fleet of resistance through the thin membrane.

Seams split & pour through a Shura, through alleged efforts.
It slows down the factories & brings down the lights.
“There is no going back” friends shout from the rooftops
sending off green balloons into the burning night.
Lugo generally
connects well with people
(although he is
reportedly
uncomfortable with women)
and has thus far
been successful in
attracting a diverse
support base
he is said to be
an expert
in human nature
and is a quick and
accurate judge of
character
personally quiet
unpretentious and serene
Lugo cares little
for physical
possessions
typically wears
sandals
because that is who he is
(he says he's owned
two suits in his life
one for his high school
graduation
and another for his
ordination)
however strong populist
leanings
including a
reputation
for detesting flaunting
wealth by the rich
could lead him to rifts
with the political
establishment
Lugo is unmarried
(although he is
rumored
to have fathered
illegitimate children)
leveraged his status
with the Church and
reputation
for honesty
to win the presidency
but will require
more than just a little
help from
"upstairs"
to govern

he is a leftist at
heart
and if you can't believe
a priest who can you
believe?

The July 12-13

debt redUction

sustainabiLity

of a sImilar

political Approach

said that additioNal bilateral

officiAls

and citizenS alike

activitieS of pop

even certAin

seNior officials

foreiGn relations

rEcently told

Minister Ben Bot anticipated

positive steps

although he expressed concern

that the EU was not receiving

full credit.

Burma remains a ticklish issue.

Rumor has it the completed chapbook will be published as early as this spring.

2011-01-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

Attention Attention Next Objectivists & Fellow Travelers

We meet TWICE this week: tonight (Tuesday) & again on Thursday. Both meetings at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois, beginning at 7:00 pm.

This week, our workshops will be "writing intensive"--often, we meet to discuss poetry & poetics, tonight we work on MAKE.

The Next Objectivists reject the prevalent mode of poetic production, which imagines the poet to be an individual entrepreneur of the self, scribbling alone in order to produce lyrics which s/he will endeavor to circulate on a marketplace primarily composed of other self-actualizing, competitive scribblers. This is the waste land of distinction. Unfortunately, many poets today have accepted a Clintonian "third-way" in the relation between art & marketplace: confining themselves to poetry that does not directly employ the capital letter "I" or to the construction of mostly meaningless sentence fragments, they believe they have dodged certain ideologies of consumption.

The Next Objectivists do not accept the popular mode of "Language poetry lite"; we believe that ideology adheres to practices, not beliefs, and is secured by activities of the id as much or more than it is by the ego's efforts to rationalize those activities. We believe that a more thorough-going set of alternative poetic practices should also be established: ones which begin & end OUTSIDE the individuated self of "true being." We find it bitterly ironic that a generation after the much heralded & fussed about "death of the author" literary society seems more indebted than ever to the practice of publishing for the c.v. The free market in poetry threatens to privatize communal relations that many poets once took for granted. We oppose these new modes of regulating poetic value by attempting to develop new kinds of poetic community.

To this end, we are entering our third year of experimentation with collaborative writing. Beginning with transcriptions gathered from public sources, we recycle the language to produce anonymous verses which we publish collectively & distribute for free.

Tonight our source texts are dreams told to us at several public events over the last six months.

On Thursday, our source texts will be wikileak documents: wikilyrics! Next Objectivist at Large Eric Elshtain calls my attention to writers engaged in the project already. Check it out at http://haikuleaks.tetalab.org/.

All Next Objectivist workshops are free & open to the public. You may leave your expertise at the door. Join up today!

Matthias

Next Meeting: Thursday 13 January

2011-01-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

On Thursday 13 January, join the Next Objectivists for our first meeting of 2011. We will meet to discuss another topic in our "Requested Investigations" series. This week's session is presented by Radu. Here's the framework:

1. Arguably, space is 'where' everything takes 'place,' and, as such, its topic could certainly be too large for both an evening of talk and one's entire life worth of work. Although mostly through visual material, either as historical or contemporary research on existing artifacts or even creative work (linear/reversed perspective in painting, historical maps, homogeneous/axiological cosmology/cosmogony, landscape architecture, etc.), my interest has also focused on textual space, in some of its varied forms and understandings (travel descriptions, poems, films).

I do regard it as an incipient work in English (1), and text (2), though.

2. I believe my endeavor in the NO to have been an undeserved and almost uncannily revealing travel in the workings of English language and its poetry... As such, I would tremendously enjoy your thoughts on how space operates in the written (English) word of poetry (and even beyond, if you such desire) as a difference, referential, location/place, potential/act, identity, coercion, extension, permission, allowance, existential axis, etc. Please feel free to bring any texts that would represent any angles you'd consider interesting.

3. Some questions I'd endeavor into posing you could be:

What, if anything, makes space a particular playground for poetry, in ways no other feature of thought can? How did you play with it? What does it give you? For instance, have you ever felt that you need a spacial metaphor to say something that no other device would allow you to say? Please make space personal.
How does space differ from time as another possible extension where 'things are'? Multi-dimensionality? Symmetry (as opposed to one-directional flow)? How does this work in poems specifically? Form and content are both suitable excuses to take on this.
Is the social space of being together while writing present in the materials coming out of the NO events? Though touched upon in various occasions, I'd like us to pause upon the ways in which this social space could be traced back into spacial metaphors present in specific writings. Please bring any examples you can find in and of such texts.
Let's also write with these thoughts in mind. Although suggesting to be open to wherever we'll be after talking about all this, I preliminarily propose to try to enact three different operations in which space unfolds and acts in writing. For instance - chromatic spectrum as a device for flexing subjective states of mind. Or: space of page as mess-procedure to fudge with the exigencies of proper writing.

The Next Objectivists at YEAR 3

2011-01-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

The Next Objectivists Poetry Workshop was founded in January 2009. Our mission: to live poetry differently. We would resist the increasingly intense pressures to privatize poetic practice that result from & help to perpetuate neoliberal hegemony by doing poetry in ways that were not captured by the economy in cultural capital as its being regulated today.

Not that we knew this two years ago; those who joined the organization in its early days were acting on impulses & following structures of feeling toward incoherently recognized desires. The workshop, which has always had a commitment to investigating the processes of poetry as techne (an art & craft, a way of life), finds its purpose through an on-going process of often joyful & contentious, sometimes banal & tedious self-examination. We speculate. & although we have a singular object of study — the poetry & poetics associated with what the poet Edward Dorn named the OUTSIDEREAL — our workshops are a various as the members who contribute to them.

The Workshop Presents

the Continually Evolving Shape of the Multitude

From our inception, the Next Objectivists has insisted upon being autonomous, free & open-to-the-public. Autonomous means that we are not affiliated with any institution (other than the Mess Hall, where we hold our meetings). Although we are often scholarly, our approach is not constrained by the academic & commercial cultures that dominate so much of the discourse about poetry today. We refuse to be constrained by the logics of alienated explication & lyrical branding, both of which tend to prise poetry away from common life. We refuse to assist in the production of non-public preserves/reservations for activities like reading, writing, discussing, revising, rhyming & designing. These practices play so vital a part in our well-being, we do not want to set them aside for the well-educated & well-to-do. We do not think poetry should be primarily identified with those who "make it" in the marketplace. We invite everyone & welcome all. We ask you to leave your expertise at the door.

Because of this policy, our membership is fluid; there's always a first-timer at the meetings, & many participants enjoy an occasional relation to the workshop. Our first two years have seen an edifying mix of determination, transformation, commitment & inconsistency. Nothing repeats. Many members who played a crucial role in the foundation of the workshop during the first year no longer attend. Many of the most stalwart members today joined in the second year, & some of the most vitalizing Next Objectivists attended for relatively short periods — five months, seven months — before wandering work search or a simple shift in interest sent them to another part of the labyrinth.

Our constantly shifting membership is organized objectively — that is, we try as much as possible to focus our attention away from the personalities gathered around our tables, in order to put it on the poetry we study. We are object-oriented in our concern for the devices, mechanisms & effects we discover in the work we read, write & rewrite together. We are interested in the dance rather than the dancer. We celebrate the unity of art & life, but in a complex way. We pry the object away from the subject because we believe that subjects are in so many ways themselves created from the outside in.

The Seminars

Although our organization enjoys the fluid intelligence that responds to desire & a hydra-headed multiplicity of approaches to our work, a gradual organization has occurred, which is (retrospectively) evident in a rough sequence of seminars. Often, the themes and issues in these seminars returned to our discussion over many meetings and sometimes we were unsure of the evening's discussion topic until it precipitated in conversation, but nonetheless a rough sequence of attention has emerged. What follows is a roughly chronological list of our seminars to date:

The Objectivist Tradition

Our attempt to turn contemporary poetic practice inside out began in the most simple manner possible. We read the work of the New York poets of the 1930s-60s that called themselves Objectivists. We read poetry by Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff & Lorine Niedecker. We also began to read work by writers who clearly inspired & were inspired by the Objectivist poets; we read poems by H. D., Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Lola Ridge, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Basil Bunting, Tom Clark. One one lovely evening in the summer, we paired the work of Rae Armantrout & Tom Raworth — we leaned a lot that evening!

Poetry of the OUTSIDEREAL

As our confidence grew & new desires emerged, we began to expand our reading list to include writers whose work was not directly related to the principles and practices of the “original” Objectivists. For example, one particularly memorable evening was spent on the production of a poetics of the OUTSIDEREAL in Jose Hernandez's modernist Argentine epic, The Gaucho Martin Fierro. Another on poetry by Stephen Roedefer. Another on modern & contemporary Surrealism. We studied the poetics of The Oulipo, the Situationists & the Bauhaus. As the workshop continues to evolve, its become increasingly clear that the poetic practices we associate with the Next Objectivist movement are global in scope & owe as much to feminist, indigenous & queer ways of making poetry as they do to the modernist aesthetics that got us started.

The Poetics of Ekphrasis

Another chapter in the history of our research began in year two, when we turned our attention away from the work of particular authors in order to investigate ekphrastic poetry. We reasoned that one mode of “poetry from the outside” might consist of poems which organize themselves around objects rather than subjects. We regarded poems based on other works of art—poems about paintings, photograph, movies, songs & other poems. We painstakingly composed a taxonomy of the ways in which poets have interacted with these objects & several members wrote ekphrastic poems of their own.

Dreamy Poems

The next seminar moved from images that belong to the world, to ones more intimately lodged in the psyche. We began ask questions about the relation between poetry & dreams. Over the course of several months, we read numerous poems about dreams or dreaming. We wrote down our own dreams and discovered the poetic dream work of a great many fascinating writers. Out Poetypists (see below), transcribed more than twenty-five pages of dreams recited anonymous by members of the general public. We consulted with several Chicago writers (see Guest Objectivists, below) who have produced poetic and artistic dream objects & tried to revise each others' dreams for accuracy.

Requested Investigations

The instantiation of our most recent seminar — which continues as we enter our third year—marked another shift in the workshop's approach to poetic life. The “Requested Investigations” series asks workshop members to generate a set of questions from their own on-going efforts to read and write from the outside in. Workshop members would work on the questions with the writer, producing new texts & unloosening blockages. The goal was to To pitch-in for another's inquiry, and to get inside someone else's unfinished poetic effort, both for the thrills and / or derangement involved in these acts of generosity and to create a collective poetic brain bank/labor tank to be at the disposal of anyone who wanted help with a particular passage their were working on or issue that confronted them. Some of the multitude of questions posed by members of the workshop to the collective as a whole have so far included:

Is it possible to use a forced word of replacement to get text MORE ACCURATE?
How do we know when we are reading texts that are FROM somebody, rather than BY somebody?
How might a grid or framework free language from the conservative instincts of the self (or ego, conscious awareness of tendencies and biases such as fears, desires, styles, tastes, talents, complexes, etc.)?
What are some of the structural similarities between poems & jokes?
How does repetition in a poem move through, or against, time?

Our forthcoming workshop,which belong to the “Requested Investigations” series, begins with the question:

What, if anything, makes space a particular playground for poetry, in ways no other feature of thought can?

The Poetry Reading as a Poetry Writing

The Next Objectivists Produce the Poetry of the Multitude

One new & unforseen way of going about the business of poetry that has emerged for us is an inversion of normative ways of conducting the poetry reading. We began with a principled stand in favor of collaborative writing, but also the acknowledgment that writing is also a solitary practice — none of us were prepared to give up our own, individualized habits of production, but neither did it make sense for the workshop to simply bolster each member's practice separately. We desired to be more than a loose confederation or professional club. So we began to develop systems of collaboration that required multiple authorship but not immediate authorial contact— projects that would require a group effort but could be contributed to with the flexibility work-life in the neoliberal environment so often demands.

Our first collective writing project developed in response to an invitation to participate in the exhibition “Synesthetic Chicago” at the Chicago Cultural Center. Over a period of several weeks, Next Objectivist Poetypists sat behind manual and electric typewriters in the Cultural Center's “Tourist Information” Room. Interacting with the numerous visitors, most of whom were attracted to our antiquated word-processing machines, we transcribed their synesthetic sensations of the city. Numerous pages of transcription were compiled & redistributed at our workshop, where they were revised into poems that were printed in the style of brochures and leaflets & placed into the information stands at the Cultural Center. In this way, we made poetry into both a collaborative practice & a public one. We returned the public's words to them in poetic form, & provided an alternative vision of what might constitute the circulation of information the city provides for visitors.

In the subsequent years, we refined (refound) this method of composition-by-public-transcription into a regular practice. We took our cue from William Carlos Williams, who sought to produce a “bolus” of poetry — an anonymous, democratic poetry of the mass rather than the singularity. This, we have come to realize, is the poetry of the multitude. It is now a goal of the workshop to help bring into begin this multitude. At various public events—the Printer's Ball, the Version Festival, neighborhood Arts Festivals, and the Red Rover reading series—we enjoin our audiences to participate in the creation of new poems. When you come to a Next Objectivist event, you help to author the evening's poetry. We resist the drive to distinguish between a cultural-producing elite and an un-empowered & frequently distracted & discontent audience that seems the engine of so many readings these days.

Guest Objectivists

Over the years, we have invited a number of “Guest Objectivists”: writers who spend the evening with us engaged in a conversation about their own particular involvement with the methods & madness of writing inside out. We strongly support the fostering of a local community of writers, & the majority of our guests have been from the city, or even the neighborhood. But we have also been honored by the presence of poets from Philadelphia and Brooklyn, New York. An Alphabetical list of Guest Objectivists to date:

Christopher Alexander

Eric Elshtain

Amy England

Kristen Gallagher

Dan Godston

Penelope Rosemont

Michelle Taransky

& note that we've been fortunate enough to schedule a reading & discussion with Allison Gruber, who will be a Guest Objectivist in the field of short fiction during the month of April!

Summer Program

2010-07-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

WHO WE ARE

The Next Objectivists is a free, open-to-the-public poetry workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the outsidereal. We take this term from the “Black Mountain” poet Edward Dorn & our name from the second generation modernist poets associated with The Objectivist Press. Although writers associated with the Objectivists and Black Mountain “schools” (Bunting, Creeley, H.D., Niedecker, Pound, Reznikoff, Williams, Zukofsky to name only those we've already studied) are prominent stars in our constellation, our objective is not to reproduce any particular style, mode or tradition, but instead to draw on many different ways of doing and making in order to isolate those practices of writing & publishing & above all those poetic effects which lead us out of the neoliberal present & the future it imagines.

WHY WE ARE

The globalization of capital promises a precarious scramble across waste lands and perilously long lines at the checkpoints for the many, while offering the claustrophobic “plugged in for survival” interconnection of a gated community to the few. Very well. We have no illusions about the present. We see where this is headed. What's the point of scrambling to get another book onto your c.v. if they're not reading you in Gaza? Or to get at it from a slightly different vector—poetry written in the U.S. today that shows no palpable response to the fact of the Afghanistan-Iraq war (now the longest in official national history, so don't tell us you were just about to get around to it) is not serious to begin with. Are we to leave it to the soldiers alone to produce poetry in response to the war? Faced with unending war, unending downsizing, unwanted acceleration & a non-stop oil geyser in the gulf (the other gulf), poets must choose. Some will make a private refuge of their words, a fenced-off preserve of the literary imagination at its most rarefied (the somber & gossip-filled corridors of the tasteful). Others will insist that some outside to the present is necessary & that some other future is possible.

The new terms of the struggle are those of “privatization” and enclosure for a global elite—the owners of property and inheritors of national “democratic” circuitry of authority and force—and the preservation of “the commons” for the rest of us, who compose, in our radical heterogeneity, what Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri name the “multitude.” The multitude are the global poor, those for whom debt and death are the rewards of labor (when you can get it) and to whom democracy appears as governance imposed by violence. Between these antagonistic forces the remains of the world remain, and the future will be determined by whether or not we will privatize the commons and whatever other elements of nationalized public culture remain from the various modern projects of socialization. Much has been lost already (and the oil has only begun to spill). “And yet,” as Hardt & Negri write, “so much of our world is common, open to access of all and developed through active participation. Language, for example, like affects and gestures, is for the most part common, and indeed if language were made either private or public . . . than language would lose its power of expressions, creativity, and communication.”

The Next Objectivists defend this comonwealth. We seek the poetry of the multitude, the poetry that tears away from the rule of singularity proposed by elites. The multitude is that “more-than-one” which resists the totalizing organization of the global downsizers and contract revisers, the barrier builders & security contractors of the cultural pollution lobby. The texts we read & topics we explore offer glimpses of many different kinds of resistance to the colonization of the imagination.

WE ARE NOT A POETIC AVANT GARDE

We are absolutely not avant garde! We are not seeking to be ahead of anything! In a moment of perpetual crisis, when “shock doctrine” capitalism rationalizes necropolitics and a 24/7 “echo chamber” of the televisual blogosphere translates everything that happens into either farce or satire on an hourly basis, who would want to be out in front? We like bicycles, but we are not “yellow jersey” types! The Next Objectivists resist the speed up! We meet to slow time down. We don't want to get ahead, we want to get away from the present predicament & perhaps even find a few shady places along the way where we can all get along. Migration, then, and a trying again—but also rootedness—a refusal to leave the common ground, made more precious than ever by its erosion, behind. We would be a bulwark, a defense; not a wall but a ballast, a refusal to float away on the tidy fashions of the day.

DREAMING THE OUTSIDEREAL

As America celebrates another Independence Day, the B. P. oil well has been more or less successfully converted into a Lacanian “stain.” It background now, turned on its side to become another instance of the thing we cease to notice, enveloped into a new kind of normal. A register of the real which we'd rather would go away. With this in mind, the Next Objectivists announce a three-month long seminar on dreams.

During the months of July, August & September we'll be investigating the relationship between the poem & the dream. We maintain that dreaming occurs not only in our heads at night but across a billion screens of televisual reality each day. We will consider the poem as an objectification of dreams, and will write collective dreams, swap each others' dreams.

SUMMER SCHEDULE
Our summer schedule of meetings will be:

8 July 22 July
19 August 26 August
9 September 23 September

Participants at these meetings are asked to bring:

a poem by someone else about a dream or dreaming
an account, in any genre or medium, of a dream you remember

We will discuss these poems, swamp dreams, and write together. All meetings begin promptly at 7:00 at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park.

POETRY OF THE MULTITUDE

As we enter the end of the oil age the basic resources of economic production have transformed to include not only fuels for industry, but water, food & clean air. The reproduction of life itself has become the predominant mode of capitalization. We see this also in the privatization of the commons which is language, information, affect, gesture, figuration. In a regime of production dominated by affective labor, poetry is a terrain of global struggle as it has never been before. Nothing less than a common imagination of worldly life is at stake. In the downsizing “first world,” educational apartheid and the emergence of “flexible” or temp labor at the highest levels of the workforce produces an increasingly enclosed academic system of part-time workers. Too often, aspiring writers respond to this climate by adopting an individualistic notion of writing and Candide-like optimism that results in a new phenomenon: cultural capital debt. We mortgage the possibility of future “success” (meaning what? a publishing deal or job offer well paying enough to wipe out years of education-based loans and a decade or more of credit card debt? Do you really think your post-Langauge poetry is going to get you onto the Oprah book club list?), creating a deficit of unrealized potential for each publication, each teaching gig, each new blog. With this kind of social valued attached to production from the very initial stages, the practice of writing itself becomes a form of personal entrepreneurship. Increasingly, each poet's “voice” is registered as a brand, each mode of writing treated as a trademark protected invention of the individual—who appears a “genius” to his friends and “lucky in the lottery” to the rest.

A NEW BOLUS

The Next Objectivists refuse to participate. Facing an increasingly privatized, individualized and apoloticized (yet always already “experimental” and “progressive”) field of poetry, we seek the actual and total death of the author. Until now the “author” as authority and autonomous creator has only been “dead” in theory, never in practice. Indeed, many of the previous generation's critics and poets have proclaimed the death of the author so successfully that we all know them by name! A poetics based on the deconstruction of predominant economic sensibilities has become capitalized upon in turn.

We must generate the language of a new kind of subjectivity—the language of the multitude. The theoretical discarding of authorship must be replaced by an actual anonymity. The poetry of the present—the “new hybridity”—must be turned over yet again, must become mulch for a new kind of blossoming. William Carlos Williams called it “loam.” At the core of his 1948 lecture, “The Poem as a Field of Action” remains a yet unrealized project: the total democratization of poetry:

We seek profusion, the Mass—heterogeneous—ill-assorted—quite breathless—grasping at all kinds of things— . . .

If any one man's work lacks the distinction to be expected from the finished artist, we might well think of the profusion of a Rabelais—as against a limited output. It is as though for the moment we should be profuse, we Americans; we need to build up amass, a conglomerate maybe . . .

Now when Mr. Eliot came along he had a choice: 1. Join the crowd, adding his blackbird's voice to the flock, contributing to the conglomerate . . . or 2. To go where there was already a mass of more ready distinction (to turn his back on the first) . . .

Stop a minute to emphasize our own position: It is not that of Mr. Eliot. We are making a modern bolus: That is our somewhat undistinguished burden; profusion, as, we must add in all fairness, against his distinction. . . .

The same choice is presented to us today, with consequences that are much larger than the egoism that concerns Williams. A new bolus—a multitude of anonymous heterogeneous polyglot poetries large enough to overwhelm the distinction industry is our project.

PUBLIC POETRY WRITING

Through the summer, the Next Objectivists stage the first step in this new process at a series of public transcription events. Join us and help us to type the multitude into being! We encourage YOU to help us make poetry out of the idiom in order to take poetry away from the profiteers!

Our typewriters will be set up at the following locations:

Saturday 17 July
Red Rover Reading Series
“Poetics of the Multitude”

Friday 23 July – Sunday 25 July
Milwauke Avenue Arts Festival

Saturday 31 July – Sunday 1 August
Printers Ball

Saturday 21 August – Sunday 22 August
Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival

Join us! You may already be a Next Objectivist!

Love Poetry from the Outside

2010-05-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

Attention Attention Past Present & Future Next Objectivists & Fellow Survivors & Surveyors

We meet tomorrow, Tuesday 25 May to discuss LOVE poetry. What happens when the love lyric is approached from outside the I-self? For example, what if the love poem doesn't emerge from the self? Are even the most conventional love poems EVER directed toward the beloved? Is it kitsch to write a love poem & actually give it to the object of your desire (rather than to a potential publisher, for example)? What about poems that are in love with themselves as objects? All attendees are invited to bring examples of love poetry that speaks from the outsidereal to begin a conversation on this important & difficult topic. In the meanwhile, a short collection of possibly love poetry by Jack Spicer, a poet who knew love from & the outsidereal very well, has been added to our dropboks account. The e-mail is nextobjectivists@gmail.com; the password is outsidereal.

We'll meet tomorrow as usual at 7:00 pm at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park. The Mess Hall in an independent autonomous experimental zone located at 6932 North Glenwood Avenue
Chicago, IL 60626. A small stone's throw from the Morse Red Line Station. Exit the station on the west side & proceed in a southern direction; we're on the west side of the street.

The Next Objectivists is the world's only %100 autonomous university devoted to the study & reproduction of the poetry & poetics of the OUTSIDEREAL. Our workshops are free & open to the public. Members make the curriculum as we go along. We read, discuss & write poetry together. As time allows we publish our findings through our website: http://nextobjectivists.blogspot.com/. If the contemporary poetry scene leaves you unsatisfied you may already be a Next Objectivist! Join us today!

Matthias

Imagining a Bauhaus Poetics

2010-05-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

The BAUHAUS School taught art, design & architecture in Germany between the wars. Many of its teachers, such as Walter Gropius & Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Anni & Josef Albers, who feld to America as the school was closed by the National Socialists, prominently influenced American modernism. The Albers, who taught at Black Mountain College, no doubt influenced the work of many of the countercultural poets who taught & studied there, such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn.

But there is no legible Bauhaus poetics. Tonight the Next Objectivists attend to this problem by imagining a poetry commensurable with Bauhaus aesthetic practices. Of particular importance to us is the Bauhaus theory of the artwork as engaged with both the avant-garde aesthetic principles of autonomy & anti-modern practices associated with folk art. What is the poetic equivalent to one of Anni Albers' textiles?
We will read a selection of poems chosen by Guest Next Objectivist poet & musician Dan Godston and discuss poetry in relation to aspects of Bauhaus design & performance. The texts can be found on line at Drop Boks. Go to www.dropboks.com; enter nextobjectivists@gmail.com as the e-mail user name. outsidereal is our password.

All Next Objectivist events are free & open to the public. Everyone is invited to attend! Leave your expertise at the door.

Basil Bunting's Burly Cants

2010-04-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago now, the Next Objectivists ended our exploration of the poets directly associated with the first Objectivist Poetry moment by reading the work of British author Basil Bunting. Luke Franklin, Minister of International Research, provides a summary & further rumination:

We read two poems by Bunting, one undated, the other written in 1928 when the poet was living hand to mouth in London, scavenging piecework assignments from the metropolitan newspapers. Before we met, a third poem was circulated: Bunting’s ninth Ode [1969] on “stipendiary” language:

All the cants they peddle,
bellow entangled
teeth for knots and
each other’s ankles
to become stipendiary
in any wallow;
crow or weasel
each to his fellow.

“Crow or weasel”, effigies of those who peddle “cants”, infuse language with the clashing disharmonies of a cutthroat market. Against this racket, Bunting upholds fine-tuned cantos, underworld language [canting] and popular song. If they would only learn to listen…

Yet even these,
even these might
listen as crags
listen to light
and pause, uncertain
of the next beat,
each dancer alone
with his foolhardy feet
[1969]

We did not take up the question of “music” in Bunting’s poetry until the very end of the session. First, we read an extremely interesting poem he left unpublished at the time of his death:

The flat land lies under water
hedge-chequer-grill above concealing
(not long) heliotrope monotony

Cold water shin-embracing clacks
Desolately, no overtones. Lukewarm
Moist socks trickle sea-boot squeezed
Black gutters muttering between the toes.
Moreover it rains, drizzles.

Utter-horizon-penetrating glances
spoil only paupers towing derelict home
the flat land hedge-grilled heliotrope under water. [n.d.]

The weather was what we noticed first: “the most British poem I’ve ever read”. We agreed that “the flat land” was farm-land: a chequered expanse of fields set side-by-side, partitioned by ditches or hedgerows. We floundered for some time, trying to discern what scene, what actions, what drama was being described here. One comment was decisive: Bunting is not depicting land from the viewpoint of a watcher, a removed observer surveying a prospect. Instead, he describes what it feels like to sink into that landscape, boots filling with water, drizzle inundating clothes. Disdaining the overview of the landowner, Bunting records the eye-view of the laborer, the “paupers” [gleaners?] knee deep in the flooded fields.

An agricultural argument lies in the background: landed sportsmen, eager to shoot grouse, let the ditches between fields grow over as a nesting place for game. Blocked ditches won’t drain the fields; land floods, causing sheep to perish from lungworm and cows to come down with footrot:

Sheep and cattle are poor men’s food,
grouse is sport for the rich;
heather grows where the sweet grass might grow
for the cost of cleaning the ditch.
[1930]

The pink-purple heather flowers stain the fields a single colour: “heliotrope”. In Bunting’s poem the sickly off-mauve shade, “heliotrope” is the colour of class conflict.

Next, we read an untitled Ode on the city of London. Bunting, Northern regionalist and ardent partisan of the coal-town unions behind the 1926 General Strike, scorns the Southern seat of government:

The day being Whitsun we had pigeon for dinner;
but Richmond in the pitted river saw
mudmirrored mackintosh, a wet southwest
wiped and smeared dampness over Twickenham.

Pools on the bustop’s buttoned tarpaulin.
Wimbledon, Wandsworth, Clapham, the Oval. ‘Lo,
Westminster Palace where the asses jaw!’

Endless disappointed buckshee-hunt!
Suburb and city giftless garden and street,
And the sky alight of an evening stubborn
And mute by day and never rei novae
Inter rudes atrium homines.
Never a spark of sedition
amongst the uneducated workingmen. [1928]

What scene is Bunting describing here? We heard a conductor barking out stops along an omnibus line: “Wimbledon, Wandsworth, Clapham, the Oval”; a drunk commuter bursting out with curses: “Lo! Westminster Palace where the asses jaw!” One shrewd reader picked out the allusion to Samson: “in politics, as in the story of Samson & Delilah, the jawbone of an ass is a deadly weapon…” Bunting’s Latin, a minor sticking point—is he speaking the patrician language of the ruling class, scourging the plebeians? Someone saw the poem as a pre-emptive strike on Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. We dwelled on Bunting’s disgust at the spectacle of defused sedition: working class districts “mute by day” as laborers are marched out to work; yet “alight of an evening”, without a spark of unrest...

At the end of the session we reworked the collectively-authored poetry produced two weeks earlier. Our objective was to refashion this inchoate verbiage into something resembling the rhythms of Bunting’s musical verse. Some of us tried arranging the word-material according to syllable-patterns in Bunting’s poetry. More fruitful were efforts to craft entirely new poems from the prewritten worksheets:

I'll ask my unlucky atlas
and in the end
fixed types of tolerance tighten.

Titans Retelling : tough scopes,
exuberance, Alps, parts, Ridges
fixed on us.

if i cold

chill dry.

white former ease, Imagine.
ending the and.

All this type. Us gritty at last.

skipping

stones
echo.

The “music” of this poem resides less in harmonics and sound-patterns than in the cognitive dissonance caused by new concepts: the “unlucky atlas”[reference book of ill omen—luckless titan]; social constrictions as “fixed types of tolerance”; the imagined “end” of the “and” in a triumphant collectivity, “us gritty at last”. To discuss the acoustic effects in “skipping / stones / echo”, it might be useful to read one last Bunting poem:

At Briggflatts meetinghouse

Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
Set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
The sun’s fires sink.

Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saints’ bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter

silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind’s wing, and leaves
delight in transience.
[1975]

Poised as the zenith and climax of the poem, “delight in transience” also marks the accomplishment of a technical “tour-de-force”. Bunting has moved from the low-end of the syllabic register, the o-vowels in “boasts time mocks cumber Rome” to the lightest, high-pitched pinnacle of “delight in transience”. I found that, once noticed, this “masterful maneuver” diminishes the interest of the poem. Arguably, the unsublimated, unmusick’d integrity of “boasts time mocks cumber Rome” is more compelling than the technical machinery that crescendos with “delight in transience”. Musical virtuosity as an ultimate value in poetry has unpredictable effects.

We should note another outcome of Bunting’s overriding concern with music. Namely, his literary self-presentation as the poet of “wine, women, and song”:

All you Spanish ladies
Carmencita’s tawny paps
glow through a threadbare frock;
stance bold, and her look.
Filth guards her chastity…
[1965]

On highest summits dawn comes soonest.
(but that is not time to give over loving)
[1935]

Poet appointed dare not decline
to walk among the bogus
the mission imposed, despised by toadies, confidence men, kept boys
shopped and jailed, cleaned out by whores…

Briggflatts [1965]

These poems are not explicitly about music-making, but the rake’s progress of the raffish troubadour-poet is the centre of interest in all three. In Bunting, deliberately “musical” poetry is marked in advance as the prerogative of the roving, womanizing bard, a seriously tiresome figure. How to get clear of the “cants” and also avoid the trappings of the meistersinger? Is it possible to single out a “crude” language in Bunting—refractory sonic effects, words not re-mastered by the virtuoso-troubadour? More discussion seems called for.

Under sand clay. Dig, wait
Billy half full, none for the car.
Quartz, salt in well wall,
ice refract first ray
……
[1965]

The Poetics of Sincerity

2010-03-05T13:52:00.000-08:00

A few sessions ago, the Next Objectivists discussed Charles Reznikoff's Testimony: The United States 1885-1890 Recitative. Recently, our exploration of the poetics of the OUTSIDEREAL has lead us to research into the works of poets published in the February 1931 issue of Poetry Magazine, which was edited by Louis Zukofsky. We had recently Pound & Rexroth; Basil Bunting was in our future.

Testimony, a multi-volume, 500+ page collection composed over many years and most recently published in the 1970s by Black Sparrow, is one of the least frequently read American epic poems (John G. Neihardt's A Cycle of the West is probably less well-known, and perhaps Diane DiPrima's Loba & Edward Sander's America: A History in Verse, which is very much a direct descendent of Testimony). It is currently out of print; used copies will cost you about $40 on Amazon; few public libraries carry it. Testimony recounts—the objectivist term would perhaps be 'remeasures'—court room testimony apparently taken about twenty years before Reznikoff's recomposition began. The events occur when the poet is in the first years of his life and therefore not a direct witness of any of them. It is a poetry of witness which begins with the premise that the event is always already mediated—in this case by operatives of the law.

The testimony occurs in verse passages of unequal length—the shorter ones being around twelve lines, the longer ones several pages and numerous stanzas—which are carefully grouped. The first taxonomic label is geographical region—legal cases that occurred within “the north,” “the south,” “the west.” Within these designations the poems are grouped by such genres as “Domestic Scenes,” “Boys & Girls,” “Machine Age,” “Property,” “Stage Coaches,” “Town & Country,” etc. As one can see, it is a very unusual “etc” that follows such a list—what might come next in such a sequence? There is no apparent rhyme or reason to the sequencing, which sometimes suggest the titles of newspaper columns or the scene titles in silent films. Under each title we find several numbered passages of poetic testimony. The relation between these passages and the title is always evident—testimony grouped under “Boys & Girls” relates to the death and disfigurement of children, that under “Machine Age” relates to deaths to occur as a result of working with telegraph lines, street lamps, and trains—the latest inventions heralding the era of industrialized capital. There are also passages which are not grouped under any title. Whether these groupings were present in the source testimony or were invented by the author is not clear from the poem; the overall effect suggests that they were most likely developed by the author in relation to the source texts.

Which is to say that the overall artistic effect of Testimony is an encounter with simulacra. Like the dream text from which Freud deduced the dream thoughts, the poems in Testimony refer to some other scene. More specifically, at least two other scenes—that in which the words of the witness are recorded, and more distantly that in which the events being witnessed originally occurred. As in Freud's dream analysis, the contours of the event are both self determining and determined after the fact of their happening. In each case, the testimony traces the unfolding of a sequence of events which provoked the law to act in such a way that, at some later date, testimony was taken. In some poems, that part of the event which brings it into being—which leads to the eventual production of testimony and hence of the event itself—appears to be obvious, at least from a legal standpoint:

On a Sunday in May
a party of young men were bathing
in the river
when a stranger passed
and was invited to join them.
He went into the water
but soon came out angry
because someone threw water on him,
got his knife
and stabbed one of the party.
The young man stabbed
died in a few minutes.

The poem continues, recounting how the stranger is captured, a mob forms, and a “A cousin of the dead man— / but not one of the bathing party” shoots the stranger dead. But within the unfolding of the event it appears that blame in the case, as related by this witness, initially rests with the angry stranger, who murders a member of the bathing party, apparently in response to a splash. The event extends beyond this kernel in both directions—backward in time to set the scene, and forward until the second death 'cancels out' the first.

Most, but importantly not all, of the poems in Testimony point us to the real kernel that engages the law, thus bringing about the original source of testimony which eventually finds its way into the poem, and through the poem into our present-day imagination. The actual activity of court stenographers, judges, police officers and all other persons called into action as a result of this event become the living medium by which the poem projects its texts back onto the world. Here, then, is objectivity as a sophisticated mode of poetic activity—the poem is a transcription of a transcription, both of which relate to each other by endeavoring to preserve a fidelity to the rational truth of the situation they describe. Writing about Reznikoff in the 1931 issue of Poetry, Zukofsky describes this quality of the writing (writing as process, as techne) as “sincerity”:

In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance) completed sound or structure, melody or form. Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody. Shapes suggest themselves, and the mind senses and receives awareness. Parallels sought for in the other arts call up the perfect line of occasional drawing, the clear beginnings of sculpture not proceeded with.

Sincerity is the work of the sensory unconscious—it is the immediate apprehension of the event which results from a sensual grasp of the particulars which operates at the level of gesture, tone, impulse & other immediate, dynamic modes of cognizance which register as affect. It occurs when the first lines put to paper render the perceived figure or event more precisely—not despite but because of their particular distortions--than subsequent revisions will be able to do. To write with sincerity in this way is to perform an act of attention which attempts to get across some of the proprioceptive intelligence that contributed to the event in its unfolding. Not merely “ornament” is eschewed, but the act of interpretation itself—a two-fold textual veracity to the event is the intended accomplishment of these lines.

The accomplishment falls short of its ideal, remaining in the zone from which it seeks to emerge—the zone of the gesture. The kernel is by the process of sincere writing rendered illegible, a void. It cannot sustain the pressure of the narrative which emerges from it. Why should a splash lead to murder? What was really going on? The profound ambivalence contained within the originating act is foregrounded in the very first of the book:

Jim went to his house
and got a pair of plow lines
and then into the stable
and put one on the jack
and led the jack out
and tied him to the fence;
and put the noose in the other line around the head of the jack
and began to pull.
The jack began to make a right smart noise.

Its dead body was found next morning,
fifteen or twenty feet from the stable door;
the neck, just back of the head,
badly bruised.

What did Jim do and why? At first it appears that we know exactly what it was that he did—but why would someone try to pull the head of their mule? And upon further reflection, what exactly did happen to the jack? The scene of its execution, if that is what it was, is omitted. The court does not have all the facts; we have the corpse and a witness that indicates Jim was behaving oddly at the scene of the crime—but no motive, & no description of the real kernel—the death of the jack which brings about the action of the law.

It is precisely THIS indeterminacy which is preserved by the act of sincerity. An indeterminacy of the event—an indeterminacy that belongs to the object, rather than to the subject. For in this case (as in all cases, presumably, for so says the law), the idea subject is the subject of transcription. The poet, like the stenographer—like the therapist—is a recording device; an impartial witness. It is not the subject who judges, but the one who suspends judgment for the duration of its act of telling so that a verdict may be rendered only after all is said and done. All is done because all has been said of what has been done.

But just as the event is never fully realizable, so, too, the attempted negation of the subject is never fully achieved. Reznikoff calls explicit attention to this aspect of sincerity—the excess of the subject which prevents the language from serving as pure conduit—in the second poem of the book, which begins:

On a Sunday—a bleak drizzling day--
Patrick Connolly, perfectly sober,
entered a streetcar.
After riding a while
without “the slightest impropriety of behavior,”
he was suddenly stricken
with apoplexy
and began vomiting.

The car had many passengers:
some left the car on account of this;
others called out
that he should leave.
When asked if he was drunk,
he shook his head
and said,
“I'll get out myself,”
but,
in raising himself to do so,
fell flat on the floor
and lay helpless.

The passage continues to describe the fate of this ill passenger, who eventually leaves the car and falls across the tracks—presumably it is the driver's neglect, which results in Connonlly being left “about two or three feet from the tracks,” so that when he shifts “his legs were across a rail of the tracks” and in the court's intervention—mostly likely in response to a lawsuit being filed. But in regard to the poetic practice of sincerity, it is not the story that matters so much as a certain excess of language. In our conversation about this poem, we began by noting that it is one of the very few poems in the collection which refers to one of the persons represented by first and last names. Why both names, when more simple denominations, such as “Jim” or “a stranger” will suffice? The answer can easily be discovered by attending to the other speech acts which exceed their transcriptive duties— “perfectly sober” and a similar phrase which is particularly noticeable for being one of the few in quotation marks: ' “the slightest impropriety of behavior.”' The use of quotation within transcription indicates an additional register of sincerity—the quotation marks tells us that it is not simply the meaning of the words, but their phrasing that matters. Efforts to preserve the immediate phrasing—the original act as an object—exceed the normal procedure of transcription. The quotation marks are a gesture that returns us to this realm of experience. Taken together, these points of excess cohere as symptoms of an unspoken “truth” of the event—Connolly's Irishness. That which the act of objective sincerity represses returns through these particulars.

Like the lacuna of the event, this excess of significance is isolated and exposed by the process of sincerity. A secondary level of mediation emerges—the scaffolding of symptoms which tell us what the text purports to ignore—but attention to this mode of mediation does not necessarily or simply lead us away from the event. On the contrary, the scene unfolds in accordance with the excessive knowledge—the social atmospherics—of racial identification. Why else is the ill man not given proper assistance, but is told, and eventually escorted, from the car? Why else does the transcription which Reznikoff partially or wholly transcribes insist upon his actual, as opposed to apparent, sobriety? The unspoken excess of racial anxiety is present already in the proceedings—it is in fact the kernel of the story itself, for to be sick while riding a streetcar is not itself a crime. Connolly is not the perpetrator of that activity—or lack of the same—which moves the law to action: he is the victim of neglect. In this way, the poem reveals the dialectic of absent-presence and present-absences which organize both the object and the subject of the poem's activity.

Events which occur in the world, one member observed, unfold according to the rules of a genre that they fulfill. The retrospective nature of this fulfillment in no way prevents it from saturating the event in the very moment of its unfolding. A passage in one of several sections entitled “Boys and Girls” helps us to glimpse the generic fulfillment which blossoms within the event's unfolding:

A boy of thirteen was employed in a coal mine as “door boy”;
he was stationed inside the mine,
between the main track along the entrance
and its wall,
in a space only a few feet wide.

The door, hung upon hinges,
was made of thick, heavy timber;
to open it,
the boy had to cross the track,
take hold of a handle on the door and return to his place,
holding the handle.

From the chambers of the mine that opened upon the entrance
the loaded cars were drawn by mules to the main track;
as each car was brought out and the mules unhitched,
the car was turned over to a “spragger”
to put a block of wood in front of the wheels,
for the main track was down a long grade.

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

That morning there were brought from the chambers
seven cars loaded with coal,
put upon the main track and left standing.
The boy was absent from his station
but seen near the mouth of one of the chambers.
As the eighth car was brought out
and put upon the track,
the mule driver called to him:
“Get back to your door!”
And the boy started to do so at a run.

The eighth car moved down upon the stationary cars in front of it
with such force
as to set them in motion,
and the whole train was suddenly sent down the grade.
The boy had had time to return to his post
before the train started; he heard the approaching train
and fearing a collision between train and door--
with himself to blame—tried to open it.

The train broke through the door,
and the boy's mangled body was found under of the cars
when the train stopped.

There are two mechanics of this scene—one material, the other imaginary—which operate in tandem to bring about a conclusion that is uncannily preordained. Within the material labyrinth of the mine, physical laws are channeled along tracks—once the eighth car hits the others, their passage upon the tracks is determined by the force of the collision and the direction of the rails. Within the social labyrinth, the boy's anxiety appears to be similarly channeled. He overcompensates for neglecting his station by seeking to respond heroically to the results of an accident which is not his fault but for which he will be blamed. The accident occurs as a direct result of a failure at the “spragger's” station—yet because the boy is not his door, he acts as one at fault. His action fulfills a destiny that is evident in the very first lines of the passage. In this way, Reznikoff reveals the total and unremitting mediation of material existence by the forces of the imagination.

A short passage from a section entitled “Social Life” focuses our attention on the retrospective fulfillment of life by the imagination:

The day had been dark and rainy,
and she and Fuller were sitting by the fire
late in the evening
in an old house on the mountain
about fifty yards from the road.
They had a bottle of whiskey between them
and had been drinking,
and Fuller was singing, “The Drunkard's Doom.”

The passage ends abruptly, never telling us exactly what occurred to motivate the transcription. Reznikoff's poetic transcription of the original, in its fragmentation, has completed its observation with the bitter joke that these drunkards themselves know how the evening will end—the poem we are reading breaks off at the moment that the world's lyric does its work for it. Reality's mediation of itself is the ultimate truth of the poetics of sincerity as Reznikoff practiced them. This is a lesson he learns from William Carlos Williams, and is in many ways the fundamental realization upon which a poetics of the OUTSIDEREAL establishes itself.

Pounding Pound

2010-02-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

Coming on the heels of a problematic engagement with the leftist anarchist Kenneth Rexroth, we approached Ezra Pound's potentially fascist poetics with some trepidation. We started by listening to the presentation of a short biographical essay on Pound composed by our group's expert on all things Canto-related & Minister of Brass-Knuckled Information, Nicholas DeBoer:

I am going to attempt to summarize this project without overstaying an introductory welcome.

Ezra Pound. Motherfucker.

Born 1887. 30 October, Idaho. Pennsylvania for a stint, pops working at the U.S. Mint, making coins. Hooked up with HD&WCW in college, smoked pipes in Indiana, hated NYC. London, met up with Yeats, did it secretary style and the War to End All Wars sprouted up, knocked out half of his friends to their deaths. Picks up on Joyce, breaks Gertrude Stein's favorite chair. His energies move toward the idealistic spit of peace on earth, justice. Fair.

By the 1920s, he was totally in love with Benito Mussolini, an atheist who utilized Plato and Nietzche to shore up his new found political organization, the National Fascist Party. Il Duce was a glorified thug, who preferred taking postcard photos with tigers and marching 30,000 men to the door of the King and walking himself into Prime Minister.

I don't know, this helps me. By 1926, Europe is sweating blood on the wall-climbing back-break of getting out of an economic recession. Germany got knocked out by Versailles and the Weimar Republic was a massive fail. Capitalism had sucker-punched America into a gigantic exploit phase, called the Roaring Twenties. Soviet style Communism had just lost Lenin and even though dude, death-bed ordered Stalin ousted, Stalin took over. Stalin tells Trotsky to take a walk and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat joined up with a much darker overtone.

The Italian Fascists offered a 'Third Way.” It was to be in between both Capitalism and Communism, called cutely, Corporatism. Recently, Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner showcased the proposal of a public-private trust system. This is one of the cornerstones of the economic agenda of Fascism. Go figure.

At the same time, Hitler pitches a fit and somehow convinces German society that not only are Jewish citizens the major problem, but that they are also secret Bolsheviks. Yeah, so when the Soviet's get backstabbed later in the war, it's kind of a no brainer. So, all this shit is going down, and Pound is just eating up every dumb fallout suggestion from the Italian Fascists, even stops writing, and gets up on Rome Radio to espouse his own dumbfuck ideas about the Jewish People, the Jefferson in Rome thesis and how the Americans should go AWOL and join up with the Fascists.

By the time the war ends, he somehow gets listed as a Top Tier Criminal. Eventually, he gets picked up by gunpoint for the reward and is tossed into a cage for six weeks, where he watches the other inmates get hung one after another. Some Pound apologists like to warrant this experience as a vindication for all his mistakes and let him plea insanity, but I think he was totally and absolutely confident in what he was spewing. You have to understand Pound is one of the greatest poets who ever lived, but also one of the craziest, you can't make this up, humans.

Pound spent six months in that American Internment Camp in Pisa and was then carted via air to Washington D.C., where his friends (i.e. Eliot, Williams) convince him to enter St. Elizabeth's Hospital, an insane asylum, to not be executed for treason. Truth be told the USA didn't have a case, but no one knew that at the time. Ezze was 60 and after 12 yrs, at 72 he was released. He might have gotten out earlier, but McCarthyism.

He jumps ship back to Rapallo, Italy and lives out the remainder of his life with his lifelong mistress, Olga. What began as a heartwarming return, by six months became a period of silence that would continue until his death. After 60 some years of never knowing when to think before he spoke, Ezra Pound just stopped talking. His artistic life ended. Who knows why, maybe he wised up, maybe he saw the photographs of the Nazi Concentration Camps and realized what his hand in all that had been, maybe he got tired, maybe he lost the last remaining containers of memory he had. No one knows. Most of his friends died. There is film of him sitting in a church, staring at the cross with serpent eyes, cane in hand. He never bought Christ, but he knew his judgment was coming.

The Pound apologists love to take note of the 1967 conversation Allen Ginsberg had with EzPo, where he apologizes for his 'suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.' I don't think its good enough, but either way by 1972 he was dead. A tragic/comedy. In all actuality, there isn't so much written about Pound's Fascism, and as revisionism goes, that makes sense. But, I will say this, if you fall in love with EzPo like I did, and you could feel his every gesture leak into the back of your thought process, where his every murmur seemed to reverberate back into your heart and warm the imagination like steady California wine, be wise and read The Genealogy of Demons by Robert Castillo. According to him, Ezra Pound was not just an Italian Fascist, but more akin to the National Socialists. Castillo traces Pound's mythology all the way through the legends perpetuated by Nazi Germany.

And during all this, starting in around 1919 for forty yrs, Ezra Pound wrote his masterpiece, The Cantos, a book so dense that the scholarship has never stopped. 824 pages embarking on his entire vision and quest to find peace and justice on earth, to find Paradiso.

We started our work with the first canto. Pound opens this work with a retelling of Homer's scene from the Odyssey where Odysseus is first met with Elpenor returning from the underworld. What does it mean that Pound is in the world telling this story? He is making the action of retelling it, but as he goes into it his retelling becomes more of a viewing. It seems that he is taking a frame of Homer and setting up certain philosophical dualities. When these dualities engage with the world in a truthful way, it works.

There is also a curiosity in that he enters and exits the poem. This work restarts the epic tradition, which had been in dormancy for about a hundred years. In this poem he not only pulls us in and out of the work, but he drops us into the world. This is the purpose of his arc-work.

Pound's self-confidence offers a strange look into his offerings to the poetic world. His confidence acts as a restoration of poetry into the world again, but also signals his own fathering of it. This oddity and strangeness is coupled with his presence in the upcoming movements or generations of writers. His whole body of work seems to be at the top of so many cookie jars.

What can we take from Ezra Pound? The layering techniques of myth and history, the audacity of his talents? Is it the talent of entering and exiting a retelling of history, the relation of the poet to the subject matter, the telling of a fiction story inside the basis of his work or the difference that he creates inside the variations he is retelling? Is it the way he deals with the center versus the lack of a center?

This first poem was written between 1909 and 1926, with the initial three poems being debuted in Poetry magazine and then reworked for the 1926 unveiling of A Draft of XXX Cantos. So much of the first canto works to express the Great War through the eyes of Homer. We enter the poem on a ship and the darkness of the sea. This retelling asks, “Where are you going to take me?”

As a group we were very engaged with the style of work and the way he takes us with him on a journey through history. His use of comma and rhythm keeps you in the present tense. It was as if we were in the library reading with him into the world. Pound speaks to us of the present with an archaic language and then speaks of the past with the language of the present, as if he is trying to modernize the past and archaizes the present.

The first piece focuses partly on Elpenor and his death and the pouring of libations for the dead, the action of honoring them. He could be seen as some form of a Frontier Shakespearian. We spent some time listening to Pound read his work aloud. In this the poem gives the emotion to the poet, in the way the poet learns how to read the poem. A poet knows their craft. They might not understand how it would be said, but in this way they learn it. What is Pound's context to read? In reading Rexroth, we were displeased with his use of references, but how should we view Pound's success? Is it of its time?

There is also the question of Pound's feminism in the way that he objectifies the canvas. It seems that in Pound, he embeds the references, where Rexroth does not. Pound's world view is primarily exclusionary. In talking about Elpenor, he showcasing an image of the pathetic man. We then find Tiresias, and Tiresias has the gift/curse of future sight. Pound also makes an importance in putting women on a pedestal, putting them in power and treating them with a respect. Yet, they are often off-shoots, thus making them unimportant. In Pound, the men are of more importance. William Carlos Williams describes a visit he once had with Pound in Paris and how he seemed to admire women, that there was an objectification but an impotence in Pound's sight.

It is with this that we see how Pound constructs the persona. He enjoys posing. He contains a fascinating beauty that moves his voice to very particular notes. He made a mistake and there is no way to solve this mistake. If you are reading something and you realize you are from the outside, a kind of outside of an audience, what do you do? How do you navigate? It's within Pound's world view that he pushes you out. If his career is built out of persona, that he is a being of two minds, how does one handle his errors? Does one view it as merely one part of his persona or something deeper. In some ways, the companion text to the Cantos can be seen as an apologist for him.

We also discussed From CXV which is a fragment from the end of his life. These pieces were derived as an almost posthumous work that became available out of a number of 'pirated' copies through Ed Sanders 'Fuck You Press' The poem seems to question what the audience is to take away, but builds off a concise refutation of our difficulty with the references. The second half seems to be stronger in its referring of concrete universals. This ending is billed as a redemption of Pound. After 40 yrs, this poem has become a place to lose oneself in the particulars. Pound's flaws brought him antisemitism and fascism. These qualities brought him to barbarism where he thought it brought him out. He wanted to do good, but ended up on the opposite side of history. There is some admittance to this wrong doing at the end of the 60s, but his blindness had a way of holding him and never lifting.

In the same way that in the first canto, we find a journey to the underworld, at the end of the book, we find that the dead are living cardboard, that there is a ambiguity. These last poems are written when Pound is in his early 70s and there is an aging in him that seems to showcase the guilt of his choices.

Next Week & the Year in Review

2010-01-20T07:18:00.000-08:00

The Next Objectivsts meet next TUESDAY—26 January, 2010—to discuss William Carlos Williams' Spring & All (1923). Copies of our readings can now be downloaded from Dropbok at http://www.dropboks.com/. The e-mail is nextobjectivists@gmail.com; the password is outsidereal.

It is fitting that on the group's actual first anniversary we should be reading the immediate genus text of the poetry & poetics of Objectivism & the OUTSIDEREAL.

It is a good time to recall that the Next Objectivists is the world's only autonomous workshop dedicated solely to the analysis and reproduction of the poetry & poetics that speak from outside the I-self. We are autonomous in two ways: First, and most crucially, we have no affiliations with universities, academies, or other institutions where the embodiment of knowledge goes to die. Second, we aspire to a democratic syllabus—those in attendance direct the course of our assignments, so that the workshop always makes it new. All our workshops are free & open to the public. Everyone is invited to attend. No previous knowledge of poetry is required. In fact, we ask that you check your expertise at the door. Our membership constantly changes, so there is no reason not to come by & check us out.

The Next Objectivists meets pretty much every other Tuesday, 7:00 – 10:00 pm, at the Mess Hall, 6932 North Glenwood Avenue, in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois. You can find our schedule on the Mess Hall website: www.messhall.org.

I now offer a brief review of the previous year & announce a change to the workshop structure.

The Year in Review

During 2009, we read & discussed the work of a diverse group of poets who members felt have contributed to the concept of poetry from the outiside. We enjoyed the visits of Guest Objectivists, including Michelle Taranasky (who also led a workshop on Louis Zukofsky's “Mantis,” Christopher Alexander & Kristen Gallagher & Eric Elshtain (who led a workshop on lyricism). We read the poetry of American and French modernists, including H.D., Lola Ridge, Ezra Pound and Francis Ponge; we read some of the Black Mountain poets, including Robert Creeley & Ed Dorn; we discussed poems by Stephen Roedefer & Tom Clark. Most recently, we've been reading through the poets represented in Louis Zukofsky's special issue on Objectivists in Poetry magazine, including Lorine Niedecker, Kenneth Rexroth and Charles Reznikoff. We continue that project by reading Williams next week and the work of Basil Bunting on 9 February.

The Next Objectivists also participated in a summer-long writing project, as part of the Cultural Center's Synaesthesia Chicago event. During the months of June, July & August, we sent poetypists to the Cultural Center & out to the streets of Chicago. Using electric & manual typewriters, our poetypists transcribed sensory impressions in the public sphere, producing pages of “raw or/e.” This “or/e” was brought back to the workshop, where it was refined by members using objectivist poetic techniques to produce a chapbook of approximately 10 lyrics. The chapbook was redistributed for free at the Cultural Center & several hundred copies were distributed at the Printer's Ball on 31 July, 2009.

A Change in Structure

In 2009, most of our workshops focused on reading & discussion. In the coming year, the Next Objectivists will also include group writing sessions each week. We will read & discuss some poetry, and then write together & read poetry composed by each other in each workshop. Our goal is to continue the production of autonomous, anonymous poetry—poems produced by many authors, poems by the outside that is in-between. Beginning in the spring, the Next Objectivists will publish a series of broadsides produced by the workshop & launch an open-mic reading series to promote & celebrate outside poetics. Each evening, our basic structure will be:

7:00 – 7:15: arrivals

7:15 – 8:30: discussion of the week's poetry

8:30 – 8:15: break; reset the clock!

8:15 – 9:45: writing, reading & revising of group poetry

9:45 – 10:00: cleaning up & departures

Finally, our tentative schedule for up-coming workshops is listed to the right. Note that on Thursday, February 4, at 6:00 PM, the Poetry Foundation & Columbia College are hosting a FREE reading by Rae Armantrout at the Film Row Cinema, Columbia College, 1104 South Wabash Avenue, 8th Floor.

IN THRU OUTSIDEREAL

kenneth rexroth: we prefer him on vultures

2009-11-16T14:24:00.001-08:00

The whalebone sieves the whale food

From the plankton, the plankton

Finally dissolves the whale,

Liberating the whalebone.

Liberty is the mother

Not the daughter of order.

-- Kenneth Rexroth, The Phoenix and the Tortoise

Kenneth Rexroth was hard for us to like. Just coming off poetries of razor concision (Creeley, Niedecker) and dense experimental language (Dorn, Zukofsky), Rexroth's swells of plaintive descriptions embarrassed and repelled us.

In “A Letter to William Carlos Williams,” Rexroth's cloudy sentiment pukes forth mostly filler phrases and dropped names:

“You're in the Fioretti

Somewhere, for you're a fool, Bill,

Like the Fool in Yeats, the term

Of all wisdom and beauty.

It's you, stands over against

Helen in all her wisdom

Solomon in all his glory.”

“He was a great man. He knew

It was beautiful then, although

Nobody else did, back there

In the Dark Ages...”

Yeats and Helen? Wisdom and beauty? Was a great man?

As readers we were like, Oh come on.

II.

So we worked at clarifying our revulsions. We agreed we saw both pap and strong passages, which was perplexing, so we looked for exactly what was awkward.

We found a few things:

Embarrassment at the eroticism and florid language, the saying too much
Skepticism about meter as allowing – even inspiring -- excessive and imprecise language, and a smug metrical satisfaction with otherwise messy thought.
Concern about descriptive naming of an entire landscape, of renaming a mentor, of superfluous description as a patriarchal naming-and-cataloguing exercise which rexroth then strains through his own hardlined metaphoric purposes
Name dropping philosophers. Seems kind of cheap and gross.

We developed some postulates for his intent, or ways to try coming-back-around or moving forward from this reading.

The first is simply to anchor his poems in their historical moment, where chaotic excess of language offered alternatives to the repressed condensed line, and where a panoramic interest in landscape and international conflict maybe argued against the internal focus of the confessional lyric. This gets him off the hook, but its too simplistic.

A second angle is his compulsion to speak in full recognition of the articulatory task's futility and potential for humiliation. From this perspective, he is opting to write a poetry that is celebratory and sappy and doesn't bother to hide it, eschewing the violent excision of macho minimalism:

“The historian differs from

The poet in this: the historian

Presents what did happen, the poet,

What might happen. For this reason

Poetry is more philosophic

Than history, and less trivial.

Poetry presents generalities,

History merely particulars.”

“Remember years ago, when

I told you you were the first

Great Franciscan poet since

The Middle Ages? I disturbed

the even tenor of dinner.

Your wife throught I was crazy.

Its true, though. And you're pure, too.”

From the angle of attempting to say everything with unfocused feeling, Rexroth's a poor fit with the Objectivists. But its interesting that he goes for the loaded, awful subject, and that we react from a place of saturated sense -- the dead body of the soldier in the waves is less repulsive to us than the sentimentalized flesh of the live erotic female body. Because dead is true and sexy is invented? The place of discomfort with the poetry is interesting, anyway.

III.

Still, what good is creating giant, cringey poems that “own” their problems if they are awful to get through?

Looking at his later works – especially the ingenious Bestiary he created for his daughters -- suggests the project might have moved forward. In a task so literal and edenic-patriarchal as the Naming of All Animals, Rexroth locates the anxiety and embarrassment of the pater-descriptor's powers as the central subject of the poems - a far better, funnier alternative than saddling the reader with its awkward by-products.

I'm not sure this fully revives the 28 loooooooong pages of the Phoenix and the Tortoise, with “Hippias and Socrates / Contending for the title/ Of Most Autonomous Greek”, and “Egyptian chisels” taking on “the vast onion of the actual”. But we do see in Rexroth a place where the attempt to transcribe objectively dissolves in the anxiety of the transcribers role and the soft hearted impulse to “glorify” in poetry.

Either way, he leads us forward in two important ways:

1) preparing us for next week's reading of Ezra Pound, the ultimate executor of a project to Name Everything in All Possible Ways.

2) the assignment to write poems “with love and admiration” for our own hero/mentors.

One funny effect of reading critically to then write imitatively is the continual return to the humility of poetic effort. Will we do any better than Rexroth attempting to write sincere admiration and stay out of the syrup? We'll see.

Niedecker's "In the great snowfall before the bomb"

2009-10-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

Our conversation last night focused on the following passage by Lorine Niedecker from For Paul & Other Poems. The problem of containment—as in, what constitutes the context of the poem & the poet's distance from her environemnt?—cropped up continually in our discussion & will be discussed at length later in this essay.

But to begin, here is the passage we read, in full:

In the great snowfall before the bomb

colored yule tree lights

windows, the only glow for contemplation

along this road

I worked the print shop

right down among em

the folk from whom all poetry flows

and dreadfully much else.

I was Blondie

I carried my bundles of hog feeder price lists

down by Larry the Lug,

I’d never get anywhere

because I’d never had suction,

pull, you know, favor, drag,

well-oiled protection.

I heard their rehearsed radio barbs—

more barbarous among hirelings

as higher-ups grow more corrupt.

But what vitality! The women hold jobs—

clean house, cook, raise children, bowl

and go to church.

What would they say if they knew

I sit for two months on six lines

of poetry?

The most prominent poetic effect upon our first reading emerged as a shift between the penultimate & ultimate stanzas. The poet distances herself from the women & men alongside whom she has up to this point in the poem worked. Her poetry is closeted & the divulgence of this private act to us, the readers, separates poet & reader from “the folk” who customs are reported in the previous lines.

There is an ethical or moral separation of some kind that occurs in this removal of the lyrical self from its workplace environment that will trouble us throughout our analysis. The poem is flooded with the dialectic of ‘being there / not being there’ that makes itself known in the shift between these stanzas.

We first encounter it in the first stanza, where it emerges, upon rereading, in at least three instances.

Temporally: the poem is set in a past marked by an event of global importance: the detonation of “the bomb.” The bomb to end all bombs. The bomb that will cause an eternal winter—radioactive ash falling like snow. “In the great snowfall before the bomb” links this event to an early, much more localized & ordinarily recurring ‘emergency’ event—a winter storm that is ONLY RETROACTIVELY (radioactively? a half-life?) related to the singular violence of America’s use of atomic weaponry on August 6 & 9, 1945. We might imagine the memorable snowfall to have occurred some 8 to 5 months prior to the event which eclipses all previous sky-born cataclysms. It doesn’t matter exactly when, because the real work of this opening line is to perform a poetic function commensurate with William Carlos Williams’ notion of “the weather”: to link one element of social life (the international political) with another (the regional mundane).

Ethically: Already in the first stanza the poet separates herself from the “folk” she is about to write about. She recollects how, in the war-time winter when the decision to use the bomb was being made, the “colored yule tree lights” in “windows” were “the only glow for contemplation / along this road.” Let’s take the final line of this passage to mean both a physical road (that of the commute home from the printing factory) & the political-spiritual road along which any brave American might travel in the 1930s & 1940s: that metaphorical road of ‘fellow travelers’ known as the Communist party. The poem follows directly Pound’s advice, in the manifesto on imagism, to make the natural object the appropriate symbol. The “natural object” is the actual road; traveling along which road the poet sees many “colored yule tree lights.” The symbolic object makes this road a metaphor for mainstream U.S. culture & in this context the lights symbolize an unthinking acceptance by the general (Christian) population of holiday rituals. The inability to choose between materialist & spiritualist analysis constitutes the ethical or moral tension animating these lines.

Aesthetically: The holiday trash we install as decoration in our collective window is like & unlike the poem we are reading. One member drew attention to how the holiday windows of department stores (I’m thinking the infamous Macy’s X-mass windows displayed to the delight of commuter & tourist each year) produce a calm that temporarily distracts us from, among other things, the war. You don’t see Santa’s little soldiers getting blown to bit by smart or suicidal bombs in the displays, even if every gift is ideally a surprise that shocks the family. The problem of ‘here / not here’ is pronounced in the distinction between poem as sacred text & the far less sacred if far more prevalent texts of candles in the window. Buy the trashy decoration, slap it in the window, and call yourself blessed. The market’s realization of the familial iteration of sacrosanct ritual denigrates what it supports. Niedecker’s poem examines this problem, but the position she takes in relation to it can only be determined by interpreting tone, & it is to this end that we will turn as we begin to assess what happens between the first & last lines.

The poet continues to set herself apart from the environment she is writing about in such lines as “right down among em / the folk from whom all poetry flows / and dreadfully much else” & “I heard their rehashed radio barbs--/more barbarous among hirelings.” But what is the social accent—the pitch, the charge in the verbal atmosphere—of these lines. Do they drip with venom or are they more jocular? Do they speak of harsh contempt for their subject, or are they, as though in holiday spirit, to be read as though spoken with an exasperated roll of the eyes? The question of tone comes down to the phrase “But what vitality!” Do you, dear reader, here total contempt or contempt mixed w/ humorous admiration?

The problem of this question—a problem of interpretation of tone—is entirely ordinary. Everyone lives their own lives at a distance from their coworkers—the ego protects itself in part by maintaining a ‘healthy’ disdain for one’s fellows. This may be particularly true of subjects who imagine themselves to share a hidden identity—in this case, closeted poetry. Certain events occasion the dissolution of this ordinary distancing of the individual from her environment. Snow storms are one such phenomenon that most Midwesterners will recognize. During & after a good storm we often feel a bit closer to our neighbors, with whom we have shared the endurance of the event. Sometimes a similar feeling can be generated by mutually witnessing spectacles. (9/11 of course, but an even more pertinent one for U.S. citizens might be the shuttle disaster of the 1980s, which interrupted an event staged for mass consumption.) But there is a further chill that accompanies such witnessing—we are united by a force of division. The bomb is surely the ultimate signifier of this painful neighborliness for several generations of cold-war Americans.

In putting this problem to paper, Niedecker is speaking for or on behalf of her workers in the shop at the same time that she is distancing herself from them. Because, after all, couldn’t anybody adopt this perspective? Isn’t this the very question posed by the unanswered last lines, which turn the question around: what would they say, these other hard-working women (who bowl rather than write poems)? Do we have to imagine a purely negative response? How far apart is Niedecker the poet from those she writes about? What constitutes the difference that poetry makes in this poem?

The poem dramatizes this issue in the lines that speak of work environment nicknames. “Blondie,” “Larry the Lug”—these are the nominal equivalents of holiday window dressings—plucked from the radio & comic strips. Niedecker’s nickname is among the cheapest & most ready-to-hand monikers of modern patriarchy. Larry’s is an equally obvious & reifying reference to the working-class everyman. The poem brings something like the shop floor conversation onto its page with the second half of this stanza: “I’d never get anywhere / because I’d never had suction, / pull, you know, favor, drag, / well-oiled protection.” Here again the problem of one’s own cherished, depressing distance from one’s life. The young woman who dreams of some more intelligent, fulfilling life’s work won’t get ahead in the print shop. (Yet isn’t it exactly in the print shop, albeit from another position, that of the author, in which she aspires to get ahead?) Ambitious beyond the social norms & therefore perceived to be lacking in ambition. On the track “Piss Factory,” (Land), Patti Smith tells a story about precisely this predicament.

The list of words for this desire that seems, from the perspective of the shop floor, to be lacking is organized in another sphere by the rhyme of “suction / protection.” The poet’s attention to these words asks us to examine them more closely, & we find in the phrase “well-oiled protection” both the greased palms of ordinary patriarchal corruption (ordinary to us in Chicago anyway, under the ever watchful eye of the Daley family) & the war machine, with its offer of barbarity as protection.

Here again the poem mediates the relation between local & national contexts of domination & resistance. With this issue of contextual blurring in mind, we noticed how this passage is embedded in a much longer poem. The serial structure of Niedecker’s poetic pieces—mostly untitled lyric fragments separated from each other by a single typographical dot—was put into the context of Dickinson’s ‘daybook’ poetry, which is most fully developed in relation to a theoretical perception of the poetic effects by Williams in Spring & All & The Decent of Winter, and later practiced by fellow traveler poets such as Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen & Creeley.

Yet, the sequence in which this passage occurs was titled For Paul & Other Poems & it was astutely pointed out that this means that we should not blithely treat Niedecker’s serialized pieces as merely interchangeable passages, but should regard them as well-ordered parts in a more complex mechanism. There is a poem for Paul, & also other poems in this collection. The passage we focused around was about three-quarters of the way through the opening poem, which is “For Paul.” We read the entire poem aloud (it took about ten minutes, being at least eight pages long) & discovered that it is a pedagogic poem directed to a boy (Louis Zukofsky’s son? we speculated, w/out following up on it too closely…) who is six years old in the opening lines of the collection:

Paul

now six years old:

this book of birds I loved

I give to you.

Here the poem emerges in the context of an actual life—knowledge of the world & joy & sadness articulated in a specific dialogic address. In the practice of reading aloud we found a new mode of relation to & within the poem. We returned to the particular passage & found it to be organized by a tension between oral & typographic utterances. The “folk from whom all poetry flows” transmit their views of the world to each other primarily through conversation. It is from this conversation that we get Blondie & Larry the Lug & “pull, you know, favor, drag” & it is not a coincidence that these are listeners to the radio rather than readers of the papers. The literate is here preserved as a poetic activity & it is the transformation of spoken to written words that constitutes the ultimate difference that poetry makes for Niedecker. The poem is a secret diary, a letter to be sent away (to New York, to that community for whom it will register as art).

Jacques Ranciere’s notion of the ultimate aesthetic object of capitalist democracy as an “orphan letter” find its home in this poem’s unhappiness with home life. The poem as aesthetic object must be sent away for it to be properly appreciated. Composition in what Williams called “the American idiom,” as an aesthetic practice for the modern poet, requires dislodging speech from its familiar place—in the mouths of polish mothers, for example. One consequence of the application of this compositional practice is a transformation in the perception & use of the fragment. In another regime of aesthetic production & interpretation, the fragment references a problem for editors that can be expressed as a concern for the lack of a total text. The publisher warns her readers that these passages from Sappho (for example) should not be read as a coherent text because parts are missing. The aesthetic practices of modernism turn this perception of the fragment inside out. The fragment is now the guarantee of another kind of totality—the totality of the artist’s vision which, Duchamp-like, allows its view to settle upon this or that particular precisely because it’s the view & not the object that matters.

With this, we turned to our own poetry. For the immediate future, the second part of each workshop is dedicated to the reading & discussion of members’ poems. We give ourselves the collective assignment of trying to write work inspired by our readings & to bring that material to the next workshop.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, 10 November, 7:00 pm at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago. We will be reading a selection of poems by Kenneth Rexroth. If you would like to join the workshop, send an e-mail to nextobjectivists@gmail.com & the readings will be sent to you!

2009-10-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

TONIGHT
Lorine Niedecker & objectivist practice
We will be reading a section of Niedecker's poetry & discussing it in the context of Zukofsky's essays, which we began to work on last week.

Announcing the Autumn Schedule

2009-10-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

Hello Next Objectivists!

Our autumn schedule is about to begin!

We have a NEW MEETING DAY: this fall, the Next Objectivists will be meeting on the 2nd & 4th TUESDAY nights. We will still be meeting at 7:00 pm at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park (Morse & Glenwood; a quarter block south of the Morse Redline station).

Autumn quarter dates will be:

October 13
October 27
November 10
November 24
December 8
December 22 - Next Objectivist Winter Party!

During this quarter, our reading will be organized around the 'original' objectivist poets. We will begin by reading the material found in the February 1931 issue of Poetry Magazine (vol. xxxvii, no. v), edited by Louis Zukofsky. First, we'll read Zukofsky's essays: "Program: 'Objectivists" & "Sincerity & Objectification" for 13 October. After that, we'll read the other parts of the issue, & then look more closely at the work of some of the poets who appear there, most notably Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff & William Carlos Williams (as well as other Objectivist poetry, such as Lorine Niedecker's).

See you at the Next Objectivists!

Planning Meeting this Thursday

2009-08-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

Join the Next Objectivists this Thursday, 27 August, at our usual time & place (7:00 pm, Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago) for a planning session. We will discuss:

Our future schedule
Upcoming guest workshops
Syllabus
Past & future publications

If you would like a hand in crafting this workshop, all you have to do is attend!
Beginners always welcome! Leave your expertise at the door.

Next Objectivists on the Beach

2009-07-17T13:13:00.001-07:00

Join Matthias Regan & the Next Objectivists this Sunday, 19 July, at the Beach Poets' Pavilion on Loyola Beach in Rogers Park. Readings begin at 4:00!

LYRIC VOICE & the Poetics of the Outsidereal

2009-07-17T12:41:00.001-07:00

NEXT FRIDAY, 24 July, the Next Objectivists host our next guest objectivist, the poet, publisher, scholar & educator, ERIC ELSHTAIN!

Eric Elshtain is the author of Here in Premonition & The Cheaper the Crook, the Gaudier the Patter; his work can be found in journals such as McSweeney's, Skanky Possum, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill. He is the editor of BEARD OF BEES PRESS (www.beardofbees.com) & strongly rumored to be the creative force behind GNOETRY, the human/computer collaborative poetry mechanism.

On Friday, Eric will lead a workshop on the outsidereal poetics of voice. He has assembled a wonderful selection of readings for the workshop, which is attached to this e-mail & includes this poem (among others) by Arthur Sze:

Six Persimmons

1
“Cabron,” rings in the ears as he walks down
the corridor to death row. Where is the epicenter
of a Los Angeles earthquake? Hypocenter of “Fat Man”?
He watches a woman pour honey into a jar crammed
with psilocybin mushrooms. A few cells down,
a priest intones and oozes black truffles in olive oil.
He is about to look at the poems of a murderer,
sees a sliced five-thousand-year-old silkworm cocoon.
x: pinhole, eclipse; the, a; shadow of mosquito,
fern frond uncoiling in mist. “Dot,” says a Japanese
calligrapher who draws a dot beginning on the floor
off the page. He looks at the page, shrugs,
there is nothing there, and pictures budding chamisa
in a courtyard, yellow yarrow hanging over a bed.
In Waimea Canyon, ‘apapane, ’i’iwi.x: it’s
the shapes of ice in an ice floe, a light-green
glazed lotus-shaped hot-water bowl. He opens his eyes
and recalls staring into her eyes as she comes.

Join us one week from today for a potluck dinner & group meditation on a next objectivist poetics of lyric voice!

OF WOMEN & THE W(H)E(A)THER

2009-07-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

PART II:

Robert Creeley’s “The Rain”

The second poem we examined also concerns the weather that is whether, and was also written by a member of the “Black Mountain” school of poets: “The Rain” by Robert Creeley. Here is the poem in its entirety:

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

This poem was first published in one of the chapbooks Creeley drew upon to create the collection For Love: Poems 1950 – 1960 (which was published by Charles Scribners’ sons in 1962), and can be found in the Collected Poems, 1945 – 1975 (University of California Press); it receives an important critical treatment from Marjorie Perloff (whose introduction to Gunslinger is also a valuable introduction to that work), which some of the week’s workshop members also read.

Whereas Dorn’s poem puts grand vistas upon either side of the ego, Creeley’s world is interior, intimate, claustrophobic. Stuck indoors because of bad weather, the poet occupies himself with the dreary thoughts of an equally dismal whether. When a steady rain falls we hear it for a time, then forget it, its patter becoming a background noise—forgotten by virtue of its very persistence. The mind, Creeley suggests, is quite the opposite—it exists only by returning to itself, again and again. The relation of the “I” to the “myself” is one of continually enacted returns—self-consciousness as the mind’s nagging “insistence” that it be known to itself. One thinks of Beckett’s line, delivered (if memory serves) by Hamm in Endgame: “a dripping in my head.” The poet wishes for “something other than this, / something not so insistent,” but finds no satisfaction. Neither “ease” nor “hardness” emerges to provide relief from the dull patter of the mind’s self-perpetuating “uneasiness.”

There is a parallel here to the critique of western values we find in Dorn’s poem. Like many poets of his generation—John Cage, Allan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen—Creeley expresses uneasiness with Cartesian rationality. The zen Buddhism being promoted in artistic circles by D. T. Suzuki and others offers a position from which to criticize the Cartesian subject as suffering from “mind over mind.”

Help to escape this self’s haunting of the self—if help it is—arrives in the penultimate stanza, which introduces a second (third?) presence into the poem—the lover to whom the poem’s final three sentences are addressed. As in William’s poem, in which the wife to whom the poem is addressed primarily exists as a back-formation of the poet’s (or even, the poem’s) need to address ‘someone’, in “The Rain” the lover emerges as a subject projection, rather than as a being in the material world. It is possible to ‘flesh out’ this lover, as Perloff does, by imagining a domestic scene, just as such scene is built up by indirect reference in “This is Just to Say.”

In Creeley’s poem, we can imagine that a quarrel has taken place, and that the “final uneasiness” is the momentary conclusion of the argument—not an end to the anger, but only to its overt verbal expression. In this reading, the “semi- / lust of intentional indifference” is an ‘adult’ version of “the silent treatment.” All the libidinal energy is focused around pretending to ignore the other person.

Do the last three sentences of Creeley’s poem signal an end to this game? Are we to read them as in quotation marks—as a direct address to the lover, one that ends the silence? Or do they exist only in the silence of the poet’s mind, the silence of the page? Does the poet write the poem rather than say the words? The profundity of Creeley’s poem—its point of greatest logopoetic density, where the wit is transformative—lies in the emphasis it places on the single, ordinary word, “wet.” Sandwiched between lust and “decent happiness,” “wet” (as Perloff points out) takes on an explicit sexual connotation, one that is essentially pornographic in its effort to find evidence of desire on the lover’s body. This connotation, however, is immediately (although not completely) overwhelmed by the wetness of the rain. At the very moment of this inward-looking intimacy, we are overwhelmed by the outside ‘reality’ of water falling on the house—“wetness” was on the brain because of the rain. Or perhaps we should write “underwhelmed,” because what’s most remarkable is not the intrusion of a physically oriented vulgarity into the lyric, but the charge produced by the word’s verbal vulgarity. “Wet” is such a meager, common term. It’s hardly sufficient. As a word, it’s all washed up. If that’s not the case, its because Creeley has learned, from Williams and the Objectivsts and writers like Cage and Beckett, that it’s the ordinary words that do the most work.

Given the importance of double (or triple?) meanings—the importance of the display of verbal wit—we must ask, has the poet found a way out of the Cartesian anxiety? Is any solace from the uneasiness of ‘mind over mind’ to be found in the virtuosity of this duplicity? The answer must be no, in that the only ‘solution’ presented by the discovery of verbal density in the commonplace word is that of the poem itself. The poem gets written, the poet finds his satisfaction. The other, in as much as she exists at all, must cease to operate as a presence in the world in order for the poem to generate its aesthetic virtuosity. There’s something savage, if not brutal, in this displacement—more so in Creeley’s work than in Williams’ I think, because Creeley’s working in poetic form that Williams is inventing.

The major difference between Dorn’s immensely ‘outside’ approach and Creeley’s intensely ‘inside’ one helps us to better understand the politics of poetic style. Dorn’s parody creates a site of contestation—literally a battle over land and language—that Creeley’s poem denies. In Dorn’s poem, there is a utopia of virgin possibilities—the moon & the stars & the “perfect night” have been folded into western man’s empirical and empire-driven imagination, but in the vastness of their physicality they persist beyond all human imagination. Creeley’s more cynical and satirical verse presumes an impossibility of escape from the self. The subject is everything; the poem is everything; and all remains within the lyric tradition. By not taking seriously this tradition, Dorn risks a utopian frivolity. By taking it very seriously, Creeley condemns himself, as poet, to remaining within the uneasiness of the I-self.

OF WOMEN & THE W(H)E(A)THER

2009-07-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

PART I:

Edward Dorn’s “Prolegomenon”

We began with a mostly hypothetical problematic. Florence Herman Williams, wife of the famous poet, writes a reply to one of his most famous poems, “This Is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

[etc]

What becomes of her reply? What happens to the poem if the reply—let’s suppose it’s a similar note, granting or denying the forgiveness the poet goes on to ask for, or better yet, a treatise on democratic poetic forms & domestic intimacies. What happens when the reply emerges, bringing the poem back into contact with an immediate context of its dialogic reality—the causal family conversation that the poem tears itself away from even as it reproduces one side of it?

These questions, even when regarded hypothetically, lead us to a problematic that the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” Poetry and politics share this activity general activity, Rancière argues, because both arrange and rearrange the subjects, scenes, values & textures that compose our commonsense. Artists, like politicians, show us what is to be regarded as ordinary, as extraordinary, as worthy of attention, and, by omission, as unnoticeable. In the choice and treatment of subjects the writer of poems, like the writer of speeches, decides who gets to count as a subject & what gets to count as the world.

Thus, for example, in Williams’ poem, the profoundly democratic induction of ordinary domestic life into poetry—the refrigerator note as viable poetic form & content—occurs through a kind of surgical cutting that excises Flora from the world. The poem no longer addresses her—it is, as Williams famously wrote of all his poems, “addressed to the imagination.” The ‘note to wife’ becomes ‘poem as note’ by eliminating, among other things, the wife. The note is a poem because the woman is not. The poem removes itself from the world, precisely in order to bring that worldliness into the aesthetic realm; it makes the note its object by replacing the ‘original’ subject of its address—Flora—with an (imagined) reader—the subject to whom the poem is addressed. Flora is consigned to a place beyond even objectivity—a space of non-being. In this way, Williams founds a modern democratic poetics through a process of oblivion (much the way democratic American society is founded on profoundly antidemocratic systems of genocide & slavery).

In our workshop on Thursday, 25 June, we pursued these questions by reading two poetic passages written by two poets who were unquestionably, if somewhat indirectly, ‘disciples’ of Williams. Both passages about forty years ago, in that very exciting time in American poetry & politics known as ‘the sixties’—a time when repressed subjects of American democracy returned to haunt its aesthetic and political norms.

The first passage was the “Prolegomenon” to Book IIII of Ed Dorn’s hippy/cowboy epic, Gunslinger. Published as a limited edition pamphlet by Zephyrus Image in 1975, this marvelous passage also appears in the 1989 Duke University Press publication of the complete poem. It begins with its first letter partially obscured by the printed image of a woman in tank top & bell bottoms on a bar stool, holding aloft a drink & smoking – something – in a long holder. (Is it possible that she is at a “T-Rex Friday”?) The poem follows her raised glass with its own salute to the moon:

Goddesse, excellently bright
thou that mak’st a day of night.
You tell us
men are numberless
and that Great and Mother
were once synonymous.

Immediately evident is the faux Chaucerian English that provides the “female” side of this poem’s stylistic structure. One strand of Dorn’s logopoetics (“the dance of intellect among the words”—Pound) involves the presentation of this pseudo-traditional lit speak, which we might take to mean ‘culture’ in its most ‘pure’ & corrupted form:

We are drawn beneath your fieryness
which comes down to us
on the wing of Eleusian image [. . .]

Here is the romantic moonlight, the soft terrain of poetry, which is malleable as the cultural myths that give it life. But in stark contrast to this, another kind of knowledge production emerges:

We survey the Colorado plateau.
[. . . ]

This is all water carved
the body thrust into the hydrasphere
and where the green mesas give way
to the Vulcan floor, [. . .]

This scientific regime of meaning, “affirmed” by “cold instruments,” contrasts with the “fieryness,” such that the play between these elements reveals itself to be an organizing principle of the poem. It’s a contrast between literary language—styled as feminine and aligned with imagination and passion—and technological language—styled as masculine and aligned with the technical objectivity of the surveyor’s eye. “[W]e give our inwardness / in some degree to all things / but to fire we give everything,” says the first voice, bringing intimacy into direct contact with the natural world; “it is truly a small heat / our cold instruments do affirm it,” says the second, interposing the skepticism of rational civilization.

At stake in game between contesting elements is our view of the environment—of what Dorn called “the West,” meaning both a physical landscape and the imagination which enfolds it within history and destiny: the world-view that particulars of the landscape—depending upon whether they are selected to stand in for the whole or not—come to represent. Williams referred to the dialectic of material reality & imaginative representation as “the weather”: that which is everywhere & nowhere, inescapable & yet avoidable, cyclical yet unpredictable, remarkable only when it changes, yet always changing. For the modern poet, the weather is always also a whether: what gets recorded & how & why? What stands in for ‘the world’? To become the weather is to be expelled form the world of subjects in order to become that about which subjects talk—the world as backdrop, as beautiful landscape; whether or not any particular person belongs to one or the other of these categories is a political choice exercised by the poet.

In the next several stanzas, Dorn’s poem lingers on the impossibility of one or other world-view. Looking across the Colorado basin, he observes that

not far
from Farmington and other interferences
with the perfect night
and the glittering trail
of the silent Vía Láctea
there is a civil scar
so cosmetic, one can’t see it.

The “interferences” with the “perfect night” are the lights of small cities, like Farmington, New Mexico, which compete with the “glittering trail” of the milky way. Both technological and natural forms of luminescence interfere with the moon’s light—and yet all three sources are not enough to illuminate the “civil scar” that remains known and yet unknown—‘visible’ only in its absence. It is this “cosmetic” “superimposition” that Dorn pursues in the next stanza, in which he describes this absent presence as

like the ultimate property
of the ego, an invisible claim
to a scratchy indultum
from which smoke pours forth.

“[I]ndultum” enters medieval English from the Latin, meaning indulgence—a dispensation granted by the Pope, permitting deviation from church law; here this allowance is like a secret wish—it comes to us only indirectly, through a “claim” is itself “invisible” and lost in the scratches (the Papal ink?) and smoke (hellfire?) of its own making. What is this missing element if not “property” itself—the impossible “claim” to the land that allows (Western) civilization to pour its interfering putrescence—a darker night of ink & smoke—among the plateaus?

Here the poem turns away from its own carefully balanced ambivalence, rejecting the surveyor’s eye and its egoistic claim to property rights in favor of the goddesse’s less proprietary gaze; the last stanza returns us definitely to the “olde tyme” language with which it began:

But now over the endless sagey brush
the moon makes her silvery bid
and in the cool dry air of the niht
the winde wankles across the cattle grid.

Having previously delineated the oppositional linguistic and perceptual modes, Dorn’s poem commits a political act by adopting the moon’s mode. Yet he does without denying the persistence of the other world-view. If the “winde wankles” it does so across the “cattle grid.” The term refers both to a particular physical structure, a depression in a roadway covered with bars designed to keep cattle from passing along roads that cut across pastures, and the economic and cultural world-views that give rise to such a device—the surveyor’s grid that transforms land into property. The poem’s sense of closure is very much dependent upon the rhyme of this last word with “bid”—a poetic presence which calls to mind another scene—that of the auction where cattle are bought and sold. Consequently, even the moon becomes associated with the economic principles that her light seems intended to oppose. A further ambiguity and intermingling remains even as the poem throws down with the “goddesse.”

This Thursday's Workshop

2009-07-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

Attention past present & future Next Objectivists!

We are meeting this Thursday, 9 July, at our usual time & place:

The Mess Hall www.messhall.org in Rogers Park, Chicago, 7:00 - 10:00 pm.

The Mess Hall is located at 6932 N. Glenwood Ave. A stone's throw from the Morse Red Line stop & close to the Morse Metra station & Broadway & Clark buses! Easy to bicycle there, as well!

This Thursday, we'll be discussing selected passages from the work of Lola Ridge.

Here's a poem we'll be looking at:

WALL STREET AT NIGHT

Long vast shapes . . . cooled and flushed through with darkness . . .
Lidless windows
Glazed with a flashy luster
From some little pert cafe chirping up like a sparrow.
And down among iron guts
Piled silver
Throwing gray spatter of light . . . pale without heat . . .
Like the pallor of dead bodies.

NEXT OBJECTIVISTS THIS THURSDAY

2009-06-24T09:17:00.001-07:00

Attention past present & future Next Objectivists!

We are meeting this Thursday at our usual time & place:

The Mess Hall www.messhall.org in Rogers Park, Chicago, 7:00 - 10:00 pm.
The Mess Hall is located at 6932 N. Glenwood Ave. A stone's throw from the Morse Red Line stop & close to the Morse Metra station & Broadway & Clark buses! Easy to bicycle there, as well!

We currently have many schemes & plans & strategies underway! This Thursday, we'll be:

Finishing our reading/discussion of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger.

Getting started on poems by Robert Creeley & Lola Ridge. Here's a poem by Creeley we may wish to consider at length:

The Pattern (from Words)
As soon as
I speak, I
speaks. It

wants to
be free but
impassive lies

in the direction
of its
words. Let

x equal x, x
also
equals x. I

speak to
hear myself
speak? I

had not thought
that some-
thing had such

undone. It
was an idea
of mine.

We'll also be mining the synesthetic or/e generated by our in-the-field poetypists. Positions are available in our Poetypist pool! We're transcribing immediate worldly sensations into the imagination using typing machines in public locations all summer. See the previous post for more details. Send applications to nextobjectivists@gmail.com.

Join us! Every single one of you is welcome here. Our only rule is make! We address ourselves to the imagination! Beginners are particularly welcome! Leave your expertise at the door!

Keepin' it real in the Outsidereal

TYPISTS WANTED

2009-05-20T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Next Objectivists are in need of typist-poets! This summer we will be participating in the Synesthetic Plan of Chicago, "a multi-sensory and experiential mapping of Chicago’s neighborhoods" that will bring together over 40 artists and organizations into "a collaborative, interactive installation for the Chicago Cultural Center’s Visitor Information Center."

The Next Objectivists will be situated in and around the Cultural Center, recording by typewriter the immediate sensory environment. But to do this, we need you!

The Next Objectivists reject the figure of the autonomous, ‘genius’ artist who composes alone in his garret, far from the press of days. We prefer the poet as editor, the poet as reporter, the poet as typist, the poet as temp. We reject the notion that lyricism as fundamentally personable and private, a soft voice overheard. We prefer poetry that lives in the mouths of others, the poetry of the crowd, the mass, the marketplace, the people.

If this sounds good to you, please volunteer to spend a few hours this summer writing poetry for the Next Objectivists. We will be relying on volunteer poet-clerks to play the typewriter on a regular basis throughout the summer months. The material produced will be compiled in our regular workshops (held the second and fourth Thursdays of every month at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park) and edited into chapbooks, which will be disturbed through the Cultural Center.

Please help us in this project! Volunteer for an hour or two—perhaps even a few hours a week! We will supply the typewriter, paper, etc. If you wish to become a poet-typists, please send a message stating some possible times when you would be available to nextobjectivists@gmail.com. Beginners are always welcome! We teach poetry!

NOT OVERHEARD. HEARD.

The Next Objectivists.

Tomorrow's Workshop: Ed Dorn's Gunslinger

2009-05-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

The N.O. workshop will meet tomorrow evening (Thursday, 13 May), at the usual time & place (7:00 pm at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park: www.messhall.org).
Tomorrow we will begin a two-part discussion of

EDWARD DORN's
GUNSLINGER

Dorn's countercultural mock epic, originally published as a series of chapbooks & broadsides in the late 1960s and early 1970s San Francisco scene is a foundational text of the Next Objectivism; it is from Dorn that we borrow the term OUTSIDEREAL to designate writing that situates the subject in a world of practical forces beyond the ego’s scope.

Dorn, who was born only 160 miles southwest of Chicago in 1929 & died a few years ago, was a student of Charles Olson's a Black Mountain college. From Olson he learned various objectivist techniques practiced by Pound and Williams, such as imagist and melodic principles, the notion of composition by field (which is the basis for Olson's "Projective Verse") and the conceptualization of the poetic act as one of “finding one’s place” in relation to the cultural vortex of the era.

Dorn took these principles with him on a "wandering work search" to England and through the American Midwest. He was a populist by upbringing & often affected a cowboy style. After Black Mountain he spent several years researching and writing about the Shoshonean Indians & tried some homesteading in remote Idaho. He wrote a number of books of poetry that were published by his friend Amiri Baraka and translated poems by Cesar Vallejo & Spanish guerilla fighters of south and central America. He taught and lived near many sites of countercultural production & agitation, including the Bay Area nin the late 1960s and Kent State in the early 1970s, before finding a permanent faculty position at the university in Boulder.

Gunslilnger charts the landscape of the countercultural vortex that emerged in these years. The poem tells the story of a Clint Eastwood like nameless gunslinger, who travels across the "high plains" with a Too Stoned horse, a madam named Lil & various hipppie freak characters, including the poem's narrator, an I named I, in search of Howard Hughes. As they go, they preach a Heideggarian metaphysical gospel of salvation—free your mind by opening it to the being of space & time & your ass will follow. The poem features stunning action sequences that 'translate' into poetry the visual texts of Hollywood anti-war westerns. Its a little like Alexander Pope riding with the outlaw Jose Whales. "Sergio Leone is like the classics" Dorn once said--so you might also think of Sappho trading lines of blow with Eli Wallach.

The Horse evangelizes
now and again
the reinchecked horses
of the plaza, bringing news
beyond the heads of most of them. Still,
One big white runs off immediately
when it is explained to her the reins
are not fixed to the ground,
and into the ear of a tall black
standing in front of the saloon
the message rain straight and clear.

This horse laughed out loud
and tore the finely tooled saddle
off his back by hooking the belly strap
on a not in the hitching rail
whereupon he seized the pommel
with his Great Teeth and pitched
the who affair thru the swinging doors
leaving one of them banging
off one hinge. A loud
vacuum of pure silence
flowed suddenly forth
from that busy place.

It doesn't matter if you haven't read Gunslinger yet! Join us anyway. We're beginning a longer conversation & everyone is asked to try to bring a few copies of passages to share with other if possible....

JOIN US! Its FREE!

THE NEXT OBJECTIVISITS
MAKING LOVE TO THE THE

2009-04-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

Francis Ponge’s ‘Thing Poems’ continued

On Thursday, 9 April the Next Objectivists met at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago to continue our discussion of Francis Ponge. What a remarkable writer! We spent most of our time discussing this short but incredibly incisive poem (here translated by C. K. Williams):

The Cigarette

Let’s first create the atmosphere, at once misty, dry, and disheveled, in which the cigarette, since it itself continually creates it, is always laid athwart.

Then its person: a little torch, much less luminous than fragrant, from which in a rhythm yet to be determined a measurable number of little lumps of ash detach themselves and fall away.

Finally, its passion: that fiery bud, flaking off into silver dandruff, held by a sleeve immediately formed by the most recent of them.

We might begin with the most basic structuring elements of Ponge’s approach to this object: the poem is split into three parts, which are ordered temporally in terms of an act of creation: “first,” “then,” “finally.” This temporal structure refers, through the verb “create” and through the order of its parts, to the order in which the poem exists for the reader. That is, it is the temporal mode of an arrangement for the writer and a perceptual experience for the reader. Ponge is by no means providing us with a record of immediate sensory experience of the object—on the contrary, pains are taken to call our attention to the art and craft of creating the poem in precisely this way.

The arrangement is next determined by three thematic elements of the cigarette: “the atmosphere,” “its person” and “its passion.” These elements proceed from the specific and factual, to the abstract and metaphorical. The cigarettes’ atmosphere is, on a first instance at least, the smoke that it produces. It is therefore a commonplace, ordinary element of the cigarette to observe. “Person” (in the French, “personne”) make a striking metaphorical leap, because while we might ordinarily think of a cigarette as having an atmosphere (indeed, as Ponge says, of creating one), it is not customary to speak of the “person” of a cigarette as one might speak of its “filter” or “ember.” A similar leap is made when we move in the last line from “person” to “passion.” Here a kind of pathetic fallacy is generated: the cigarette is endowed with a human (or perhaps animal) trait—it is given an affective life.

This thematic ordering carries with it yet another dimension of relations: from the outside toward the inside. “Atmosphere” signifies an element that is physically outside of and surrounding the cigarette, whereas “passion” suggests something internal. Between them is “person,” which like a person’s body mediates between their external spatial surroundings and their internal feelings.

Passion, of course, indicates not just any feelings, but those which are particularly intense—one thinks, for example, of Christ’s passion, or of ‘a single night of passion.’ In the context of a passionate encounter, the phrase “fiery bud” suggests male or female genitalia and we are reminded of the importance of the cigarette to popular romance scenes and narratives. The atmosphere is not just a smoky one, but now also one of flirtation as this becomes a poem about getting closer to the hot object of desire.

Yet, remarkably, it remains always and foremost a poem about an object and about the words that describe—or, better, “create”—this object. Each of the three lines goes on to describe what Ponge clearly deems to be the core or constitutive feature of the object: its burning. The minute developments at the immediate site of the carbonization are taken up in detail: we are asked to notice how the cigarette “continually creates” its “misty, dry, and disheveled” smoke; how “little lumps” of ash “detach themselves” from the burning end in “measurable” quantities and at a “determinable” rate (if not yet determined) rate; and how the flakes of ash are “held by a sleeve immediately formed by one of them.”

The detailed, almost microscopic observation carries with it a charge of objectivity which counteracts the obviously subjective elements that emerge in the narrative about passion. As a result, the space of first-person authorial experience is evacuated, leaving a gap between the object and the words used to describe it. The words develop circuits of referential meaning which belong to the field of language, rather than to the cigarette. At the same time, the cigarette appears to exist in its objectivity—as a thing which is in no way dependent upon the words that describe it.

The ability to maintain this separation between word and thing is perhaps Ponge’s greatest contribution to the practice of Poetry from the Outside. In his essays on objectivist poetry in Poetry magazine, Louis Zukofsky writes of the ‘balance’ which gives the poem its objectivism. Such a balance is achieved in Ponge’s three-line poem. It’s a balance that comes about from the radical separation of subject and object within a few dozen words which intertwine both the impenetrable ‘thatness’ of the object’s being and the self-sustaining circuits of passionate intent which ‘translate’ the object without ever quite containing it or matching up with it….

This coming Thursday, 23 April, we will meet to continue to build our Time Line and World Map of POETRY from the OUTSIDE. We do this in order to compile poems and practices of writing we may wish to study in the future, and in order to begin to recognize the tremendous range of writing that suggests itself when we think broadly about ‘objectivism’ in verse and what it means to write poetry from outside the I-self

Our focus for this Thursday’s class is next objectivist poetry from around the world: please join us and bring a passage of poetry that seems to be written from the outside and which was not written in the United States. English translations are appreciated but not required! Bring copies of a short passage and some information about the writer’s outsider practices if possible!

Our Friend Francis

2009-03-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday the Next Objectivists had a fantastic discussion about the work of Francis Ponge. Ponge was a French writer (he never described himself as a poet) who wrote prose poems focused on everyday objects. He aimed to write "definition-description literary art work" and distrusted ideas, turning instead to concrete objects as a way to understand the world. He wrote primarily from the 1940's - 1970's and was involved with the surrealists, as well as the Communist party in the 1940's. Due to the depth and intensity of the discussion, the group only got to a couple of poems! We spent most of our time discussing the poem "The Pleasures of the Door" from Taking the Side of Things (1942), particularly the differences between translations by Beth Archer and C.K. Williams.

The Pleasures of the Door

(translated by Archer)

Kings do not touch doors.

They know nothing of this pleasure: pushing before one gently or brusquely one of those large familiar panels, then turning back to replace it -- holding a door in one's arms.

The pleasure of grabbing the midriff of one of these tall obstacles to a room by its porcelain node; that short clinch during which movement stops, the eye widens, and the whole body adjusts to its new surrounding.

With a friendly hand one still holds on to it, before closing it decisively and shutting oneself in -- which the click of the tight but well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.

The Pleasures of the Door

(translated by Williams)

Kings never touch doors

They're not familiar with this happiness: to push, gently or roughly before you one of these great friendly panels, to turn towards it to put it back in place -- to hold a door in your arms.

The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; this quick hand-to-hand, during which your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment.

With a friendly hand you hold on a bit longer, before firmly pushing it back and shutting yourself in -- of which you are agreeably assured by the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.

The group was divided on which one of the translations was better. Overall, most people thought that "Kings do not touch doors," was stronger than "Kings never touch doors," but felt that "click of the powerful, well oiled-latch" was better than "well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms." The formality of the Archer translation was noted as compared to the Williams version. The group also mused on the more "American" feel of the Williams version, as well as the muscular sounding consonants in that version. The different translations allowed the group to discuss the differences between voice and tone in each translation. It was also noted that simply being more formal does not make a poem more objective.

Ponge's work is a perfect example of thinking through objects. While he claimed to be disgusted by ideas and philosophies, it's difficult to read his work without seeing metaphorical leaps and connections to the world at large. When discussing "The Pleasures of the Door," a large part of the discussion centered around whether or not the poem was political in nature. Is the poem merely about the pleasures of interacting with a door? The initial line immediately brings us into a political mode of thought -- noting that royalty chooses not to indulge in small pleasures such as opening doors. This brought up a discussion about the gulf between the common people and their leaders. The 1992 incident of President Bush being confused by a barcode scanner at a grocery store came up as modern day example of this problem. www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0flhnboptk

Much was learned from the discussion of Ponge's work, and I think everyone left with a greater appreciation for the objects and pleasures of daily life. Ponge shows us that even the simplest things -- opening doors, oysters, oranges, trees -- are worthy of exploration and investigation.

Join us the second Thursday in April when we will return to some of Franics Ponge's work and try our collective hand at homophonic and regular translations!

Francis Ponge

2009-03-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

On Thursday 12 March the Next Objectivists read and discussed several passages by Francis Ponge. More it to be said upon what we learned about Poetry from the Outside by reading Ponge in subsequent posts. At present, we would like to share the result of our group writing exercises.

We observed how Ponge focused his writing—often over many years—around ordinary objects, often producing complexly self-referential hieroglyphs that politicize and philosophically reflect upon the everyday experiences we have with oysters, doors, and other such things. We chose as our oyster Oreo cookies and as our door the wood floor of the Mess Hall. Each of us wrote for a half hour on these objects, then combined some of our most interesting passages to make the following:

OREO

When it comes to printed foodstuffs, Oreos are the leaders of the pack.
The intricate delicacies of printed foodstuffs. A fragile fringe, interrupted by small breaks, rings an inner orbit of dots and dashes—the Morse code of taste. This code encircles a ring of Kaiser’s crosses which in turn enclose the name of the object—stamped upon the cookie’s face like a coin.
The box of Oreos is comprised of four rectilinear struts dividing three Oreo phalanxes, which rest in curved, grooved basins like the stupefied devotees of a royal luminary.
The tease of a white petticoat hangs from a double-rimmed chocolate wheel. A twist of the top one way, a tug of the bottom the other way bares the lingerie to front teeth that scrape, leave skid marks that must be licked.
When broken apart the cookie with less cream on it is lighter and appears inadequate. The cookie with more cream on it is heavier and appears more than satisfied.
An Oreo is to a floor is an impossible metaphor.
An Oreo is to a floor as an offering is to a church.
An Oreo is to a floor as an American is to a European.
The cross-hatch strengthens on an axis.
The cross-hatch patterns fill the bounded space.
Oreo, you are waiting to become manipulated and fondled. Chocolate cream duality, round, transforming my spit into grocery paste.
Why is it man wants nothing more than to put coins in his mouth? He’s been doing it since he was a child. Is it the tiny raised images his tongue desires? Is it the tiny grooves along the edge?
Someone told me once: “that white stuff—it’s all lard, kid!” Tasty lard! Who cares! Wabisco, Wabisco, Nabisco!
Prepackaged, manufactured, mass-produced clones of pearly lusciousness, perfection of joy denied the diabetic & love-child of cocoa & milk lobbyists penetrating the kindergarten with blackened teeth and whitened arteries.

WOOD FLOOR

Remember when you heard you couldn’t just start over? New hardwood panels over poison only equals prettier poison.
Who would have known wooden floors were insomniacs who understood Atlas and his back problems?
Scratches, scuff marks, paint stains, dust, dirt, crumbs, candy wrappers, notebook scraps on the floor, but no apology letter written to the floor promising restorative justice in the form of a fresh varnish job, new nails, or buffering from its owners.
No one shoveling out the small soil the boards have been pushed away from each other, soon the floor will be given over to the dirt rows.
Floors are beginnings—offering the solidity of no mistake, the delight of constructing the future.
It became a floor a long time ago when logs were placed at right angles and other logs were added to these first four—no five, there was a door—to become walls and a roof—made of something, I don’t know what—and the grass died, and they started sweeping it. Now it’s hard and flat—so hard it broke a teacup once.
Bottom or top, position relative to the head or foot, two by fours, march in line, bear the skid marks, slips, scratches as the veneer, impregnated with Oreo cookie crumbs, mop water, sheds its natural color, its milled odor to bare itself.
Cracked, chipped, skinned—intimately familiar with the gutter anatomies of rodents, ants and roaches. Scuffed, scratched, scorched—supportive of the refuse of construction. Scrubbed, brushed, buffed—slippery for socked soles, summer swells & littered with scraps & bits of toe nails, toe taps, boot heels. Hollow echoes of lives lived.
Brown, dull and secretly Russian, the floor provides the perfect metaphor for . . . something. We’ve yet to decide on an approach or even any sort of tone but there it lies forlorn, forgotten and forever flat until we, the self-appointed givers of life and meaning, use it to launch all that it could represent—what it could be—to the reader—to the writer—to the reader—to the reader.
So snug. So cozy. So fair. Three points make a place. But a thousand make a floor. There in the corner a baseboard makes an unwelcome but necessary interruption. Scuffed only to the point of character. Maybe a tad beyond this floor is as welcoming as any timber can be in its double lacquered form. Unbroken verticals random horizontals or maybe the other way around. Cro-Magnon man never knew the simple pleasure of a spine pushed unnaturally close to a perfectly parallel floor.
Sturdy, solid, and old, wood that could have been pulled from the forest or pulled from a hull. Singularly the planks only the slightest of significance unless perfectly applied. But as part of a floor part of this floor it provides a place to build an area to gather. A plane on which to rest.

THURSDAY 12 MARCH WORKSHOP ON FRANCIS PONGE

2009-03-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

The Next Objectivists Workshop meets this Thursday 12 March at 7:00 pm in the Mess Hall in Rogers Park Illinois! JOIN US! Experience Poetry from the Outside!

This Thursday we will read several short pieces by Francis Ponge. Here is the first of them:

From Taking the Side of Things (Le Parti Pris de Choses)

Translated by Beth Archer (unless otherwise noted)

The Oyster

The oyster, about as big as a fair-sized pebble, is rougher, less evenly colored, brightly whitish. It is a world stubbornly closed. Yet it can be opened: one must hold it in a cloth, use a dull jagged knife, and try to more than once. Avid fingers get cut, nails get ripped: a rough job. The repeated pryings mark its cover with white rings, like haloes.

Inside one finds a whole world, to eat and drink; under a firmament (properly speaking) of nacre, the skies above collapse on the skies below, forming nothing but a puddle, a viscous greenish blob that ebbs and flows on sight and smell, fringed with blackish lace along the edge.

Once in a rare while a globule pearls in its nacre throat, with which one instantly seeks to adorn oneself.

If figuring out what sensations are alive to the imagination in this & similar work, then attempting to discern the mechanics of the situation so that we can all write like this sounds good to you, JOIN US THIS THURSDAY!

ALL WORKSHOPS FREE &
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!!!!!

Christopher Alexander & Kristen Gallagher Reading

2009-03-07T11:12:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, 28 February, we read the work of our guest obectivists in our usual fashion: the poet reads a passage of his or her work, which is then read a second time by another obectivist and then discussed, sometimes at length, by the group before another poem is read. It’s a slow process, but one that turns attention away from the author & onto the work at hand.

Here is my initial take on just a very little of all that we discussed. Other objectivists & interested parties are welcome to join in by posting their own takes on the poetry!

I have read Alexander’s work for many years & have known some of Gallagher’s as well for quite a few years. In my view, both poets practice exemplary forms of poetry from the outside. Their writing is often intertwined in various way—they have recently co-authored a number of remarkable books (including Thumb Suckers & Pundits) written by various objectivist methods—particularly the use of another medium as the primary source text from which to draw poetic experiences (TS&P is drawn from television “talking head” news programs watched from May to November, 2007). The basic principles of imagism are everywhere present in this writing—economical, melodious but prose virtues, a collage of images rather than a coherent narrative.

But their presentations at the Next Objectivists on Saturday were from quite different poetic practices. Reading this work, it occurred to me that a some of the larger assumptions that motivate what I’m calling objectivist practice can be discerned when regarding so of the differences in poetic style.

We began with a sequence from Gallagher’s project “No Goal.” I write ‘project’ because although a book entitled No Goal was published in 2006 by Rubba Ducky Press, Gallagher’s more recent work continues to appear under this title: for example in the Fall 2008 issue of the absolutely lovely magazine Model Homes. The project is clearly an on-going experiment with various methods of writing everyday life in the modern world & the writing is itself about processes, rather than nominal states. Processional writing is a very important part of the Next Objectivism—because our focus is on the work, not the resume, we tend to reject the implicit narrative of a moment often found in first-person lyrics in favor of on-going experiments which are sliced into various samples.

The first passage of Kristen Gallagher’s work that we read was from a sequence entitled “Reading a Map”:

We’re facing this way. We came down. We just came from here so this is that – what is that? This is that and and this is that – OH!—ok wait—what is that? This is that Am I wrong? I just don’t know! well, yeah. I thought we were coming from here—we are—but then that would be here then—oh—and this Yeah, I don’t remember june beetle bridge….mm-mmm, so I guess we came this way. That’s ok, whatever, here we are. This way? This way? I dunno. This way? Yah, you’re right. This way.

I was forgetting that we were meant to come.

The forest is ending.

Oh, it’s Cars.

This poetry takes an austere, holistic approach to the imagination. Gallagher states that this approach to poetry begins with Wordsworth’s famous decision to write in “the real language of men.” At the beginning of what Jacques Rancière calls the “aesthetic revolution”—the ‘silent revolution’ that shifted the relationship between art and the world toward its modern subversion of classical genres—Wordsworth declares that poetry belongs to the domain of ordinary language as its spoken. William Carlos Williams later calls this project “writing in the idiom,” and the contemporary poet Bob Perelman—an important influence on Gallagher’s work—carries on this tradition by tracing the movements of “vernacular” thought.

Gallagher’s approach is remarkably straight-forward: she records conversations using a hand-held audio cd recorder, and makes transcriptions of these overheard conversations the basis for her writing. Gallagher speaks of her poetry as a kind of sampling—the poet as d.j., which is version of the poetry as editor. (Marianne Moore is an important influence here—she also cultivated an editorialist sensibility for writing from the outside.)

I call this style “holistic” in order to indicate the very clear distinction that is maintained between the word as embodied speech act—language caught up in the flesh of the moment—and the word as literary orphan—the faceless, nameless letter of the text which confronts us from out of nowhere (from the clean slate, blank void of the page) & without the clear intent of meaningful communication. This distinction between the words as spoken and the words as printed—the basis for Williams’ notion of the imagination—is everywhere evident in Gallagher’s poetry.

On the one hand: immersion in the immediacy of the world—the voice or voices are lost, turned around, living in the confusion of the moment. Absorption in the drama. Words as moment by moment efforts to make sense of the world. On the other hand: the distance of mechanistic recording. The simple but absolute difference of transcription as a removal and return. The dramatic turning away of anti-absorption. Words revealing their own impersonal patterns of relation as they are carried away from their immediacy into the subtle negation of utility occasioned by the aesthetic regime.

If the ultimate goal of the Next Objectivists is to teach ourselves a mode of composition I call “Harmalodics” (the word is Ornette Coleman’s, used to describe a mode of collective improvisatory composition based on the rhythmic spacing of ideas—in short a melody of meanings), Gallagher’s work shows us how poetic harmony can be produced by allowing the clear and direct distinction between two modes of language to reveal itself. A lower pitch—the immediate, idiomatic, vernacular register—resonates alongside a higher pitch—the straining toward the free circulation of words in the aesthetic realm of the literary.

Chris Alexander’s work, by contrast, engages a multiplicity of tonal shifts to generate a flashier, more intricately textured harmonizing. Alexander also draws from idiomatic source texts—but his sources are internet conversations and blog posts. For several years, Alexander has produced Zombie Safety Puppet Show (http://zombiesafetypuppetshow.blogspot.com/), a poetry blog that actually makes poetry out of the material on other blogs. We began with this passage from one of Alexander’s recent blog poem “More Than Meets the Eye, Bitches!”

I LOVE THE FUCKING TRANSFORMERS
oh yes, I told you it was awesome
now I’ll start to critique it…

crazy product placement in like every shot
no this product placement was way over the top
like all the GM cars & everybody scarfing up
Pepsi with the logo fixed & in focus.
The xbox placement was cool though,
they weren’t all GM cars.
Yes they were, name one non-GM car
even the ambulance was a fucking GMC
& do not get me started on the military propaganda

The same poem ends with these lines, which delighted everybody:

seriously: dude
dude seriously
duuuuuuuuude
how about that Transformers movie
Are there some robots in that shit or what?
Uh your moms in it
HAHAHAHAAHAA

Alexander pays minute attention to both idiomatic textures of the literary chatter of the internet and the melodic elements of imagist poetry, as practiced by Williams, Pound, Moore, Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Neidecker & other poets. As the poem begins, we disentangle the nets of being that make up internet chatter. The voices are not particularly distinguished on Alexander’s page, so that it takes a moment to recognize the terms of the debate one is ‘overhearing.’ An argument about whether or not every robot car in the Transformers movie was branded by General Motors or not is itself peculiarly precise—it reveals a critical engagement on the part of wary consumers, while at the same time showing the terms of their debate to be caught up in a crippling—if also exhilarating—minutia.

A similar set of conversational gambits unfolds in the second quoted section: the delicate tones of bored playfulness are brought forward in this little poetic dialogue, which is also about engaging and refusing to engage in the production consumption of mass-marketed entertainment cultures. Deadening apathy (the stupid, obvious joke) & organic modes of resistance to consumer culture (Rabelasian crudities and playful reproductions of verbal speech acts) intermingle.

In many of Alexander’s short pieces, this harmonious positioning of tones & textures calls attention to a species of shame cultivated in proximity to the culture industry’s shameless promotion of all things cute, adorable, cuddly, and otherwise gooey with cheap sentiment. The poems manage this relation formally, by partially imitating the textures they describe, even while maintaining a clear sense of nausea. This ‘inside/outside’ relation to the aesthetic and political sensations provoked by cultural products in something Alexander learned from Ed Dorn’s Abhorrences, and one way to think of this poetry is as a sequence of poetic editorials on the politics of cuddling in post-Columbine on-line American world-culture. Consider “Haiku Super Explosion”:

1 plastic measle, 6 glasses of cola & absolutely no sleep
46 Beanie Babies, all mint with tags apart
a devil doll on stick legs in fascista leather
gray distressed Converse sneakers,
big flapping horse’s ears & crap film acting
El rey de los Monstruos contra el Rey de Skull Island
no tag chubby free celebrity porn video
Enough rubber to make even the Michelin Man blush

A polyphony of collaged passages that belong and don’t belong to the “voice” of the poem—a voice against itself, a patterning of different tones of signification to produce a harmonic essay on a very protean topic: the way desires are organized by the marketplace to produce opiates. Adrift in a sea of endlessly proliferating choices, we become like Williams’ “automatons,” “locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.” Alexander objectifies this drifting. His poems are like glass submarines immersed in the ocean of imagination, charting the little pink blossoming devils’ flowers & glowing sea snakes of democratic culture.

Next Objectivits Workshop of 26 February 2009

2009-03-04T20:00:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, 26 February, Guest Objectivists Christopher Alexander & Kristen Gallagher led the Next Objectivists in a workshop & writing exercise beginning with passages from Georges Perec.

The exercise was one that Kristen & Chris frequently teach to students at the City University of New York. We read aloud from the section entitled “The Street” in Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. The section begins:

The buildings stand one beside the other. They form a straight line. they are expected to form a line, and it’s a serious defect in them when they don’t do so. They are then said to be ‘subject to alignment’, meaning that they cay by rights be demolished, so as to be rebuilt in a straight line with the others.

This parallel alignment of two series of buildings defines what is known as a street. The street is a space bordered, generally on its two longest sides, by houses; the street is what separates houses from each other, and also what enables us to get from one house to another, by going either along or across the street.

One feels immediately the grip of Perec’s abstraction. Crucial to his project is a shift in attention which involves the disintegration of ordinary scripts of seeing & the reintegration of new visual patterns that are less obvious as one goes about one’s daily business. Each day we go up and down streets, with little regard for the structures that organize the world in this particular way.

Perec, in his cool tone—offhand, hip to practicalities—suggests that it is possible for us to observe systems as he does. We, too, can write like this if we wish: we need simply “Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps.” “You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colorless,” he tells us. “Detect a thrythm: the passing of the cars. . . . Look at the number plates. Distinguish between cars registered in Paris and the rest.” Simple & clear passages that suggest how one might generate this abstraction from person to system.

He doesn’t offer us a view of how things ‘really are.’ Only the world that coalesces around these abstractions. In other words, a negative dialectics: the ‘real’ of ordinary life is not there for Perec. There is no representation of the street beyond what is written. That other street lives in its steadfast flux, unorganized, ordinary. We begin the passage with the big abstractions because there is only the writing.

For Perec, it seems that the inevitable transformation of the world that happens when an objectivist poetic exercise is engaged begins with prepositions. Writing inevitably transforms the world into prepositions: when one stops and writes about the street, the temporal, spatial & otherwise causational relations between events calls out for attention. Hence the move toward systems: in language the things that we see have relations, and in ordering those relations, Perec orders the world. His effort is to order it in favor of objective abstraction:

Decipher a bit of the town. Its circuits: why do the buses go from this place to that? Who chooses the routes, and by what criteria?

In this straight-forward sense, Perec’s work nicely exemplifies an effort to produce an objectivist ‘factory of the sensible.’ By trying to write what he sees in the most objective manner possible—in this case, figure out how to record systems, rather than merely moving along one of them—Perec supplies models for a simple & powerful strategy of writing outside the self. He writes fully within the imagination, reworlding the world\ in a radically democratic fashion.

The move away from the first-person un-seeing ordinariness that is absent from Perec’s text toward the abstraction that results from sitting and observing for long periods of time (a disruption at the level of visual & aural rhythms produced by the act of writing for no reason but that of objective observation) is typical of the poetry of the outside. One of its most prominent origins—no doubt an influential one on Perec & the Situationist & Oulipian writers with whom he affiliated—is Edgar Allan Poe’s fascination with what Henri Lefebvre would eventually dub “everyday life in the modern world.” A much celebrated early conceptualization of how to relatievto the imagination that makes reading the world in this manner possible can be found in the opening pages of Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”:

At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.

In his laconic manner, Perec advises us to attempt the very practice that Poe articulates:

The people in the streets: where are they coming from? Where are they going to? Who are they?

People in a hurry. People going slowly. Parcels. Prudent people who’ve taken their macs. Dogs: they’re the only animals to be seen. You can’t see any birds—you you know there are birds—and can’t hear them either. You might see a cat slip underneath a car, but it doesn’t happen.

Nothing is happening, in fact.

Here a predominantly objectivist attention to details described in the ordinary relations produced between them when one simply sits and contemplates (“You must write about it more slowly, almost stupidly,” he tells us “Time passes. Drink your beer. Wait.”) produces new knowledge. The world transforms itself in our gaze. It suffers a decent into language, in order to arise again as the aesthetic reorganization of itself. The imagination envelopes us & the dignities & endless possibilities of the collective self replace the pissed-off, errand running, nervous, on-the-way-to-work I-self that has prevented the whole world from erupting into poetry.

Slow your mind & your ass will follow.

Or is there something else going on?

In their conversation, the Next Objectivists soon discovered that something else was going on in Perec’s text. Another kind of world was possible—a world saturated with sentiment & alive to the endless possibilities that emerge all the more vividly for being operative in the immediate flux of experience. Regarded with this figuration in the driver’ seat, another voice manifested itself—a slightly tweaked first-person lyric suffering the street in on-going trauma. Stephen Dedalus as a Parisian hustler, juggling Oxycodone & amphetamines & strung out to the point of mentally bopping out. A comic book reality: the story of Raskolnikov as told by Guy Ritchie. Try reading these lines aloud in the stressed-out voice of a hophead gangster who can’t act—like Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas if it had been played by Leonardo DeCaprio:

The street: try to describe the street, what it’s made of, what it’s used for. The people in the street. The cars. What sort of cars? The buildings: note that they’re on the comfortable, well-heeled side. Distinguish residential from official buildings.

The shops. What do they sell in the shops? There are no food shops. Oh yes, there’s a baker’s. Ask yourself where the locals do their shopping.

This is the more sentimental Perec—the limits of the program. The subjective emerges as a fascinating remainder, a ghost that shimmers across the surface of the words. There is much more that should be said about the shift that occurs in Perec’s writing when read with collective attention.

Led by Chris & Kristen, the Next Objectivists participated in a group writing practice. We brought our chairs to the large plate glass window of the Mess Hall and turned off the lights. We sat in several rows looking out at the dark, rainy street, notebooks on our laps, writing what we saw. After a half-hour or so of writing in silence, we returned to the table and each person cut & pasted into a sequence some of the most interesting passages we had produced. We read the passages aloud together, then ate & drank collectively before parting ways.

Here is our poem:

Attributes of the frame—

two bars, and a pane

between, lightening towards

its surface.

1. Glass 2. Water 3. Concrete and water 4. Pavement & water 5. Cement and water 6. Gravel and water 7. Branches and water 8. Brick and water 9. Sky and water

The wild—disobedient lines have stopped

movement, as if lines can be shy—

you can only assume 2 or more eyes

you changed its speed of motion

I forgot to mention the power lines.

raised margin of unformed vegetation

in the plans the zone labeled “unplanned”

For all its art, the wall depends on the street. The wall wants to demean the street—its plain black flatness but behind its screaming mouth and bulging eyes and red lips

it depends on the street.

the wall wants more than art, it

wants freedom

street you are a nostril

matched past CTA by

your other nostril, northbound

as alleys, hiding green-apple trees

A red & white sign supported by

slender metal posts among the

tree’s branches:

e e p O u t

c tric c ent

it tells us.

The trees live on our embankment of dirt held up by the mural’s wall.

There are rectangles of yellowish light, pieces, rooms of a building where someone is away inside.

“Arts for all” says the mural. I am terrifically

bored. Some engineers have raised

the earth about 25 feet above the street.

Half the height is a retaining wall

of concrete. Then tress and shrubs

anchoring the steeply sloped earth

upon which, smeared like cream frosting

sit twelve inches of white gravel.

The train cuts right across

the center of the image

5 minutes must have passed

since I began this piece

b/c the train has come again

& blocks out the dust and yellow light of those house windows

street cleaning scheduled

for something to avoid we could attend

come see the street cleaning

An exit sign is reflecting onto the window (as is my pen, hand & notebook The exit sign looks like it was planted,

glowing into the earth.

10 feet away, wild lines, resting on

circles, 4 in all, with a 5 on its side with

letters J E E P

Trees and other brush approach

the very edge—some ominous

others possessed of a slight lethargy

The street is sincere. Dark and straight. It asks nothing from the buildings that stand facing it—staring at it relentlessly. The street has no demands.

How much can you cherish

a person as much as their

cough

Welcome Guest Objectivists Christopher Alexander and Kristen Gallagher!

2009-02-24T12:13:00.001-08:00

The Next Objectivist Workshop is delighted to welcome two of the most insightful and hardworking experimentalists in poetry today:

KRISTEN GALLAGHER

&

CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER

This THURSDAY (2/26), at 7:00 pm and SATURDAY (2/28) at 4:00 pm, Chris & Kristen will visit the Next Objectivist Workshop at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago.

Both poets are graduates of the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo, where they trained with many of the best contemporary writers in the objectivist tradition (including Robert Creeley, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein). As writers, publishers, designers and visual artists (both are also members of the CAfF Collective, a shadowy organization that sometimes describes itself as 'a radical experiment in aesthetic democracy'), Kristen & Chris continually create new forms of artistic, intellectual, and practical possibility. They live in Brooklyn, New York.

On Thursday, they will lead a discussion of work by the Oulipian writer and film maker, Georges Perec and teach us how to see the world in new ways. On Saturday, we will read and discuss some of their most recent experiments in poetic doing & making.

Here is a brief preview of the some of the exciting word we have to look forward to!

From Kristen Gallagher's Reading A Map:

---------------------
We’re facing this way. We came down. We just came from here so this is that -- what is that? This is that and and this is that – OH! – ok wait – what is that? This is that Am I wrong? I just don’t know! well, yeah. I thought we were coming from here – we are - but then that would be there then – oh – and this would be that – we did just come over that though, so we must have not gone this way at the right time? Yeah, I don’t remember june beetle bridge...mm-mmm, so I guess we came this way. That’s ok, whatever, here we are. This way? This way? I dunno. This way? Yeah, you’re right. This way.

I was forgetting that we were meant to come.

The forest is ending.

Oh, it’s Cars.

"Haiku Super Explosion"
by Christopher Alexander

1 plastic measle, 6 glasses of cola & absolutely no sleep
46 Beanie Babies, all mint with tags apart
a devil doll on stick legs in fascista leather
gray distressed Converse sneakers,
big flapping horse’s ears & crap film acting
El rey de los Monstruos contra el Rey de Skull Island
no tag chubby free celebrity porn video
Enough rubber to make even the Michelin Man blush

SEE YOU at the NEXT OBJECTIVISTS!

Next Objectivists Recent Meetings & Latest Work

2009-02-16T18:58:00.001-08:00

The Next Objectivist Workshop meet twice this last week. On Thursday, 12 February Guest Objectivist Michelle Taransky, visiting from Philly, led us in a discussion of Louis Zukofsky’s “Mantis.” Much was learned, or at least it felt that way to me. I was particularly thankful to the group for helping me to see what gets done in the poem through the “thoughts’ torsion” produced by juxtaposed fragments of speech in lines like these:

“Banks, ‘it is harmless,’ he says moving on—You?”

“Call spectre, strawberry, by turns; a stone”

“And hands, faked flower, —the myth is: dead, bones, it

Was assembled, apes wing in wind: On stone,”

In the context of the sentences in which they occur, the meaning of these words is colloquial, relatively straightforward, and subject to no more than the usual amount of poetic compression and metaphorical thought. Nor is the subject or form particularly “difficult.” Both the form (a sestina) and the poet’s subject—a preying mantis on the encountered on the steps of a subway are entirely conventional.

But within these conventions, Zukofsky allows a whole second universe to reveal itself because he insists upon thinking objectively. He allows his thoughts to flow along patterns of meaning that do not reside in the I-self, but extend its being into chains of eventuality—halos of metaphor as we find them out there. Language at play in fields of experience. The imagination.

My experience of the poem began with our observation of the sestina’s simple form. Six words end the first stanza: “leaves,” “poor,” “it,” “you,” “lost” and “stone.” These are repeated as the final word of each stanza according to a pattern of substitutions. The sestina’s particular form of attention—its formal calling as it were, where calling is a calling out—asks us to notice the last word of each line.

In Zukofsky’s version, this formal urgency we encounter in the last word of each line spreads through the rest of the line, producing lines full of single word phrases: “spectre, strawberry,” “stone,” “hands,” “flower,” “dead, bones, it” etc. It is of course this interest in the singularity of words that Zukofsky declares when he gives his epic poem the ultimate one-word title: “A.”

In “Mantis” Zukofsky’s interest in the singular focuses attention on the production of ideology within ordinary experience. Each word is like a mantis on the subway stone—phenomenal to the extent that one attends to it. You can either notice the mantis or not notice it; if you do, the longer you meditate upon it the more it reveals.

In the first of the above-quoted lines, the singularity of experience is contrasted to the commercial flow that incites transformation from one object to the next. Flowing through the line we find a question about the material connectedness between objects produced by money: Watching the hustle and bustle of the crowded masses, Zukofksy observes that

“Even the newsboy who now see knows it

No use, papers make money, makes stone, stone,

Banks, ‘it is harmless,’ he says moving on—You?

Where will he put you? There are no safe leaves

To put you back in here, here’s news! too poor

Like all the separate poor to save the lost.”

Paper makes money, money makes stone, stone makes banks, the poet reasons, following the torsions of thought one finds in “rock/paper/scissors.” Everything is contained within everything else because the flow of money links quarry (or farm, as Michelle does in her poems) to bank.

And these linkages occur in the dimension of ordinary experience, too: the selling of papers makes money for the newsboy, bringing him into direct contact with the “banks” of stone against which he leans. And there is nothing but stone around him—no leaves into which one might “put” the mantis “back in here.” That which brings us together—the banks of stone and the commercial banks—leave us without shelter; bewildered in our humanity, we lack the resources to bear the collective pain each carries for all within all.

And this, in Zukofsky’s view, is common knowledge—“Even the newsboy” understands this. The problem is not one of understanding, but of attending to what one understands to happening. The problem is deciding what counts as news. For the newsboy, the mantis is not news: “‘it is harmless,’ he says, moving on.”

Here is the structure of alienation for Zukofsky: we are caught up in that set of particulars that makes up the news of the marketplace, unwilling to step out of our roles in the drama of the day. It is a conventional poetic theme: a cosmos in the grain. There is nothing but this world of particulars, and there is nothing to be done but rearrange what one pays attention to. The mantis is most often the “You” that occurs regularly at the ends of lines. In the above passage, it also refers to the reader. “it is harmless,” the newsboy says, and then, with a dramatic dash—“You?” The poem is asking us—what do you think?

Its not hard to decide not to pay too much attention, despite what one knows. & so ultimately it comes back to the “You” who might “build the new world in your eyes, Save it!”

After a very insightful discussion of these and many other topics, we began construction of our own objectivist sestina. The first draft (the Next Objectivists do not regard any of our work as finished; poems are on-going experiments for us) appears here:

DUSK INTERRUPTED BY A FULL MOON

Dollar crumbles off, the city lights that

Kill the shadow—it’s necessary so

By sunrise certainly this dusk will end.

It’s shadowed, dusty, musty, fussed over as they tower . . .

High tide. Pratt Beach spits. Rock. Paper. Bone.

Bones that flow under the sweat of her.

Specifically, our family ate bones & bones are sweaters.

So the sweater stumbles, ignores the thermostat—

Carved ivory crescent, smiling cat, striated bone

That obliterates the obvious. Keep always what you sew.

Lights swallows attention. The Tower

Complainer, artificer, all that’s left at day’s end.

Start is the line, broken at end

Unraveling like yarn—dust the sweater.

Three pyramids: fever climbs the tower:

One for water. One for milk. At that

The city sweats tickets, beggar tries to sow

There where the tower held bone.

It plays over the radio. We heard bone—

Bone or stone. Who could tell in the end

& so you say—it ends—sew & sew

Although its chill absorbs all philosophies, he, still naked, becomes blind by it—he as sweater—

That same measure of waste that

Finest contrail split by a tower.

The Mayor coveted the salt tower

Fighting for new marrow in the bone

Breezing along the bone-lit path, the phrase of that

Happenstance that falls down at the end.

It was a family sort of Cosby sweater

Haze on haze split plush—full moon dusk—so.

While the walls were being built just so

Great lakes turn matter into tower

And lights embered the space and on the bench a sweater.

Malnourished—yes the sky was, you see it’s bone.

Your eyes can’t will it, or change that.

And in the end it was the end.

Chicago’s moon as brittle as bone.

Chicago’s dusk-covered moon is that.

Next time sober so this interruption won’t end.

The following Saturday evening, 14 February, the Next Objectivists met to read and discuss Michelle’s work. Michelle read from her new manuscript, “Barn Burned Then,” a beautiful collection of lyrics that move along lines of metaphor between two poles: “Barn” and “Bank.” The figurative connections between Barn and Bank construct a story with an eternally displaced center, to create a kind of secret history—a family trauma, but one belonging to no single family, although iterated always in particulars. In this way, Michelle’s poems responded to the crises of our new depression as it began to unfold in and around Iowa City, where she lived during the latter days of the books’ composition.

Here is an all-too brief selection of Michelle's poems:

Barn Burning, An Eclogue

For those who say it is enough
Of the farmstead, not falling

Rain come last to bed and tearing
White sheets into small armies of animals

Where this keeper’s concern meets
Old thrasher in the shed

Its keyhole patterned
After a breast and the calling

A lake we had built
Filled with response

A response then

Respond, respond with a weed to
The flames stopped to

Track a doe

I don’t know how
Barn is like grave

Matter and matters
Like a silo missing its torso the
Barn’s reading rooms

Forgetting-weeds mirror what
Was kept in the safe, same as others
Have divorced a few apple trees with no ideas

About red
As if it has two mother

Languages— they are the bad pruners
The unhorse
Crediting the no

(Previously published in Denver Quarterly)

Building the Bank, Asking

Who called the bank

The bank of

Grave the bank

You asked for praying

Mantis

When she handed us the bill her hands were
Hands of a farmhand

It’s good to have the image in mind.
At the bank.
Farmed stoppages
Selling a model townscape
Confrontation of milk and made
Never less resistance
To read the entire deed at once
Left for the vultures
Crime seen by one-
Eyed barn owl I caught
To keep the farmscene
Unlike a name
Changing to tender

(Previously published in 88)

Bank Branch

State of fall
I mean fall
Leaves

Saying a season
Is not an only answer

Probability of rotting
That permits

Door-keeper as well
As the door he left

A teller never their
Worries about

The red horse &
Confession
Folded into threshold

Glass statement
Promising I won’t see you anymore
A likeness

Here fixing causes that dream
To be about a bank

A blood-like retreat
From root
For trust

Going to war

Changing brother is

Going to get there

(Previously published in 88)

Michelle explained the origins of many of her poems. While working and reworking the relations between barn and bank, she used her poetry to collect and generate emotional textures. "and the calling / / A lake we had built / Filled with response," Michelle writes; in these lines, reminiscent of Michael Palmer's work, the search for meaning--a finding and a making--is the poem's "calling." The poem is a scenic, calm, ordinary place--a idyll lake--that reflects (or, potentially, loses within itself) responses the work.

Michelle explained how she developed poems the responded to traumas that were not ‘her own,’ which caused some distress among her classmates and teachers over the years. Michelle used the experiences that occasioned by responses to the poems to create dramas that appear within the poems. For example, she described a number of the lyrics as “revenge poems,” explaining that they contain semi-secret “replies” to various fakers she’s encountered. (Michelle told us who she was arguing with and why.)

In these poems, as in Zukofksky's, many words are "pivotal" or "hinge" words in the sense that their meanings are multiple and interlocking. Syntax rotates along the axis of meaning, bifurcating and looping back upon itself, so that multiple connotations resonate at once. This is what Pound called the "dance of the intellect" among words; in Michelle's work its often signaled by dense patterns of repetition:

Who called the bank

The bank of

Grave the bank

You asked for . . .

or:

When she handed us the bill her hands were
Hands of a farmhand

In each passage, the repetition of one word puts that much more weight on the others, such that, for example, "Grave" responds to the field of meanings generated by the banks that surround it--the bank of the grave is the edge of the dread pit, and "grave" also describes perhaps the most commonly imagined tonal register of the Midwestern bank (a sober, even somber place), but we hear also "gave the bank [what] you asked for." The grave that takes becomes the gave that gives.

Similarly, in lines like "From root / For trust" the ear, trained in the subtle shifts in meaning that Michelle's writing calls to our attention, gets "From root / For rust" as well. And in that little shift--the subtraction of a "t"--the cherished story of economic collapse in the heartland is encapsulated. Once the repository of the nation's "trust", the bread basket of America has become a rust belt. That story is also in these poems, as they explore the ocean that resides between BArn and BAnk.

Thank you Michelle Taransky! The Next Objectivists salute you!

Next Objectivists Present Michelle Taransky

2009-02-09T09:15:00.000-08:00

The Next Objectivists Poetry from the Outside Workshop is pleased to present

Michelle Taransky

Michelle was born in Camden, NJ. Her first book, "Barn Burned, Then," was selected by Marjorie Welish for the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize. She lives in Philadelphia and works at Kelly Writers House.

Thursday, February 12, 2009
7:00p-10:00 pm
Michelle will lead a poetry reading and writing workshop entitled “Thinking with the Things at they Exist."

Saturday, February 14, 2009
4:00 - 6:00 pm
Michelle will read from her new collection and discuss the objectivist tendencies in writing practices.

Both events are FREE & OPEN to the Public. Both will take place at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago: www.messhall.org.

If you wish to join the Next Objectivists e-mail list, please contact us at nextobjectivists@gmail.com.

2009-01-29T21:14:00.000-08:00

The Next Objectivists convened for the first time at 7:00 pm on Thursday, January 29th.
By 9:00, we had finished composing our first collective poem. The experience of our first reading & writing together was like dictation meets surfing.

If Anything / Result / No One Will Want To See It

A Collective Poem Composed 1/29/09 by the Next Objectivists

Manifest destiny & Amen!

Do so with proper documents

promises, initiations.

The parent schools his child.

Entropy: evolution of this system

broken like the scene

of 40 years ago. Next stop—

individuals pay for sitting in the park.

New England hair cut

eats my heart!

George Bush, a canvas above the bed

showing badly spent money, persuade the

public, with dancing lessons—

What does it have to do

with modern day arrangements?

I’m inviting pretty girls up

to the present.

Tomorrow’s clichés need dancing

lessons. So much

the better, Wilhelm.

The beautiful illusions are intercepted.

You’re a special case, Rita.

One of life’s gambles. An expenditure

of modern-day energy.

& Reggie & I, industrial problems.

What alternate America, not

the first jokes & dreams

all played by real students

A completely reversible world

the whole cost of time

symmetric as Elton John:

individual, private American soul-singer

girlyness, subjectivity a sea-change

abundance is a lost sock

the expansive mileage of corn—

it sucks! distracted, no one followed up

their paper Burger King hats

one color scheme, the only thing

plus utilitarian ceramics

industrial components

action figures & beach chairs

skimming it off the top

$35 an ounce

a device, another set of advices

the height of the Mosquito Summit

President Bill Clinton—

if anything result

there is nothing appealing—

a simple box

a mystery

If anything of a moment

no one will see it—

contact with the world

the world is today

I don’t like

faith, feeling

deeply

cruel—

What do you mean?

What do you call poetry?

No one will see it. There is an

ocean. The current political cliché

is that political diversity, ask Jim, ask

members of non-profits, I sat as a

member, what are you, a pagan?

sausages build rectangular power

the President shall be subject to renewal

in the machine age he arrives, man or boy

a filmgoer could, relationship to land—

look at the mileage of corn & soy

white on white on white:

life’s a gamble dharma cab

physical characteristics of socks

socks that survive, screwing up

his life for women enjoy obscenities

& quantum numbers

A better class of industrial components

customer—already commission on civil rights

sure that there is problems rated to promise

Asian commodities it is neither

no mystery, especially

regarding pink socks individually

others of gold arrangement

had a very good point—

Are you a pagan? Is this what you call poetry?

And indirectly the United States primitive

attempts to fill rectangular power. Shall hold the

office. Each state shall elect the state no Senator

put in a film each frame. It sucks. Is it boring

& oppressive rigor in the Gulf of Mexico.

Amen. Shiny walls, a countertop & tile provide

a world of interests.

The paradoxical position—to trap verse

& arrive at transformation itself—

cranberry red flowers & elegant drapes

ever more luxurious. Imagine

life as a series of surfaces.

Romantic nonsense behind the counter at Burger King

in a one-color scheme on the countertop. In a world

of interest, the state of an electron is quantified

by four numbers: sleigh, country Swedish, upholstered

& blue dazzle.

transformation of self

to path of freedom

as relation to writing

things is the same but the

tone is different—

Notoriously executive Japanese poetry from that

subjective episode record dispute of dead telephone

Take heed masculine flamboyant atoms. Baroque annuities

in turn facilitate cheap poverty

Repression makes

it possible to keep

things together. box

spring, 4-poster, timeless

anchor. Defining a

specific purpose for

every piece of

furniture, every action

every minute.

WELCOME TO THE NEXT OBJECTIVISTS

2009-01-26T11:32:00.000-08:00

The Next Objectivists is the world's only literary workshop entirely dedicated to the study and practice of objectivist poetry. We are a free school of poets and critics pursuing the techniques of writing poetry from outside the self. Our program of study is largely organized by the participants, so come join us!

The Next Objectivists meets second and fourth Thursdays (and some Saturdays) of each month at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park. The Mess Hall (http://www.messhall.org/) is located at 6932 N. Glenwood Ave., a few feet southwest of the Morse Red Line stop and a few blocks west of the UP-N Metra Station.

Please join us at the FIRST MEETING of the NEXT OBJECTIVISTS POETRY WORKSHOP at 7:00 pm this THURSDAY, 29 JANUARY 2009.

The Next Objectivists read, discuss, write, and listen to poetry together. Our meetings are potlucks, free & open to the public. Beginners are always welcome. At our first workshop we will read & discuss some poetry, and write some poetry using objectivist techniques. Our initial approach to the question of "what is the poetry of the outside and how does it work" will center around Charles Bernstein's writing on the "Artifice of Absorption." During the month of February, we will entertain several guest objectivists, who will lead workshops on particular techniques & read and discuss their projects. On the second Thursday and Saturday of February, we will feature the poet Michelle Taransky. On the fourth Thursday & Saturday, the Workshop will feature the poets Christopher Alexander and Kristen Gallagher. If you are an objectivist poet of any stripe, please contact me about reading at our workshop!

The Next Objectivists are fed up with the dominant practices of lyric poetry in today's neoliberal America. We are sick of the lyrical rat race, the scramble to print, the continued consignment of one voice per author (especially by writers who purport to know better), the cynical rationality of the marketplace as it grasps in desperate new ways at our art and craft. In the face of these problems, we dedicate ourselves to a collective study of poetic techniques. We read together and write together in an environment focused on poems, not egos. We are dedicated to Jackson Mac Low's understanding of poetry as "a situation wherein she or he invites other persons & the world in general to be co-creators. The poet does not wish to be a dictator but a loyal co-initiator of action within the free society of equals which it is hoped the work will help to bring about."

In this environment, we preach & teach poetry that happens outside the myself. We hold that objectivism is one name for a set of interrelated effects produced by modern and contemporary poets who use their verse to explore the world of the imagination beyond the I-self. "If there is an ocean it is here," William Carlos Williams wrote. We mean to explore this outside world by observation and practice.

We come together as an independent, autonomous school outside of and in opposition to the predominant academic discourses around poetry and the academy's use of publication as a form of self-promotion. As intellectuals, we heed Gertrude Stein's observation that "Even those who are just ordinary know what the human mind is"; as historians of the lyric, we take Wyatt's warning to heart: "Stand, whoso list, upon the slipper wheel / Of high estate . . ."

If you agree with our ideas about poetry, please join us!

We do not want to join your club,
but you are welcome to join ours.

If you wish to be added to our e-mail list, please contact us at nextobjectivists@gmail.com.

Look here for future posts of poetry falling into & out of our workshop!