Dear All,
***IMPORTANT NOTE: READ THIS EMAIL TO THE END – IMPORTANT SCHEDULE INFO AT VERY BOTTOM OF THIS EMAIL***
Apologies about getting this work to you a little late, but for the most part you’ve already read this week’s readings. Please refamiliarize yourself with the two altered books I assigned last week, the Gardner and the Nelson below. On the other reading: please read the Jenna Osman essay on found poetry and then read the Fitterman fragment.
SO: as I wrote before about the altered book, to get a sense of where we’re headed in lecture thereabout, feel free after doing the readings below to peruse our optional blog. But: what do the found poem (or found prose piece) and the altered book have in common? Why put these things together? Well, both are, for me, instances of yet other ways to think of “performing text,” but are also forms that very much rely on a) plagiarism (hey, a good thing sometimes in poetry!), and b) relatedly, appropriation of often well known texts or tropes. Both are, in a sense, collaborations, no? Albeit not with a live person, but “overt” collaborations with other texts, not, say, the more subtle idea of “unavoidable collaboration,” i.e., “we’re always collaborating whether we know it or not” that Gabe brought up – a subtle and good point, so perhaps the distinction is in degrees? Anyway, chew on these things, their connections, etc., as you read this work. Should be fun. (Note: Bruce Andrews is introducing us to Rob Fitterman in the excerpt below, and we encountered him before in a completely different arena – in visual poetry).
See you Weds!
David
http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-osman.shtml – Jenna Osman on found poetry
http://bostonreview.net/BR26.5/fitterman.html – fragment of Rob Fitterman’s found poem cutup trilogy, “Metropolis XXX” (a cutup of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, interspersed with “found” lines from streets of Manhattan)
http://www.dusie.org/ebbport.pdf – Susana Gardner, altered from EBB
http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/altn.xml – Altered Book, Beverly Nelson (press “images”, and then read/look at the book via zooming in, clicking the right arrow, etc – play around till you get to end..)
————————————————————- OPTIONAL —————————————-
The Isou film, his Lettrist Manifesto, parts of which I was going to show last week. Feel free to look. It’s fun!!! Or maybe not.
http://www.archive.org/details/venom_and_eternity
—————————————-SCEDULING CHANGE/INFO————————————-
This upcoming Saturday, instead of class, those interested will be going to procession of the species with Diann. Get in contact with her if you are interested in going. For the rest of you – instead of taking the whole darn day off, it’d be good to maybe work on forming ideas to bring to your group regarding what you might want to do…
To make up for that missed time (no class Sat), I propose that we do a session the following Saturday at my house, PRIOR to us moving into “get together mode.” That is, instead of losing that Saturday to the class get-together, we’ll have small group work for 1 1/2–2 hrs, then hang out for refreshments, music, etc. So, 4pm at my house Saturday after next, with directions coming to you next week. 6pm onward we can relax, enjoy, even more than we will be relaxing and enjoying seminaring in a place not on campus.
PERFORMATIVE EVENT GROUPS:
Please email me who you definitely do want to work with and who you definitely do not asap (unless you have no preference whatsoever). Let me know, too, any other pertinant info, like what sort of thing you’re interested in (medium or media, say), and whether you’d rather work with folks who have experience in collaborative work or would rather be with folks who maybe don’t have any experience. We’ll try to work it out so that you have the greatest level of ease going into what should be considered a fun experiment, hard work yes, but something for which we’re not being “judged.” From that data I will then form groups of 3 or 4 and post them via email and blog next week. After that we can tweak, but we’ll only have that following Saturday to try the tweaking – then it’s off to the races…don’t worry – I don’t get off the hook, either. If you need me as a prop, a worker bee, a whatever, let me know. I don’t take all requests, but I will take some.
ARC OF WEDS LECTURES NEXT 3 WEEKS:
This week, found/altered text
Week 5 – we leave the normative page behind and do sound, gesture, & “theatricality from Situationism to Steve McCaffrey and the Four Horseman to Tina Darragh and Rodrigo Toscano
Week 6 – we round out our major readings for the course by returning to the page – procedures, forms, and instances of collaborative writings (2 or more authors), including translation work (Linh Dinh’s video poems), translation as we normally think of the term, Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney, authors of “Eclipse,”; example of ekphrastic writing (1 or more writers in collaboration with 1 or more artists of other media); and, perhaps, if anyone has work of their own by then – your/our work!!!