Week 2: Reading for Weds, Books to Order, Writing Prompt

Great work Saturday. Good discussion for the first week! This has been emailed to your Evergreen account as well. Below this writing prompt I’ve typed up (what I gave you verbally on Sat) are links to poem-images–so please read the whole message. The main reading for this week is attached as pdf in your email message (3pp, excerpt).

–Please remember that you should be sending me your “architectual” poems: the 10 line poem plus a short description of the architectual space you chose to take notes on.

–Artaud Writing Prompt: Pick one of the numbered aspects of the “living theater” or “theater of cruelty” that Artaud gives us in the reading we did–e.g. “lighting” or “the set” etc–and use the ideas about your chosen aspect as a springboard for writing a piece (up to 2 hours of writing, 1 hour of editing) that is philosophically violent, that speaks to the theater of cruelty, i.e., enacts a writing of cruelty. Think about the form of your writing and how your attempt at shaking us out of a particular complacency might function. How to maximize your writing in an Artaudian sense? Where costumes, lights, music, language and so forth, are all large and exaggerated, anti-realistic, “monstrous forms.” What writing can you make that in form is Artaudian? That is, what would a written-textual-poetic “translation” of Artaud’s ideas look like? And how might it be of social value in the way Artaud writes of–bombarding the senses and awakening in us the long-sleeping sense of the possible, the magical, the unconscious, etc? So play with those ideas for your text arts experiment this week. IT’S DUE FOR NEXT SAT (sent to me as attachment by then and brought to seminar/workshop), so you have time to think about these questions and re-read the Artaud if need be. Have FUN with this (um, in a serious sort of way)!

–Readings, Week 2 (to supplement and complicate the main readings of Week 1):

1) Liz Grosz (attached as pdf and sent to you as email)

2) Kaia Sand, excerpted page of Remember to Wave  HERE (B/W, larger image)

3) Kaia Sand, excperted page of Remember to Wave  HERE (Color, smaller image)

4) BELOW: after my framing of these readings/images is an excerpt of discussion on “spatial” poetries by David Berridge, curator of Very Small Kitchen (where the excerpt comes from)–a very cool website of related materials…

The work by Kaia Sand and the artists mentioned below–the links here–can be said to represent the interests of work by those interested in making the invisible forces of the city acting upon the body and shaping the body–the commodification of Marx, for example, or the 4 “arts of distribution” in Foucault–visible again (which means making PEOPLE and their treatment visible again) through the poetic/artistic. Two links (one color/one bw) are from the inside of Kaia Sand’s wonderful book, Remember to Wave. Below is a short blog entry from a very fine poet and researcher who writes on the history of the poetic reclamation of spaces by the author’s bodily interruption and artistic analysis of that space. The pasted writeup below provides a very short but fascinating rundown of some central ideas in this regard, and so helps contextualize Sand’s work. Hopefully it will also help us see connections between this work and Artaud: that with Artaud we have a theater that wants to function as a philosophical (social and political) violence, shaking us out of our disciplined slumber, waking us so that we may gain some painful recognition of the brutal control mechanisms of “polite” (colonial) societies, and that similarly, Sand and others are interested in a shaking-us-up, but the strategies for how to do this, and the mediums, are very different. Remember to Wave is many things, but it is one contemporary instance of a sort of “spatial” or “investigative” poetry: the body’s sensory, perceptual, and cognitive (through historical research) interfacing with a particular place–the built environment–and its histories as well as potential future(s). How the body affects the space and how spaces affect us, our bodies. In this case the place is Portland, and the investigation is the multiple “invisible” histories of Portland’s Japanese internment centers. Links plus pdf amount to a few short printed pages.

I have also been gathering a number of books and materials which offer methods and examples for [Very Small Kitchen]. The first is a gathering of texts around the idea of “documentary poetics,” including works by Mark Nowak, Kaia Sand, and Brenda Coultas. Sand’sremember to wave , for example, begins with the following statement of method:

How do I notice

what I don’t notice?

How do I notice

what I don’t know

I  don’t notice?

Inexpert, I

notice with the attention

and drifting inattention

of poetry

Inexpert, I

investigate

Inexpert, I

walk, and walk.

Such texts offer a variety of methods for how poets can approach the complexity of places, then represent those texts in written form. Developing the poetics of Charles Olson, the poet-songwriter Ed Sanders, for example, has suggested a model of the poet as an historical scholar, working through all forms of documents, experience, and information, transforming them into “High Energy Verse Grids” or “Data Clusters”.

Kristin Prevallet, adapting Olson/ Sanders methods into her own practice, has suggestively summarised this position as follows:

The poet is a researcher, investigator, interpreter, singer, and prophet who engages in an active relationship with the political, social, and cultural forces around him or her. The poet is a manifesto-creating, opinionated, ranting, perpetual surveyor and tireless investigator of history. The poet is busy creating verse grids out of whatever materials are present before him or her at the time: the poet is an appropriator of sources, a thief of facts, a collage-creating scoundrel in a hyper state of awareness and inspiration. Flowcharts, newspaper articles, photographs, etymology, and ethnography become the raw materials for the poet’s unique assemblage. (115-116)

The Poet Brenda Coultas, meanwhile, adapts for her own writing the notion of “public character” in Jane Jacobs classic study of urban planning, The Death and Life of American Cities. Coultas writes:

Jacobs defines a public character as the person on the street who knows everyone and whom everyone knows; this person serves as the eyes on the street, and thus lends cohesion to the community and serves to prevent crime… So I began to think about the possibility of leaving the anonymity of the page and becoming a public character, that is, a public poet. (11)

How does public character apply to the project in West Bromwich? To working with an archive of texts?

…and another useful statement of poetic-investigatory-documentary method from the poet-film maker Abigail Child:

Someone is thinking/ speaking to herself. Analyzing beat of energies, of digression, remembering. Memory and this question: What is the relation between narrative and history, between art and memory? Articulate the relation between witnessing/ events and speculation/ fiction. An attempt to see how issues of biography and history are neither represented nor reflected but are translated, reinscribed, radically re-thought. History as a translation, through which is created new articulations of perspective. Acknowledge the conceptual and social prisms through which we attempt to apprehend. (248)