Evergreen Course Blog | Spring 2011 | Reclaiming Public Spaces

Below are the translations I received from you yesterday.  The first set are your individual pieces, listed by row (instrument set).  The second is a combined piece written by use of a statistical program.  Using the frequency and approximate length (in seconds) of the different rows (1-4), the work came out the way it did below.  This is, of course, only a rough (very small set of inputs) translation of the “flow” of the piece once converted back into text cues.  Notice, though, that there are (I think) 14 different “movements” or “sections” in the Zorn piece, hence 14 movements or sections in ours.  Good work everyone.  Note, too, that WordPress can only do so much visually, so we’re lacking in some tools that might make the translation more interesting, e.g., more textual polyphony, etc.  If you would like to add your piece, type it up and send to my email! 

Best,

David

First Row: Drums, Piano (all percussion besides rhythmic voices)

 

Grass pulses with spinning flames. A Desperado’s sin string.  Big gun down and Buerara’s ghost is more than Ms. Monroe eat your fucking heart out Andy Warhol Campbell’s:  Fur all eyes winter coast diminishing, claims Spanglish.  Dizzying snares.  Aural or oral, their waves under pressure.

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Emptiness before emptiness

surrounded on either end by void.

Unknown life line begin, life line end, unknown.

Now just your eyes open

slowly with the inhalation of lungs.

                Something is clear to you now

until the race,

                running now

from sovereign emptiness, anxiety

                embryonic meditations.

Optic access and tastes of motherly nectar

                alive, on fire

golden in the center of the sun

                center stars of solar system

your soft curly hair will blonde soon

under the rays of present understanding

                open eyes and

infant nursing.

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

 

 2^nd Row: Voices,  Rhythmic

Voices, nails.  How can I write about non-musical sounds?  Wild west with some sort of synth.  Huff,  huff, breath.  Footsteps.  Chaos.  Ethnomusicology.  Drum roll please.  Translate these from a foreign tongue.  Do not interpret, whatever that means.  What would inspire Fun Galore?  Think street party.  Think dancing.  Think cattle drive.  The letter w.  Hoo-hah.

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

crackle cack cack le please

omeone stunted breaking, oh

 

Climpsing, eager snore sleeping

a fear collapsing into fear I – I – I

 

They were talking amongst the the

street into shop into

a went into a mud you and laughing he

 

oh I oh I

running downstairs out out the door

I know I follow hrah no!

————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

One foot in front of the other.  Keep up the pace, there is still a ways to go.  If you keep your eyes open you can see safety in the distance.  One foot in front of the other.  If you keep your eyes closed you can at least pretend to hide from the footsteps trailing behind you.  If you can’t see them they can’t see you.  One foot in front of the other.  This is what frantic means.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

 

A gulp, a slight choke and the impeached speech in laughter, their teeth, beneath a coarse wooden table, although, the comedy adjoining ruptures any sense of shock, still there is breathing, they know, afraid to know, the ceiling is dripping, no knowing, by an agreement, we can sift through a mess of indistinguishable, there are too many, there is a sweating of noise, their perverse inklings, they carry us away, give a movement, and there we are fast and tearing across the white glaring teeth.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Away away, out and above you can save me if you can hear me, but if you don’t try I’ll die.  I’ll die anyway.  Yes.  I’m here, here above.  Run and try as hard as you can to shoot that man.  Breathlessly.  Breathingly.  Not of you or me, but we make our way in the dirt hear me hear me, we make our way in spite of you in the dirt and happily.  Arrival and celebration.  Go, go for me, win for me, and I am trying to scare you.

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

3^rd Row: Brass, Wind

 

space through epiphany

split horses         speech nexus

apowing to pull in

the sea is healing

sway as your walk

Jack Nickleson in the lack delete

running do catch

can you feign the moments

 

Screams, quarreling in horror at the sign of some unknown

Machinery breaking

Unveiling pushing rising moral

More screams and horns, bellowing swells

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Brass – a young child is listening to

                what is said during the destruction

                of his village

the woman tries to use her sexuality

to convince the prison guard to

release her son

 

the woman has successfully convinced the

guard and they ride off into the sunset

 

                they have been discovered

 

to no avail the prison guard turns into

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

4^th Row: Strings, Melodic Voice

 

Serial killer          not-quite there

Despair                 heartbrake         redemption

Building and building…                   alien communication

Futuristic             sonar     ripples  whistling

Shooting starts  outerspace         alone…

Sassy, scared, alone        0          cliffdiving

Plying                                    H

Happy more building, train going faster

And faster…       Faster still…        still going

Faster…                fasterstill…          stillgoing

Faster…                                and stop him

Ghost

And Japanese faster and faster                                 happy

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————————-Does piano count as string?

Chillos

Chillos, chillando

                Nos vemos.

On the other side

is vicious

Vicious

Instruments

At which point

Intersections

No longer cross

Entre  sections

De gritos

Gritos y

Chillos

Que mararon innocenia

And blur

Blur the lives

De un lado yelotro

Cuando nos encontremos

Juntos

De un lado &

The other

Merging together

In discord

Agreeing

Q’las lineas

& Boarders

Combined Version:

 

1

 

Dizzying snares dizzying snares before emptiness surrounded on either end by void.

Unknown life line now your eyes open lungs lungs.

 

Something is clear to you now until the race lungs and optic access and tastes of motherly nectar alive, on fire golden in the center your soft curly hair.

 

 

1, 2, 3

 

 

Something dizzying snares the present understanding open eyes and infant nursing. A Desperado’s sin string. Big gun down and Buerara’s ghost is more than Ms.

Monroe.

                   The letter w.

Hoo-hah.

 

 

Eat your unknown heart Andy Warhol unknown: Fur all eyes winter coast diminishing, claims Spanglish. Dizzying snares.

 

Unveiling pushing rising moral More screams and horns, bellowing swells Of matter ocean.  Brass – a young child is listening to what is said during the destruction of his village.  the woman tries to use her sexuality to convince the prison guard turns into the hero and he defeats and they ride off into the sunset. they have been discovered. to no avail the prison guard turns into the hero and he defeats and they all escape. to no avail the prison guard to release her son. the woman tries to use her sexuality to convince the prison guard to release her son.  the woman has successfully convinced the guard and they ride off into the hero and he defeats and they ride off into the hero and he defeats and they all escape. before it happens. Screams, quarreling in horror at the sign of some unknown.  Machinery breaking. Unveiling pushing rising moral More screams and horns, bellowing swells Of matter ocean.

 

 

The letter w.

Hoo-hah.

Crackle cack

 

Something is clear to you now until the race l

 

 

4

 

Chillos Chillos, chillando Nos vemos. Serial instrument.

On the other side is vicious Vicious killer Instruments At which point Intersections No longer seven.

Chillos Chillos, chillando Nos vemos.

On the other side is vicious Vicious space Instruments At which point Intersections No longer seven.

Chillos Chillos, chillando Nos vemos. Stop.

 

 

2, 4

 

I – I – I – I                                                             On the other side is vicious

 

They were talking amongst the                                   On the other side is vicious

 

They were talking amongst the                                   On the other side is vicious

 

Street.

Shop.

 

1

 

Eat your unknown heart Andy Warhol unknown: Fur all eyes winter coast diminishing, claims Spanglish. Dizzying snares.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1, 3

 

the present understanding

the present understanding

ghost is more than

machine breaking

the woman tries to use her           More screams and horns, bellowing swells Of matter ocean.  Screams, quarreling in horror at the sign of some unknown.  Machinery breaking. Unveiling understanding more than present pushing rising moral More screams and horns, bellowing swells Of matter ocean. 

the present ghost.  The more than

 

1

 

Optic access and tastes of motherly

nectar alive, on fire. golden in the center of the sun center stars of solar system your soft curly hair will blonde soon under the r

 

ays of present und   

erstanding open eyes and infant nursing. golden in the center of the sun center stars of solar s         

ystem your soft cu             rly hair will blonde sounder the rays of present understanding open eyes and infant nursing. A Desperado’        s sin string. Big gun down and Bu     

 

erara’s          ghost is more than Ms  Dizzying snares.  Unknown life line begin, life line end, unknown.

 

 

 

2

 

If you keep your eyes open you can at least pretend to hide downstairs behind you.

If you keep your eyes you can at least pretend you trailing behind you.

If you keep your eyes closed you can at least

If you can’t see you.

Entresections De gritos Gritos y Chillos Que macron innocenia A blur Blur the lives De un lado yelotro Cuando no est encontremos Duntos De un lado & The other Merging together.

Brass – a young child is listening to what is said during the destruction of his village.

the woman tries to use her sexuality to convince the prison guard to release her son.

the woman tries to use her sexuality to convince the prison guard

 

3, 4

Entre

sections De gritos

Gritos

y Chillos Que macron innocenia A blur

Blur the lives De un lado yelotro Cuando no est encontremos Duntos De un lado & Screams, quarreling in horror at the sign.

Machinery breaking.

Unveiling pushing rising moral.

More screams and horns, bellowing swells.

Ocean.

Matter.

The other Merging together.

Brass – a young child is listening to what is said during t 

 

he destruction of his village.

the woman tries to u

se her sexuality to con                  vince the       prison guar  

d to release her son.

the woman tries to use her sexuality to convince Screams, quarreling in horror at the sign.

Machinery breaking.

Unveiling pushing rising moral.

More screams and horns, bellowing swells.

Ocean.

Matter.

 the priso

n guard

 

1, 2

 

Something snares     dizzying         string

          I – I – I – I

If you keep your eyes closed you can at least

If you can’t see you.

Eat your unknown

                I keep I you I can’t see

 

Sin string              the present                        more than

Something snares     dizzying         string

          I – I – I – I

If you keep your eyes closed you can at least

If you can’t see you.

Eat your unknown

                I keep I you I can’t see

 

Sin string              the present                        more than

 

4

On the other side de gritos Gritos y Chillos Que macron

innocenia A blur Blur the lives De un lado

yelotro Cuando no est encontremos Duntos De un

lado & The other Merging together In discord Agree

ing. On the other side is vicious Viciou

s Instruments At which point Intersections No longer cross Entresections De gritos Gritos y Chillos Que macron innocenia A blur Blur the l

ives De un lado & The other Merging together.

Brass – a young child.

A young child on the

Other

Blur

The lives

Listening to the

Lives the guard the

Lives the

 

 

 1, 2, 3, 4

On the other side is vicious Vicious space Instruments At which point Intersections No longer seven.

 

Chillos Chillos, chillando Nos vemos.

 

On the other side

 

de gritos Gritos y Chillos Que macron innocenia A blur Blur the lives De un lado & The other Merging together.

Brass – a young child on the Other Blur The lives Listening to the Lives the guard and they ride off into the hero and he defeats and they all escape. Before it happens

Screams, quarreling in horror at the sign of some unknown Machinery breaking Unveiling pushing rising moral. More screams and horns, bellowing swells.

Ocean.                             I I I

Matter.                             They wre talking

the priso n guard 1, 2 Something snares dizzying string I – I – I If you keep your eyes open lungs lungs.

Something is clear to you now until the race lungs and optic access and tastes of motherly nectar alive, on fire golden in the dirt and happily.

                                      They were talking

 

 

1

 

Something dizzying snares the present understanding open eyes and infant nursing. A Desperado’s sin string.

 

1, 2, 3, 4

 

More swells.

Ocean.  the priso n guard 1, 2 Something snares dizzying string I – I If you keep your eyes open lungs lungs.

Something is clear to you                       

now until the race lungs and optic access and tastes of motherly nectar

alive, on fire golden in the dirt and happily. Ocean. If you can’t see you

Matter.                   The letter

the priso n guard

Something snares dizzying string I – I – I If you keep your eyes open lungs lungs.

Something is clear to you now until the race

lungs and optic access and tastes of motherly nectar      The letter     

alive, on fire golden in the dirt and happily.

Chillos

Chillos, chillando Nos vemos. If you keep your eyes

 On the other side is vicious Vicious space Instruments At which point Intersections No longer seven.

Chillos Chillos, chillando Nos vemos. Hoo-

 

Hah.

 

 

Here’s a nice link, thanks to Whitney, who sent it to me:

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/4/en/display/274

You’ll notice that it’s a list of ways to talk like a situationist.  If you notice, too, every one of these items in the list one can check as your professor having done or said.  Except one.  I have not denounced universities or art yet.  So, in order to fulfill my duty to talk like a situationist this week, here’s another link to how I denounced a university, and did so regularly as a union organizer:http:

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:2Se_3ZRcNL0J:www.dailypennsylvanian.com/home/index.cfm%3Fevent%3DdisplayArticlePrinterFriendly%26uStory_id%3D16b32962-5da6-4a55-98db-69d980994fb8+%22David+Wolach%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us

To be fair about the situationists, I mean, the original group–they were very politically active and deplored universities as corporate engines that did not allow the same access to immigrant and poor populations in France.  Divestment was also a big issue.  Also, the really nice thing about this friendly joke article is that it re-enacts a rhetorical strategy of deflating an opponent: generalize, caricature, disempower words and actions by using them in simplified ways.  Very similar to how a political opponent (John McCain, say) tries to deflate and trap another, more “dangerous” opponent (um, the African American candidate, “that one”). 

Along the same lines, there’s an interesting debate going on right now about a pirated, unauthorized collection of poetry, For Godot–

http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/10/3785_page_pirated_poetry_antho.html

that I apparently appear in–which combines the names of avant-garde poets of today with long, dead avant-garde writers of the past and inserts a poem under each of those names that none have actually written.  The debate is about a lot of silly things (including who actually constructed the book), but most interesting for us are the strands about whether this gorilla project is “situationist.”  You’ll see a lot of the same deflationary language by those who dislike the collection but “like” situationism, those who like both, and those who dislike neither.   The blog discussions are so interesting (socially) that I think you should read the comments of at least one of the blogs, The Poetry Foundation’s.  Tell me what you think.  Better, tell them by posting.  If you all post, then you can take over the blog for a day, effectively performing an imaginary coup on the question of situationism.  Weird thought, that is. 

To get my take on this project, which has made quite the stir in the “experimental” poetry ”scene,” (not my thoughts, but the book, that is) you can read my comments.  Suffice it to say here, it’s nice to appear in the same collection as Tristan Tzara, Emily Dickinson, and Bob Dylan.  Or, are they my comments?  Hmmm….

(to be continued.)

   

A few things to have for Wednesday, Week 3 (PLEASE READ THE POST BELOW THIS ONE FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION FROM CLASS):

1) Readings: we’ll be moving from Debord and derives to translation – the problems and possibilities of translating not only from one language to another, but for this course, translating from one artistic medium to another, translating one’s derives into text, and translating each other’s work in various ways.  What are the broader meanings of “translation”?  How does translation relate to problems of communication and understanding generally?  To “say the unsayable” or “unwrite the written”?  We’ll be spending this week and next on translation, broadly speaking.  This week, some poems and music.  Next week a short prose piece.  To get us in the mood, here are a couple very short readings for Wednesday.  PLEASE PRINT THESE OUT AND PUT THEM IN YOUR COURSE BINDERS (AND BRING THEM TO CLASS):

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/retallack/vol.html - More Retallack, but this time, a poem!

http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/deathfugue.html#Celan - Paul Celan, Death Fugue

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pepc/authors/jabes/adam.html - Edmond Jabes, from The Book of Shares

http://jacketmagazine.com/36/kent-on-translation.shtml - Kent Johnson, Notes on Notes on Translation

STUFF AROUND TOWN

2) BRECHT: Please feel free to attend the performance of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera at The Capitol Theater instead of coming to class.  HOWEVER, if you do so, bring on Saturday a) a 2 paragraph free-write about the performance and b) a translation (interpret this as widely as you’d like) of that free-write.

3) BECKETT: Please join me in attending a wonderful performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (in my mind one of the most incredible works ever made for the stage) at The Midnight Sun.  The show runs through this weekend.  I believe tickets are $12.  For those of you who go to Endgame, I’d be open to having a casual get-together someplace (end of next week) about what people thought of the production. 

4)

See you all Wednesday,

David

ps: be prepared to listen to some Coltrane… yum

For today’s post I want to tie the past (week) to the present (week), in order to make some sense of the future (week).  So far we’ve discussed textual experiments as relating to scientific experiments (Retallack), writing to action (Debord and Theory of the Derive), and the kind of acting that writing is or might be as trying to suspend the normative spatial/temporal order such that one is open to a kind of “bliss” (to use Kate’s term – a nod to Barthes, I assume) or to seeing everything, even for a moment, as “sublime” (to use Kant’s term).  We’ve discussed how this may or may not relate to the notion that writing is not so much a thing one does or an endproduct in a captialist marketplace, but a state of mind-body, a “poetic state” that Celan spoke of as living one’s life as if every word is one’s last. 

There is so much to consider here.  This is why we’re going to come back to these themes, albeit under different conditions, throughout the quarter: 1) writing as a kind of active discovery unique to itself (PLAY); 2) writing as an active process rather than a product; 3) the need for strategies, constraints, and above all, collaborative structures, to carry through any such process we might call “writing” (again, I prefer “playing”) in this context; and 4) finally, the aching question of how we might situate the writing process, the (when you really think about it) truly radical act of pure play,  within a broader socio-political framework.  Though one’s writing may not be overtly political, one would be hardpressed to find a good argument that any writing can be truly divorced from social-political structures–local systems of power, habituation throughout one’s lifetime, broader economies, etc.

We’ll come back to each of these interrelated themes, looking at work ranging from Hannah Arendt to Samuel Beckett to, yes, each other’s work.  For now, I’d like to zero in on a couple of wonderful ideas that came out of the very good discussion we had last Wednesday. 

First, on the Situationist notion of The Spectacle.  The question came up: how do you know when you’re “in” The Spectacle or outside it?  Other questions followed.  Supposing that The Spectacle is some kind of network of power structures that has a “shock and awe” effect on us, and supposing this network is not something that just dropped out of the sky, but involves people making decisions, just what IS The Spectacle?  Like, WHO comprises The Spectacle?  And is Debord suggesting that we can somehow step outside it, and if yes, for how long?  In what ways?

I cannot here claim to have answers to these questions–maybe there are no complete answers–but at least I can clarify some, echo them, as it were.  One of you, for instance, said that in thinking about The Spectacle, we must a) realize that we are actively playing a role in its generation and persistence through time, and b) that it would be helpful to make the distinction between The Spectacle and “a spectacle,” i.e., between the systems Debord is speaking about (and in different ways Marx, Foucault, Jameson and others) and the common use of the term, which, paradoxically, is closer to Debord’s notion of a “situation” (a constructed moment that may, say, elicit, “wow, what a spectacle!”).  We’re speaking here about a system of media-induced distractions and simplifications - reality-as-image, not something that momentarily stuns or delights us.  But, the comment that we are ’active’ (actively passive?) participants in The Spectacle, that we are responsible for this reality (these realities?), is, I think, what Debord and The Situationists were keen to point out: this is a subtle notion and is what allowed them think strategically about how to deal with the stark possibility that we cannot “step outside” of The Spectacle any more than we can step outside of space-time.  What we can do is set up situations in which The Spectacle shows its own machinations, its own logic/systemic effect, by constructing things that aren’t easily digestible/reproducible by, say, mass media.  Or, again, to use mass media, the city, social systems–all of that which The Spectacle is–to expose parts of life that may be otherwise obscured.   “If the spectacle can be defined as the autonomous movement of nonlife…then the situation represents the recovery or liberation of moments of pure life…” write Harris and Taylor in Digital Matters.  How to deal with this reality, if taken as, at least partly true?  “This was to be achieved,” they further note, ”by detournement - the reverse, or better still, the preverse engineering of media messages through the juxtopositions of inappropriate words and images…and the derive or drift - urban space was to be reclaimed through a form of nomadism attuned to the singularities of the city that lay below the surface of its commodified space.”

Whether this reclamation was possible, and whether the strategies employed to get there could work, were for The Situationists, always a matter of dispute.  In his later writings, Debord noted that such radical acts would, in the end, either be subsumed by mass culture and tamed so as to be marketable, or they would be discarded as moments of nonsense.  But if this is so, are these constructued moments–these situations–still not worth performing?  If for no other reason than that the alternative to acts of pure play seen as absurdities by your culture, alternatives such as the autonomous movement of non-life, just as absurd, and, potentially, less pleasurable?  If we are to take Celan’s challenge of living one’s life as if every breath were your last, what would you do?  Certainly, there is something to be said about watching television and believing in the realities of the stock market, various sundry products to purchase online, and going to work or school and then home again, day after day, until you die.  There is, after all, something comforting about that life.  But once one questions where the comfort comes from, and if one concludes that such comfort doesn’t completely come from sources that are neutral to your existence, then one is faced with asking such questions as “why am I taking this writing course, anyway?”  and “what is the purpose of this institution I am paying for?” and “who decided that I should pay for this public institution anyway?”  So, the quandry begins and the possibility of trying to manipulate these familiar structures in order to understand them suddenly looms. 

Lastly, I’d like you to consider all of this in relation to the two other strands of thought viz. creative writing, that we’ve so far encountered: writing analogous to a good scientific experiment, and the problem of how to capture or record a situation.  The two strands are connected.  As Retallack notes, a good scientific experiment is one that involves a great deal of chance, or, uncertainty regarding outcome.  You begin with a set of questions for which you honestly do not know the answers ahead of time, and then you produce a set of procedures that will focus your questions into some kind of action that will produce some kind of data.  How is this that different from setting up a writing experiment?  Think of our collective minds as a creative writing laboratory.  To think along those lines (and if you disagree, please comment), you are liable to run into the realization that to ask certain questions, let alone perform experiments to elicit answers and further questions, you need to partner up with others.  One cannot trace the trajectory of uncertainties alone.  We’ve begun to work together to open up unknowable results with our derives.  But derives are one set of experiments among countless others.  Think of ways that two, three, or four of you set up a different experiment using materials you are already working on.  This would mean, of course, finding some common ground–but also challenging your own work in the face of the work and strategies of others.  

Further readings for those interested:

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (available free online)

Jan Harris and Paul Taylor, Digital Matters, Routledge, 2005

Karl Marx, Capital

Theodor Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” from The Culture Industry   

Read below this post for readings to be done for Wednesday, Week 2. 

As is usually the case, our discussion about the role of form in writing experimentation, specifically contemporary poetry/prose, was just getting juicy when… class ended.  A confession: sometimes I desire for us to keep talking after the proverbial bell has sounded, keep at it until we are all too tired or bored to discuss any further.  However, I think that if we use the small amount of time we have in this small course of ours as a springboard, a starting point, a beginning, a teaser, then we won’t need to feel that our gratification is anything other than simply delayed.  That is, how many of you really feel that Experiments In Text, or anything else you do, is separate from, rather than contiguous with, the rest of your lives? 

To get on with the discussion: one of you raised a very good point about Retallack’s failure to mention (supposing we are taking her thought experiment as vaild, that creative writing practices can be likened to good scientific experiments) that part of a good (workable) experiment involves knowledge of a whole set of rules and procedures that have a long and tested history. Bacon and the “scientific method” was brought up as just this sort of procedural paradigm.  We’re all familiar with its basic structure of hypothesis, controlled and independent variables, testing that hypothesis, with repeatability, verifiability of results, etc., as preconditions for the validity of the experiment.  And true also that deductive and inductive scientific practices shift, even if slightly, from field to field, experiment to experiment, with each question about each different sort of phenomenon having its own sub-rules and procedures (physics and biology have different rules when it comes to experimental work, even if a common root, right?).  So, the point was brought up that this analogy carries over to myriad fields and practices, not least of which, prose and poetry.  The overall point, to paraphrase, seemed to be this: the idea of text arts-as-experiments breaks down when the rules and procedures of, say, poetry, seem to have vanished, given way to a kind of “anything goes” mentality about what counts as poetry, not to mention “good” poetry, etc.  How can we perform an adequate experiment without any a) training in poetic/prosaic form?  and b) without any (at least western) culture of valuing poetic/prosaic forms (certain metric forms were brought up as an example)?

To get at (a) very briefly: unfortunately (or fortunately?) this course is not a course about the history of poetic form.  Though, the discussion almost makes me want to teach that course some day.  But for (b): this is a rich challenge to anyone who writes today and also takes Retallack’s analogy as more than an analogy (like, say, me).  I’d mention off the bat that the essay appeared in Jacket Magazine, the place all of us poetry geeks go to read excellent essays, translations, and collections of stuff on non-mainstream poetry.  So, Retallack is writing to an audience who is supposed to know something about the history of poetic form.  Of course, this is an imaginary world.  I am willing to bet $13 that at least half of Jacket’s readership knows very little about the history, say, of the Descort. 

Let me try to enter this discussion by agreeing with some of you who argued that it is untrue that we no longer learn about established forms in our writing classes, etc., but also by agreeing that we don’t do so, say, in the Oxford style.  Like, we don’t cram for quizzes on definitions.  By “we” I don’t just mean Evergreen, but I mean U.S. institutions generally.  You’d be hardpressed to find such rigor in formal practices anywhere these days.  So it is probably right to say that, as compared to other places and other times, we, as people who write stuff, are living in a comparatively pluralistic world.  Or, to put it another way: as an editor of a journal that publishes a lot of new and established writers, I’ve found that it is very difficult to put one’s finger on what the trends are, what editors think they are looking for, formally, from writers, and what writers think they are doing in relation to one-another.  I have some thoughts on why this is the case, but that is a different discussion.  Suffice it to say that I think profound changes in patronage systems has a lot to do with the great diversity of writing we see now as compared to, say, even 50 years ago.  

What I’m interested in addressing here is a bit more general.  To go out on a limb: I think that it is difficult to discern what language games (to use Wittgenstein’s terms) we are playing while we are playing them.  It is much easier to look back and say, “well, this period was marked by a shift away from the Elegiac Couplet to the Heroic Couplet, effectively ending three centuries of poetic tradition…”  How cognizant were 17th century European readers of poetry that this paradigm shift was taking place?  Most of the work we’ll be looking at in the coming weeks–prose, poetry, and essay–can (and has been) described as “hybrid,” or “mosaic” or “uncategorizable.”  I prefer the term ”mosaic.”  This is not just because some of the work uses multiple media or because other pieces consciously break from previous traditions, and in so doing, seem to float implacably.  Rather, it is also because many of these works take established language games and mash them together, or erase some rules and keep others, etc., and in so doing are dissimilar enough from previous forms that we don’t yet have the vocabularies, the language, to describe them formally or otherwise.  This is less about ”mind-blowing” work and more about the fact of new things, things that don’t ignore established forms, but play with them to the extent that they appear out of nowhere.  I’d bet that most of us have had the experience when writing something, or making something in the world, of stepping back during or after the process and saying: “I have no idea what I just did.”  T.S. Eliot (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”) argues that to get to this point, one needs ample training in intellectual history–otherwise your artistic gestures are reckless, probably meaningless, and probably uninteresting.  But is this necessarily the case?  What is your argument (seriously, I’m interested) against making something in your basement with only a vague sense of why, and from where the initial idea came?  Waking up one morning and saying: “I’m going to write for an hour using only English words that lack any vowels”? 

This question gets me to a last thought, for now, on matters of language, language games, form, etc.  It seems to me that in prose, which I write and write poorly, as well as in poetry, which I write and write poorly, there are very rigid rule-structures, or, language games, at work.  Perhaps the shift we sense is not one from form taking primacy, say, to anything goes, but rather is a consequence of 2 rather recent changes in emphasis (among many others): 1) what counts as “text” has shifted from “that which is written on the page” to include many other things: the context of the written, the page itself, the syntactic structures embedded within a line, the response the reader has to the work, etc.  These, it can (and has) been argued, are all formal structures to be played with.  And 2) an increasing emphasis away from “product” and towards “process.”  How the work is made, what the work’s initial conditions are, how the work interacts with orthogonal or larger social structures in real time–these process-oriented matters are taken now by many western writers to be as important, if not more so, than an end result.  The end result being, in some cases, a questioning of whether there ever is, as in some lines of scientific inquiry, an “end result.”  I’m curious about what you think.  

Let’s dicuss these questions further, here on the blog if you so choose, but also in your own work, in the classroom, and with the readings.  In fact, this week’s readings might be a nice case-study in whether or not you think certain meta-structures–context, process, etc.–are “formal devices,” so to speak, that can or have taken the place of past structures, such as meter or traditional plot and character development through the paragraph-dialog-paragraph mode we’ve seen in a great deal of fiction writing.  If so, do these hybrid or mosaic works work for you?  What do they do?  What are they up to?  As we’ll see, the Situationists had, for a brief time, a fractured, though comparatively good handle on what they hoped to do.  This is where the politics of form, or, less specifically, the politics of writing (or the writing of politics) comes into play.  Why is it that we sometimes try to radically shift the way in which we make text?  Out of boredom?  For sociopolitical reasons?  For fun?  All of the above?  And why are so many of these paradigm shifts, such as in Dada and Situationism,  accompanied by “movements” or “collectives”?  This, finally, was another question/set of comments that came out of Saturday’s workshops. 

Reminder: please bring your creative work (if you have any yet) to Saturday’s class.  In the meantime, email me with answers to these questions: 1) Do you have something (prose, poetry, etc) you want to work on in this course, and if so, what? (If not, let’s meet and brainstorm).  2) Would you be willing to share this work, towards the end of the quarter, by either publishing it someplace, sharing it with your fellow ET colleagues, and/or via a end-of-quarter reading?  If unsure about (2), that’s okay–I just want us thinking about this sooner rather than later.

READINGS FOR WEDNESDAY:

Situationist International Journal #1:   http://libcom.org/library/internationale-situationiste-1-article-6 

“Theory of the Derive,” Guy Debord: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/314

“Robert Frank Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” from The Bowery Project, Brenda Coultas:

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:__8JxNKI2IQJ:www.thebrooklynrail.org/poetry/march05/coultas.html+%22Brenda+Coultas%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us