Automatapoeia

Went to MASS MoCA this weekend and was lucky enough to see one of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests, Animaris Percipiere, in "person." Jansen's sculptures are kinetic sculptures that he has designed using PVC pipes that employ the wind on the beach to move around in the manner of an "organic" being. He simulates the process of natural selection by nurturing, testing and discarding models which do not work. The Strandbeests have reached a level of sophistication where sensors tell them if they have strayed into the water or into the dry sand of the upper beach where they can't walk, and also if conditions are such that they have to drop anchor until a storm passes or more favorable wind conditions occur. Jansen is another one of these people who are challenging the notion of "Artificial Intelligence," with the concept that, if it acts like it is alive, then perhaps it is alive; sort of like the programmer of the A.L.I.C.E. program who controversially won some AI competitions because his program acted as though it could hold a conversation, based on generic linguistic prompts. The AI community eventually denounced him because the program did not conform to the standards set that determine what "cognition" is, despite the fact, that, to the participant, the program exhibited every characteristic of being "alive."

Jansen hopes to some day release his creations into the wild and allow them to live out their own autonomous lives--to the eye, creatures, despite the fact that they are inorganic. Looking at the Animaric Percipiere got me thinking about poetics, the idea of authorship and the agency we attribute to poems and the creators of poems. It struck me that Jansen's sculptures correspond to my idea of poetics in some pretty profound ways. What I wish to do with poems is to give the veneer of 'intent,' without actually imbuing them with any intent as such. The poem exhibits all of the trappings of life, yet it is inert. It can exist in the wild following the program of its own primitive existence, yet it is only a simulacra, not a living, breathing thing. Yet the difference between the poem and the author seems ultimately academic. I may be an organic being, but generally what I do is react to outside stimuli in a way that is somehow hardwired or preordained. The rituals of my consciousness are not so very different from the programed motions of the Strandbeests. The beauty of the sculptures lies both in their ability to function autonomously, and to the way that they are also avatars of Jansen's own consciousness.

What I want for my poems is to give the illusion of intent, of life, of quickness without instilling in them any actual 'intent' as regards the traditional understandings of cognition. They will make their small motions and protect themselves, as they have been fashioned; but their actual purpose or intent is as obscure as my own actual purpose or intent. If adequately fashioned, they will stumble their way into the world and persevere. Much in the same manner that I, myself, have. Ultimately their purpose is ambiguous, as is the purpose of the herd of Stranbeests lurching along the shore, to eventually dissolve into the sea or to wind up as skeletal debris.

Gazing at the lattice of the Strandbeest I wondered about the Romantic 'I,' and the sacred conventions of art that dictate that the creations of I should be merely shed skins, the scratchings and leavings of I and not entities unto themselves--that the poem I write is simply a trace of my own unmalleable consciousness. That my consciousness exists at all. Perhaps it is the poems that create the person and not vice versa. Most of the time I feel not altogether different from a Strandbeest, lurching around in my preordained ways, my eyes blank windows on the word--betraying every semblance of consciousness, but yet I am merely a process, as the poems themselves are processes. When the wind blows too strong I hammer my little stake into the sand and wait for more hospitable gusts and when the wind blows favorably I scrawl my poems, who, in turn will do the same. Someday you will find them on the beach, fanning their fragile wings and nailing their nails into the strand--perhaps even when I am a significantly less animate but perhaps no less sentient skeleton.

I need to update my links soon, to fix typos and to add new ones for folks who have come to my attention since I last updated. This is much for my own benefit than for anyone elses, since my links are used primarily by me to make the rounds through the blogs of others (though I often use my sitemeter for this, since it is more up-to-date than the links!)

A Primer of Small Things

I'll admit it; I favor mid-length to long poems over short ones. To my mind, longer pieces have a greater ability to build satisfying tensions and rhythms than do shorter pieces (excepting serial pieces composed of smaller individual numbered portions--which are more like long poems than a bunch of short poems). When I refer to shorter pieces, I am talking about the contemporary conception of short, which is very short. Once upon a time the sonnet was considered to be a short form in English-language poetry, but our interest in the 20th and 21st cetury in Asian forms like the haiku and renga has shrank our conception of shortness to very, very short. This proclivity can be irksome at times, because it is harder to write good short poems, I'd say, than most people think. And the short-short poem in English is an altogether different animal than an Asian form rendered in an actual Asian language, as much as we'd like to convince ourselves otherwise.

That said, the top few selections in my long-neglected "to-read" pile featured an interesting menagerie of short poems that really mine the potential of the form. The first of these, Aaron Lowinger's Open Night Poems from House Press is a nice collection of uber-personal vignettes in the form primarily of brief poems in the ballpark of 12 lines. Amongst these is an actual formal sonnet, and it is interesting to see Lowinger pay homage to these poems' lineage in a profound way. At their best, short poems offer a kind of youthful exuberance in their ability to address a wide array of subjects in a short time, and these poems with their dark-chocolate-no-saccharine earnestness hearkened back to my mid-20's when small emotions seemed epic and the amorous potential of the world was boundless. These poems are influenced heavily by the New York School as well, in their focus on autobiographical events and real-world names, but in a fashion that is less cloying than the work's progenitors--the New York School if it were not written by snotty New Yorkers (this spoken by a snotty New Yorker).

Next up was Frame #2 from Press4Press, a small square cerulean-colored anthology with work from Thomas A. Clark, Logan Ryan Smith, Jeffery Beam, Sally Ashton, Marjorie Manwaring, Aaron Tieger, Michael Schiavo, Amie Keddy, Whit Griffin and Jess Mynes. Some of these names are familiar to me, such as Aaron Tieger, who over the years has become a master of the short quotidian poem in which a surface banality tilts just out of focus enough to draw interest. Aaron's poems have always been most at home in the corners of one's eyes. I had not read Amie Keddy (one of the editors)'s work before, but the little poems here operate like pared-down fairy tales with their primal sparseness: "the man/ had a piece of wool / from such a lamb / and a jar of milk." Among these, Sally Ashton and Logan Ryan Smith's poems give one a little more legroom, and offer a wider palette of sonic pyrotechnics/

A short poem seems to have two routes to travel, that of hyper-specificity or towards aphoristic enigma, as in Tom Orange's A Day in Switzerland: A Book of Picabian Aphorisms from Susanna Gardner's w/e chaps project. Each of the aphorisms in the little book bears a timestamp and, as such, could be viewed as one long poem. However, the aphorisms are largely self-contained, and, like the paintings of their namesake, offer a poignant distortion of everyday life fueled by desire and melancholy. At times the poems assume a puffed-up oracular voice, "12:12 am Laughter is/ the sublime/ unreason to/ this comedy of life," and at others a naked urgency, "6:10 am I /admire /your /eyes /Will /you /help /me" These little poems seem to extend their frame of reference not by way of a focus on the small or specific, but rather the large and abstract, touch-not-cobble stones.

The poems in these little books definitely inspire me to take another look at short-form poems and give great insight into the future and potential of the genre which is evolving towards a uniquely American short poem, no longer derivative of forms from other languages or of the early Imagist approximations of same.

Hi My Name is Link 1

Hello Poetry Foundation people; while you are here, please pick up one of the fabulous chapbooks from my Press.

SHORE LEAVE

Shudders, loping--once
the net of swamp plants
shrugged off, engines
kick in. Open sky, it
remembers what it was
made to do--vanishes,
just like that, into
a single winking point.

Sue Storm white-
line ghost me
hovers out to greet you.

Hi!

What they wanted was
the pliant wax tablet
with my face in it.
Clicking the hungry styli
to deface the impression.
Guess what? Now
the replicas have a little
extra skin.

After all this hugging
the wall, at last the center
of the room slides
into view. There's a seat
for you next to the projector.

Under the fake floor,
99 Furies tilt the ground
in time with my swaying.

Blogsurrection

Things should be getting back to "normal" around here, now that I am done with school-type stuff and approaching a lull in the teaching semester for a little while. Which means I have a little bit more time to do things like actually go to readings and to post here. The former I am really looking forward to, the latter I approach with some ambivalence. I haven't really been enjoying the blogosphere all that much lately--at the risk of joining the chorus of "it's not like it was back in the day"-sayers, I do have to admit that the landscape and climate are not much like they were back when I started this in 2003. Regardless, I don't see the need for any kind of self-immolation and subsequent resurrection or dramatic suspension of operations here. However, I am at a loss as to what, exactly, to do with this space these days apart from using it as a kind of egocentric bulletin-board.

Now that I am left to my own devices, I will have a chance to catch up on my babelesque "to-read" pile, so perhaps I will post my impressions (not reviews, mind you, impresions) here. The summer bounty of the Dusie chapbook exchange booty has begun to show up, ever-so-slightly mangled, in my mailbox (Dusie folks (or anyone else, for that matter)--please write "DO NOT BEND" on the envelope of anything you send to me. The troglodyte who delivers our mail has the habit of snapping Netflix disks and everything else in half to fit them in our tiny box), so I guess I can also document those here. And the occasional polemic, lest I start getting invited to parties again.

Spare some reviews, brother (or sister)?

Anybody have an approximately 500-word review of anything that has come out in the past year that they are looking for a home for?

At the risk of jinxing myself, it looks as though Astrometry Organon should be out by the end of this month. I will post here as things develop.

Back in May, folks. Busy building an ark.

Against Precision

About a month or so ago I mentioned that I disagreed with several points that Nicholas Manning brought up in his admirably considered and ultimately reasonable review of my long poem Night Season in Galatea Resurrects. My pace in formulating criticism or responses to criticism tends to be glacially slow. It was not until I went to see some of the works in the Minimalist collection at DIA: Beacon that I began to glean an understanding of what, exactly, my point was in differing with some of the notions that Nicholas put forward in his review. I don't really want to offer a point-by-point rebuttal to Nicholas's piece, since I think that it is a fine and self-contained view of the poem in question. Instead, I'd like to offer my thoughts on the matter in relation to my reaction to some of the work at DIA: Beacon and some of my thoughts on precision in art (read: painting, poetry, sculpture, what have you) in general.




My girlfriend Rachel had discussed some of the thinking of one of her professors on the subject of minimalism and the rhetoric of power, which I initially dismissed since I'm generally resistant to the shibboleth of the connection between aesthetics and politics in favor of meeting the work itself in the decontextualized moment of initial contact between artist an audience. Minimalism was, by most reckonings, a reaction to the uber-personalized, gestural aesthetics of the Abstract Expressionists. What the artists were up to was a depersonalization of art and a flattening of affect in order to foreground the idea of art-as-object or art-as-process. These impulses, as I assessed initially are fundamentally populist and aesthetic rather than political. When confronted with the work itself, however, looking at Sol LeWitt's meticulously constructed angles in his "Drawing Series" and Walter De Maria's austere geometries one thing came to mind: the depersonalized machinery of fascism. However, I had exactly the opposite reaction when regarding Agnes Martin's fecund fields of blank penmanship paper, awaiting the immanence of the word, or Joseph Beuys' sound-deadening piles of ragged felt. What I began to realize is that I had no problem with the minimal, on the contrary, those works in the collection that I did not react negatively to, I liked very much; but rather, what I found disquieting was the precision of certain pieces, and how that referenced the power dynamic. I think it probably is not a coincidence that the work I objected to the most was mainly by white males--whereas Agnes Martin seemed to be rejecting some sort of gestural phallic "present-ness" in her work, Lewitt, De Maria and others seemed to be offering a kind of antagonistic swipe at gestural particularities. There is erasing the page, and there is destroying the page.




This is perhaps an intensely subjective reaction to the work, and a cliched conflation of aesthetic precision with the well-worn adumbration that Italian fascism "got the trains running on time"; nevertheless, it was the fundamental reaction I had, and conspicuously close to Rachel's professor's assertion that the resonance of Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc," lies not with its formal purity, but rather with the fact that the work killed people. This, I'd say, is a fine metaphor for the ideological implications of depersonalized formalism--what do the forms do to us when we have withdrawn our human intervention. "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work Makes Us Free") unfettered of its context, hanging above the doorway to the concentration camp. This is a hyperbolic example, but its theoretical and aesthetic underpinnings are sound: the stripping of a people of their humanity is the first ingredient in genocide, the stripping of a work of art of its humanity thows it dangerously into the sphere of the depersonalized rhetoric of power. In Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, he speaks of the organization and precision necessary in orchestrating the deaths of thousands of people employing a few guns, machetes and spiked clubs alone. To me, this is the inevitable end result of precision for precision's sake. Ultimately each and every one of us will be saved or blessed by an error. Insofar as humanity itself is a kind of error, we must embrace imperfection as the very source of our own existence and our own life-force.




What does this have to do with poetry, and with Nicholas's thinking about my poem? I am certainly not calling Nicholas a fascist! However, those moments he objects to in Night Season are those that he deems 'imprecise,' 'mundane' or 'overwritten.' And it is true that they are, in fact, all of those things, as I react strongly against precision in poetry, in the same way that I do against precision in art.

The rhetoric of power is different in poetry. "Minimalism" in poetry is more often than not focused on a kind of gestural preciousness that, while often cloying, is not depersonalizing and doesn't inspire in me the same revulsion as some of the minimalist painters and sculptors. I think the analogous impulse occurs not in minimalist poetics, but rather on a "craft-centered" (Serra's work is often centered on "materials" in the same way) poetics. It is easy to single out "workshop poetics" (as parodied, hilariously in Tim Petersen's "Tarzan Workshop": "Do student know Louise Gluck make over FORTY DRAFT of single poem, and over half of draft just CHANGE SEMICOLON? Do student know that most “serious poet” do nothing than sit at desk and REVISE POEM ALL DAY LONG? Because Tarzan poem “never finished”!") But some culpability also lies elsewhere with writing that completely emphasizes form or process over the human gesture (note, I don't say "content" here, because I don't believe in content, only human marks made): the oftentimes hermetically-sealed irony of Flarf can be guilty of this, as can some Oulipo-type writing that entirely foregrounds procedural devices. Language poetry most often seems in keeping with Martin's fecund immanence, to my mind at least, though I'm sure some who are sympathetic to this perspective would differ with me. (I am speaking generally here, it is important to recognize that there is actually a fairly vast variety of work which falls under the aegis of such blanket terms as "Flarf," "Oulipo," "Langpo," "Minimalism," and any other critical marker that we use out of convenience to classify a body of related work. And, as you probably guessed, I am against these makers anyway (with all due respect to Joshua Corey and other "classifiers"...))




I am most sympathetic to writing that is self-consciously "flawed" (though not necessarily as relentlessly and pristinely "flawed" as Flarf, which is sometimes like a shelf of identically pre-ripped jeans) or "excessive" in some way--poetic Art Brut of a fashion: thus leading to my fondness for Hopkins, Crane, Stein and Duncan to name a few 'canonical' types. I won't name contemporaries in order to avoid sounding cliquish. This is something I strive for in my own work, and the impetus which leads to the undermining of say, "May my death never come." with "Still--I am just / a plant like all the rest," or the borderline cliche of "We sleep even/as figures/ march/ through snow/ or dust to enact/ violence." It is certainly a reaction against precision when I push myself to "overwrite" moments of extreme psychic intensity or extreme biliousness. I'm drawn to the excess of the Weimar Republic or the fecund pond of Rococo or the gestural purity of Abstract Expressionism more than I am the austerity of minimalism or bald-faced formalism.