Month: June 2009

Kevin Killian kindly blogs on the SF MoMA site about the ATA show Konrad sponsored for me and Gary and Erika Staiti last month, and writes a bit about the benshi phenomenon as well.

Cool!

[I’ve been asked to write a statement on the relation of my work to “conceptual writing”… and would appreciate any feedback on these thoughts…]

Even after reading the little blue book, Notes on Conceptualisms, I admit that I am not entirely sure what conceptual writing is not. I am pretty sure I know what it is, but I don’t know where exactly to draw the line that distinguishes it from what it is not.

I get that it is allegorical, but it is not allegorical in the standard way that A Pilgrim’s Progress or Paradise Lost are allegorical: these are teaching texts that ask us to become better people by reading them and comprehending their correspondences and how those correspondences relate to our lives. The new conceptual writing is allegorical in that it points outside itself to other structures it aims to critique, as opposed to structures we should obey and follow and be improved by. That critique may serve to make us more “conscious,” but that consciousness doesn’t necessarily improve us or make us virtuous. The old allegory tries to make us obedient; the new allegory is subversive, and asks us to be disobedient. Maybe, given the contemporary social frame, disobedience is the new virtue?

There are also so many practices listed in the little blue book (hence, plural conceptualisms) – “appropriation, piracy, flarf, identity theft, sampling, constraint” – all of which I gleefully subscribe to – that the term could almost spread out to cover just about all the writing I do and that I pay attention to. Considered VERY broadly, all writing, even historically, is all of the things in the list above, with the exception of flarf (a narrower and more culturally specific term): we simply cannot use language without appropriating, pirating, stealing identity, sampling, or constraining. Can we?

Thus, in my state of theoretical puzzlement, I can only say: When I write conceptual poetry I don’t set out to write “conceptual poetry.” When I “appropriate,” I can compare it to wandering in a field and seeing, oh, lupine, and Queen Anne’s lace, and mariposa lilies, and wild irises, and because they are beautiful (and grotesque, like all flowers) they compel me and I take them and arrange them, even though it may not be legal to do so. Flowers are nature’s readymades. Or maybe “appropriation” is like wandering in my neighborhood in Brooklyn (admittedly looking for poetry) and seeing a giant sign over a Russian nightclub that reads “EUPHORIA.” The “conceptual” mindset, then, is about looking and noticing: as Place points out (writing of the image as reference), “like any good art, it teaches you to linger.” Not just, I think, to linger: to somehow penetrate what is noticed until it penetrates you. There’s a kind of interinanimating ecstasy (Donne) in this.

I do not privilege obviously appropriated writing over a more Romantic interiorly generated writing (although the latter, as I mention earlier, is in a sense also appropriated): in fact, the sort of writing that most intrigues me most is that which (I have written elsewhere) performs a kind of pavan between these two modes, because that is how I experience the world, as input and output gracefully and/or shockingly affecting each other. I want to lay bare this affect to myself and to anyone who takes the time to read what I write. I’m very much with Place when she writes, “If there is superior art, it lies in the ability of any image – real or abstract, written or pictorial – to dropkick, lick, tickle and torture, to render its reader absolutely sensate.” [italics mine] Thus, the “purely” appropriated writing I do is absolutely subject to my authorial manipulation and editing in the service of that sensation.

…………………………..

Coda: Wondering… given the definition (or lack of definition) above… is the following poem (which I wrote when I was eleven or twelve) “conceptual”?

3.95

a number
a poem in itself
a mathematical complicational digital3 figure.

or

Love – Beauty – Virtue – And other corny junk

or

Chinese Noodles and fried asparagus noses

or

BLEEP

but all it really is

is

3.95

Let me be born again. Let me
literally be spirited
back within my mother who
equally miraculously
let be live as once she was.
Let me decide just where & when
& in what set of circumstances I
shall this time choose to enter.
Let me think.

~ David Bromige

The riotousness of woman is linked to that of speech and indeed seems to be a condition of poetry itself.

R. Howard Bloch in “Medieval Misogyny”

If I’m killed in jihad while dressed as a woman, will I still get my houri?

(from, of course, Yahoo Answers)

Unadorned, she is not desirable. Adornment excites love. If there is a connection between ornaments and love, that is because the first ornaments of all were in the centre-jar of the celestial granary; and that jar is the symbol of the world’s womb. (acc. to Ogotemmelli)

In certain societies where sounds have become letters with sharps and flats, those unfortunate enough not to fit into these letters are tossed out of the system and qualified unmusical. They are called noises….A music bound up with movement, dance,and speech, one in which the listener becomes a co-performer, one that has no overall form except one of continually recurring sequences of notes and rhythms, one that plays endlessly – for nobody has enough of life – has been repeatedly called elemental or rudimentary. Is irritable to most Westerners’ ears.

The sound of a swelling cry of ululation.
That high wail that speaks her joy, excitement, or grief.

from a script by Trinh T. Min Ha, NAKED SPACES: Living is Round, published in Cinematograph, Volume 3 1988, purchased for 50 cents at a garage sale on Sunday