funny experience today: art and reality

Today I was showing my CEP students the DVD “Art City: Making it in Manhattan,” a wonderful documentary that features such art luminaries as Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Elizabeth Murray, and Ashley Bickerton.  In the beginning of the film, an art critic named Jerry Saltz introduces himself, saying “I’m an art critic,” and giving his phone number rather rapidly.

I made it a listening exercise for students to note down the phone number he mentioned.  When we were checking answers, it seemed that their version was one digit different from what I had heard. 

We could have listened again to that section of the video, but I decided that there was a more interesting way to find out which was the correct phone number:  by actually calling it.  First I tried my version.  It rang and rang: no answer.  Then I tried the students’ version, and to my surprise, a male voice answered:

Hello?

Is this Jerry Saltz?

Yes it is!

Oh, excellent!  My students here at Pratt were just watching the video of Art City in which you give your phone number and we wanted to see if it worked.

He was effusive.  He said he loved Pratt, that he was a Pratt person, and wanted to know what my students were studying, and mentioned that the film was made twenty years ago, and I said that it was extraordinary that he still had the same phone number.  At the end of our brief conversation, he said something like “I love you: art conquers fear,” or something like that.

Then I held up my iPhone and had all my students shout HI to him.

So that’s my funny experience for the day.  Can you match that? 

Jerry Saltz
HI JERRY!

L=A=N=G Po’s Long Run? Or time for a new moment? Mesmer & Gordon discuss….

SHARON MESMER:
 
 
Nada, last week we were discussing the phenomenal 40-year run of Language Poetry as a prevailing literary mode/model (forty years as of this year, if you date it from the first issue of This).   I don’t know if any “movement” has stuck around for as many years, considering that it so intimately brings with it the influence of what immediately preceded it: if you connect it with FOH’s “Second Avenue,” we’re now talking 51 years.  We were joking about this — Language Poetry: die already!  — but a few days after our conversation I was sort of desultorily looking through Michael Gottlieb’s MEMOIR AND ESSAY, and I found (maybe coincidentally) this (the italics are mine):
“The sixth issue of This was the first I came across . . . (it) had a long, brilliant piece by Clark Coolidge.  There didn’t seem to be a title.  I had no idea who he was, but on the copyright page of the magazine was a little note, ‘This Press has recently published “The Maintains” by Clark Coolidge . . . ‘  I ran up to the front room of the Gotham, and there, in with the other ‘C’ poets was ‘The Maintains.’  And it was beautiful; it was amazing.  It was clear to me from that moment on: you didn’t need to tell stupid stories any more.  A poem could be about what it was supposed to be about — the indigestible, irreducible, unredeemable words that flung themselves at us every day, the language that, in its infuriating, inexhaustible, immeasurable confusion, yet limitless precision, lived, teeming, out there, outside our door.  There could be no subject, or at least no subject greater than this.  Let the words be themselves, don’t try and yoke them into some tyranny of argument, they would tell you what they were about.”

Poets discover poetry in different ways, and each way is a powerful, revelatory moment.  Mark Strand wrote this about Pablo Neruda’s “moment” in the New Yorker in ’03:  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/09/08/030908crbo_books1
Two different revelatory moments here.  Neruda’s is bound up with human emotion (“I felt an intense emotion and set down a few words, half rhymed but strange to me, different from everyday language . . .  I wrote them neatly on a piece of paper); Gottlieb’s loosed from it (“Let the words be themselves … they would tell you what they were about”).  Yet, both are interpreting **something** — but for all of LangPo’s disavowal of a guiding and hierarchical “I” telling stupid stories, Gottlieb’s knowing “you” (really “me”) seems to be “receiving” words like a privileged stenographer of the indigestible, the irreducible, unredeemable.  It’s like a reverse conversion: “Unredeemable words are flinging themselves at me, and I am just writing them down and letting them be because what they really want is to tell us — those of us with eyes to see/ears to hear —  what they are about.”  
For forty years.  
I understand the moment of revelation, and I think Gottlieb’s book is fascinating — especially that passage.  But: isn’t it time for a new moment?  And what will that moment look like, do you think? 
x, S

*************************************************************************************
NADA GORDON
 
 

Hi Sharon!

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OK, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, I think we need to back up a little and think about your hypothesis here, whether it is really true and whether it is really phenomenal, and also to put it in both larger and smaller contexts.  I want to start with the smaller contexts first – that is, you and me as individual poets – and in doing so also respond to what seems to me a mischaracterization of my position in regard to language writing in your first paragraph.  You and I have quite different genealogies as poets.  In your work, the vestiges of Beat and Slam are palpable. You studied with Ginsberg, you were (are) an Unbearable, so already perhaps built into those alliances is a kind of suspicion of or hostility toward language writing.  For me, although I had steeped myself in poetry since my early teens, my first real flowering as a poet in a community of poets happened in the heady air of the Bay Area Language scene in the 80s. So I really was very close to what was happening there, although very young and marginal, and the writing of that group was totally seminal to me.  I don’t think I have ever wished that the influence of their work would “die already”! I’m not saying either that I’m free of suspicions or hostilities to what might be taken as repressive elements of the most simplified (and hence not really accurate) forms of langpo dogma, but that’s another matter, maybe to address later. 
Another question:  Is forty years really a long run for a poetry movement?  Or is that just something we might think now in the 21st century where you blink for a moment and then everything is different?  (I mean, for how long have people been writing sonnets?  not that that is a movement, bu t you know what I mean.) And is your dating really accurate?  Can you really date the beginning of punk as a wider cultural phenomenon from the early Stooges?  or was it more from 1977 or so, when the meme had started seriously spreading through the media?  It’s interesting that you connect back to Second Avenue as a possible precursor to LP, but couldn’t you, if you are defining Language Writing as a kind of stylistic tendency (which is a problematic definition) go back even further –  to Mallarme? Of course, that’s silly.  No one could call Mallarme a language Writer or O’Hara either… because really the term belongs to a historical affiliation of (stylistically vastly different) writers, not to a particular tendency. I suppose I’m curious to know how you see the legacy of language poetry having prevailed, and in whose works, and why (or if) that troubles you.
I do know that when I would come back to the US from Japan throughout the 90s, and when I first moved back here in ’99, I would sometimes find myself annoyed by what seemed like a vast number of both language poetry imitators (who often diluted the impact of the earlier work) or anti-language-poetry reactors (who defined their works in opposition).  I would say that then it really was prevailing in a way that it is not so much now, although it’s hard for me to say this with any certainty, since I have always occupied such a tiny niche in poetry that in fact I have no idea what is “prevailing” (i.e. in MFA programs, in classrooms, in little magazines – most of which I don’t read  – in book publications, etc.).  That is, I know what I think about and I have some idea what my friends think about, but I don’t have any sense of a national or global map of poetry sensibilities.  Maybe you can speak to that better than I can.
I DO think that the Flarf & Conceptual movements are a kind of Cain & Abel to Language Poetry’s Adam-Eve.  Both movements still frolic about in some kind of garden (not Eden – definitely postlapsarian)-of-language-as-material, but Flarf works with the repressed lyricism and hot energies that some (that word is important) language poetry disdained, and the Conceptualists take the language poets’ work with framing and art-historical theory to a new extreme.  So in these senses, the language movement survives in these highly mutated forms. Key members of both Flarf and Conceptualism have been closely involved with language writing and writers for decades.
I don’t know, Sharon.  I sort of hate taxonomies of literary influence.  It seems like something that boys do, and it seems that if we were to really parse it, it would be unimaginably complex and tangled.  I mean, what is the influence of LP on, say, most of the writers published by Belladonna?  or  on NY-school-ish lyric poets like Anselm Berrigan and Dana Ward?  How does the LP influence play out differently on the two coasts? or the cities in between? What is the influence of LP on docu-poetry? or eco-poetry? How are the Flarf and Conceptual writers differently influenced, and by what writers in particular?  I could go on posing questions like this, but it might get tiresome.
Regarding the two “a-ha” moments you counterpose (Gottlieb’s and Neruda’s), I don’t really see all that big a difference, except that Gottlieb’s actually sounds a lot more effusive and lyrical. .  I don’t find Gottlieb’s version any less emotional than Neruda’s; something about Neruda’s neat writing seems a little anal to me, actually.  And to be honest, I really would rather read Gottlieb than Neruda.  I do think that, historically, language desperately craved (if you can groove for a moment on my anthropomorphizing) the liberation that Gottlieb describes there.  I still think it wants it, and I still often find those moments in my reading and writing almost ineffably ecstatic.
Regarding LangPo and “the I”… well, the (arguably, according to some) great collaborative work of the movement in recent years has been The Grand Piano, with lots of Is telling lots of stories, so I don’t think that critique of them really holds water anymore.  It was decades ago that Barrett Watten wrote the line, “Start writing autobiography” (which people then proceeded to do.).
And you know what, I think poets are, really are, “privileged stenographers.”  We didn’t make the language.  It moves (in) (around) (through) us.  Our notion that we are controlling it is only ever a fiction we are telling ourselves.
As to your last question, I think it is always time for a new moment.  I think Flarf was a new moment.  Conceptualism maybe a little less obviously so, since there was so much in the way of historical precedent, including the works of several language writers and NY school writers and artists, too.  I don’t know what the next moment will look like but I hope that it astonishes me. I suspect it might have something to do with (already has something to do with) multi- and inter-media:  a Compleat Art?
TO BE CONTINUED…

What do YOU think?

FOR EXPRESSION

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Rest Periods for
Expression of Milk.
Robust estimators for
expression analysis. Bill
O’Reilly Smears Nancy
Pelosi For Expression
Of Faith At
Catholic Event. JEX
is a universal
set of APIs
for expression languages.
Individual expression languages
function as plug-ins.
Efficient quadratic regularization
for expression arrays.
You can use
the “for expression
to perform specific
calculations as the
argument of an
aggregation function in
the Mapping node. Windows
Azure Blob Storage
for Expression Encoder
I am asking
a very basic
question which confused
me recently. The
problem is that,
in the multiple
generators For expression,
I don’t know
where can I
put each for
expression body.
The Expression Problem
is a new
name for an
old problem. Facial
Asymmetry Quantification for
Expression Invariant. Human
Identification*. pole dance
for expression Molecular
Basis for Expression
of Common and
Rare Fragile Sites.
Female Mice Chimeric
for Expression of
the Simian Virus
whether a language
can solve the
Expression Problem is
a salient indicator
of its capacity
for expression. Just
below the Channel
Grid in the Synful
Orchestra Control Panel
is the Delay
for Expression switch.
JSF Error:  cannot
get value for
expression. Modern Dance
For Expression Of
Feelings. Modern dance
is a dance
form which was
started in the
early 2oth century.
It was breakthrough
style. Consumers have
a need to
express themselves through
their attitudes as
well; because the
need for expression
can be great.
Direct Cloning Approach
for Expression of
an Anti-cucumber Mosaic
Virus Single-chain Variable
Fragment in Plant.
Proteins present in
cauliflower nuclear extracts
as required for
expression. Lash promoters
for expression in
Angola.  Construction of
Yeast Vectors Potentially
Useful for Expression.
Puppetry Can Provide
a Safe Venue
for Expression. Puppets
may be able
to express ideas
and feelings that
the puppeteer may
not be able
to express himself.
I know it
sounds weird, but
how was the
I Am-ness of
Yahweh finding room
for expression in
me? Dogs should
have right for
expression, how they
can, only they
can bark, rolling
on grounds and
moving their tales,
nothing more? We
can regard our
DNA as our
parents (and their
parents) living within
us; waiting for
expression. This process
of DNA transcribing
and translating itself
into proteins is
life itself. If
the couple in
question happens to
be a married
one, then the
overwhelming amount of
responsibilities leave no
scope for expression
of love. There
are no words
for expression. We
have set up
the best life
possible for the
broilers and follow
a model that
allows for expression
of their chicken-ness
and good health.
Woman must not
accept; she must
challenge. She must
not be awed
by that which
has been built
up around her;
she must reverence
that woman in
her which struggles
for expression. Margaret
Sanger. Round pegs
in the habitation
of seeking square
holes for expression.
Walk on to
the strange using
foundational techniques to
do pushups while
wrestling with the
non human with
a borrowed face.

put on your husband pants

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found Mr. Potatohead’s ear
in my husband pants pocket
Pants Off Dance Off
I’m a 29 year old chickadee
who loves spending time
with my dog babies and
my stained glass artist husband
pants We have a few pairs of Hideous
Husband Pants. Put on your husband
pants = act like a flaming asshole
And ’tis to be amongst these
sovereigns My husband pants !
Wife discovers her husband,
pants around his ankles, huggin’
on a pretty brown-eyed bovine.
husband, pants, ugly, waste, red,
fashion sense. Her husband, pants
unbuttoned, is constantly in front
of the TV set. For instance,
even when you have caught
your husband pants down
on top of another woman,
there is no need throwing up
All styles have a pocket
to take their pool as years
and to promote with husband pants
on a fluid passementerie. sobbing,
and thrashing, turning purple
while a nurse yells at her to hold
her breath and push, her husband
pants oddly at her elbow,
Plumper sun husband pants
email forbid pantyhosed
oral still in could
lady orgies ring rooms
hurt thumbs unexplored
and crazy answer fat sigh

A Treatise on Testicles

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Testicles are made for rubbing and licking.
Testicles are made for being wrenched off.
Chocolate was designed to make you horribly fat.
Life isnt really worth living but death is even worse.
Our testicles are made for making babies, not withstanding
punches, or being kneeded there. I know girls who get
a “puffy taco” from just having sex to hard.
You’re testicles are made for gambling,
that’s why you have two.
how little you are
testicles are made for a reason
(which is where honor and morals are thrown out the window)
grassy, swampy yak testicles are for the truly hardcore
kangaroo testicles are for lunch
testicles are for fun, just like our breasts
are fun for a man. Except that our breasts have fewer nerves
large testicles are for mating with many females
and not for producing more sperms.
Testicles are for males!!
She asks what a man’s testicles are for
if not to please a woman who comes into contact with them.
Testicles are for squids and Asian school girls.
i give him time to eventually realize what his testicles are for?
he “rapes” stuffed animals usually ones my male dog is playing with.
Testicles are for pulling, tugging, squeezing and milking.
Testicles are for wusses.
if the testicles are for some reason not developed
they will stay in the velvet with their first set of horns
Crazy Greeks, whale testicles are for Chinamen.
Goat milk and testicles are for stereotypical Arabs.
Stereotypical Mongols drink yak’s milk and eat mutton
jerkies. Sheep eyes are considers delicacies.
Either quit whining and cross the street or go in the shop
and find out what the plastic testicles are for and try it out.
Testicles are for losers… Allergic!
He can tell you what the chemicals in your testicles are for;
what happens when you carry too many memories;
Guys have testicles so women can use them for control
they want to know what “the little marble things are”
I am unaware of any reports that Jesus was incomplete,
so this begs the question as to what this God’s penis
and testicles are for? Is there a female god?
I guess your testicles are for decoration only.
The local specialities like puffin, shark, whale
and ram’s testicles are for the adventurous.
Testicles are for fastening leashes to..(grin)
Not for storing in formaldehyde. They are sacred.
Testicles exist to produce more testicles
Testicles exist to be unusual

p.s.  This is a work of appropriated collage and so it must be said that the convictions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the arranger.

silver paper hat

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Back in high school, i never really belonged
to any of “the groups” or “the cliques.”
and before you start explaining why
you removed me from the candidates list…
don’t. I don’t need or want to know.
This weekend’s weather gave me
the distinct feeling the earth really
doesn’t want us here. It absolutely
makes it difficult to live here as I know
when I’m not needed. I know when
I’m not useful. I know when I’m not curable.
The bewilderment I felt from anger
quickly dissipated into fear as I watched
John turn and walk away from me. Walt
Disney named a dog after me. Teachers
always put me last on the science quiz.
Darth Vader gives me more respect.
“I can’t talk about this anymore.”
“What if he comes for you?”
She shook her head. “He won’t.” “
I just came by to pick up one last
thing. [PICKS UP A MARCHING
BAND STYLE FRENCH HORN.]
I can sense when the church
members are cliquish and unfriendly.
Janet got up and took off her silver
paper hat. It caught on one of her
snowman earrings. [Lame try at airiness.]
 Visibly crestfallen, unable to hide it,
he turned and moved off I’m going
to pack my bags and leave. o again
I’m sorry to have disturbed your
community, it won’t happen Sniffles
and looks back with a sad look on his face.
But I’m cured….. I swear. I work my fingers
to the bone to bring you all happiness and
THIS is the Thanks I Get! (sniff sniff)
(She drops a basket full of laundry on the
floor.) Then he wrote his emo letter
and packed up his stuff. I’m bloody
used to it. I thought you were different
…sigh. I can see all the signs. You put goo
on me and try to cut me. I can take a hint.
I’m going now. Don’t try to stop me. I
would never be a burden. He said in
dissappointment, sitting up with
a boner out.”You girls have fun…
I’ll just walk out this way.” 😦
sulk. But before I go I’ve got
something to say to you people.
You talk about ancient beauty
and life… *packs his bags*
…and you can keep the jewelry.
Janet got up and took off her silver
paper hat. Janet got up
and took off her silver
paper hat. Janet got
up and took off
her silver
paper hat.

Dear Fellow Eunuchs

Dear Fellow Eunuchs,
there seems to be a lot of

misunderstanding. A lot of
people may be isolated and

seeking connection to the
(eunuch’s) neo-vagina,

going so far as to tape
appropriately shaped objects

to the groin area, but really
analysis is never the role

of intellectual eunuchs or
chauvinistic meatheads.

Nothing makes a beer
taste better than a lot of

hot naked women around,
rendering a bright and

intelligent man into a withering
eunuch. Eunuch is Spanish word

for HOT! Luv U baby! Let’s dress up!
Ladies, say “no” to having uneven and

teeth-like lips! I’m more of a
Rasputin-type cult myself.

Just a Special Din

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 Pushed world eggs pilot windshield and gets made.
Figure the having gods of magnets that mother full looked their wide. Ugly entry loving wherever they believe.
Open running praying a your angel in her blood thought.
Parallel thought back gets asked in both eyes by two hand permits.
Turned total earth awkwardly interests the help of a favorite witness.
There is always her oxygen next to her skyscrapers.
Thinking right onto her sister.
Safe cold people years.
Walk up a course enjoying metal.
Turned epic child sitting and peering a go.
Open to the nice match, taking the words if cautiously.
A helpless any new distance hands prey inside a polliwogs’ armed trailers.
Night hand realizing and lowering her concerned miniature.
Any father has his church changed by any window.
House the repeated, empty and nude (as your) down of quickly needed faces.
A panic official in her sanitary offer.
Interest capri bows knew good.
Miss a oil high pin.
Might important questions two hymns down her heart.
Dead the logic and place the sheets to back your neck.
Square theme hearing and watching.
Don`t face me how we ever filled to become electronic images, beacuse of the sure rules, I still can`t excuse.
Palm down liquid signals over for a great dangerous danger.
These positioned heavy churches.
I came more of the have at constant thought.
Cloth resumed eye trying way and looking list onto her time.
Mysterious close trying a white man in her grasping go.
And again to costume bones.
Red hat lights paid far.
Cry our hell, going a don on all little lines.
Might master walls with time as a grateful redstone lashes her.
Enormous tender men get into new shovels.
A month from the mind touch all her smart eggs.
I have a poker and shoved spank.
More blowing than pain to down critics and noticed torrents, has barely brought him to talked their miss of away.
Fit down thing flames her child before standing her down hand.
Police the clinging clarity of anthologies that come only checking their asking.
Name cotton dinosaurs of picture and school.
Glass eyes end just the special din.
Big strong respect needed science (for chair, and surprise).
Be to the night night.
Kid justice lined by power.
Waxen touch falling wherever they head.
Far original blue sleeves.
Smooth people coming wherever they like.
Brown killed hole, fighting a thought on all allowed worms.
Grave nervous used monopoly ties
Low breath with english wondering by news sound stomach.
Found her step to eye apparently of the swinging eyes – only the disappointment. Tall can eyes two miracles down her truth.
Wave to her poems and find with them.
An angry english wide gets said on a girl.
This shrugged lunch  threatened by a urged thought.
Fit paper high connection with a look.
Spiritual obvious father doing a reading and standing.
Mother of the feeling jungle – run by sucked guard – to war – behind the odd.
Being more than talking to own breasts.
Our thought faces a author: get on his science & do him.
The night club is someone who guards long for lovely running and says open shot eyes.
There are side fish her father left her.
It often caves the door of a driven brain.
Sleeping with children chunks a secret one pitiful to cast.
Preferred vegetable barely sculptures.
Her no pick face out of our emergency, like this sweet connection.
A killer gets on his flannel & lifts him.
Bond someone to get with you.
There are wild children at desk level to  hair your little means.
River with a removed cold body mothers her till she books next.
Pad toward aching sense.
Whats the accordion of a darling cloud when you can ground a narrow one?
Whats the challenge of exchanging a pushed head when you can face a secret one? Cut the door hands of history.
A cold unable artifact gets on a brotherhood.
Generous people with largest feet and small hands barriers her book.
More into lonely and evil apparel, I was into thought and walking warm dinner. Private and wound have been in a top chair for four eyes now.
Distance with things the making days
Down control trying after ground landing and pink room. Examination?
Members opposite eyes as a down kiss states her.
Hurt the dress of message in marks, and be tights in a mad attire.
Cracked people echoing dress and smiling motionless eyes.
Deep archives  and nerves hand politics and tones
Free thinking grows legs in your finding heads. 
Accused coin on this void hospital felt wide.
They wait to bottom luxuriously in their red want.
Sprawling epic non-clouds miss the glanced angels’ directions.
See not bulb hand reading down with high hope to welcome up on the men.
Exact threat for decaying and sitting.
Have a miss to dress you for an ordered gaze.
Alone sad perpetuity knows her empty park
The will engines the leaving thunder saw the mother front.
Cells have always been very simply red with each position.
Difficult hot doorway again pants a return.
Your nude turned back clothes her for a declared cross. Full reading first redstone mortgages machines gone by stretch.
The keeping perils.
Don`t edge me how we were ever told to become past muslims; beacuse of the baby trains, I still can`t want.
Every house a end who had take to the case (with bull).
Motionlessness surprised her measurements and elephants.
Circled first jail fingers long and protests a door.
Two currents conceal matter in a sleep touch.
Box questions hook like a image.
Eyes silence like a front.