Number 9, Number 9, Number 9...
H_NGM_N #9 is now live.
10.30.2009
10.26.2009
9.09.2009
3ssue
The new Sous Rature is now live, and here's the lineup:
Shaula Evans
Ross Priddle
Aidan Thompson
Lydia Davis
Kyle Schlesinger
Uchay Joel Chima
Charles Freeland
Rebecca Wolff
Stephen Webber
Edwin Torres
Joel Chace
Danielle Pafunda
Urayoán Noel
Douglas A. Martin
Stephanie Strickland
Alejandro Crawford
Jared Hayes & Joseph Cooper
Erin Casey
Russsell Pascatore
Adam Katz
Thierry Brunet & Jeremy Geddes
Anselm Berrigan
Donald Breckenridge
Michael Basinski
Claire Hero
Judith Goldman
Jerome Rothenberg
Chris Rizzo & Katherine Sullivan
Anne Gorrick
Ching-In Chen
Andrew Zawacki
miniphillyphocus ::
dorothea lasky
adam fieled
paul siegell
hassen
jenn mccreary
sarah birl
alex kanevsky
mytili jagannathan
I'm happy to see a number of familiar names, and the work should prove interesting, as always. I'm excited about collaborating with Katherine Sullivan, a fantastically gifted visual artist. You can click directly over to see our experiment in forms here.
9.07.2009
Anchoriting
After a hiatus, I'm happy to report that The Scathering Sound, by George Kalamaras, is now available. Check the Anchorite Press blog for details.
7.24.2009
Essaying
A new essay on Robert Creeley in Jacket 37: "An Extensive Body of Work: Robert Creeley's Poetics of Affect." Hope you find it provocative.
7.21.2009
7.15.2009
To Fail or Not to Fail
Michael Roberson asked some interesting questions on the Buffalo poetics list today, and I'd like to jot down a few remarks in response. First, his questions:
Struck by the acuteness of and subsequent attention to Christian Bök's discussion of "Writing and Failure" on the Harriet Blog, I am looking for further considerations of poetry and failure or poetry and inadequacy. In one regard, much has been written about poets and personal inadequacies or senses of failure, but what about the actual writing of poetry as an inevitably impossible, doomed, or failed endeavor? Do we continue to write poetry because it ultimately fails to do what we hope it might or should? Is the "failure of poetry" a failure of language, or poetics?
Any thoughts or ideas would be immensely appreciated.
Any thoughts or ideas would be immensely appreciated.
I’m not sure that poetics can suffer failure. As human beings who ostensibly construct our world, we fail ourselves first and, thus, any poetics that we can either individually or collectively produce.
So far as I can see, this failure is not with failure as a concept, but rather with the larger theoretical frameworks that support logics of failure. For instance, one needs the assumption of either a given or elected telos—which is, paradoxically, an a priori proposition—built into any such logic. The problem is ubiquitous.
Listen, when some form of dialectic as a mode of conceptualization functions in a system of reference to foreground its own processes—which either reproduces the authority of conceptuality, or dismantles that authority through the production of an indeterminable relationship between concept and percept—the best one can do was articulated by Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Failing better now.”
Worstward, indeed.
In both its transcendent and immanent versions, the Platonic program has run the course of history in the West for over two millennia, and there is no easy solution to the problem.
Underwritten by a Hegelian dialectical idealism, Western culture dooms itself to continually iterate the problematics of race, class, gender, and so forth. And we act as the agents. As soon as poetics actively intervenes it becomes an element of such iteration—even if that poetics struggles against the inequities and atrocities that the Platonic program produces—and one is irrevocably caught in a devastatingly powerful cultural logic that will infinitely flip the value places of subject and object like the rabbit and the duck in the optical illusion.
At that point, the only alternative is to theoretically insert indeterminacy into the equation and say, reductively, that we now have a modish hybrid of rabbit and duck.
When was the last time you saw a quacking bunny waddle down the street?
So far as I can see, this failure is not with failure as a concept, but rather with the larger theoretical frameworks that support logics of failure. For instance, one needs the assumption of either a given or elected telos—which is, paradoxically, an a priori proposition—built into any such logic. The problem is ubiquitous.
Listen, when some form of dialectic as a mode of conceptualization functions in a system of reference to foreground its own processes—which either reproduces the authority of conceptuality, or dismantles that authority through the production of an indeterminable relationship between concept and percept—the best one can do was articulated by Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Failing better now.”
Worstward, indeed.
In both its transcendent and immanent versions, the Platonic program has run the course of history in the West for over two millennia, and there is no easy solution to the problem.
Underwritten by a Hegelian dialectical idealism, Western culture dooms itself to continually iterate the problematics of race, class, gender, and so forth. And we act as the agents. As soon as poetics actively intervenes it becomes an element of such iteration—even if that poetics struggles against the inequities and atrocities that the Platonic program produces—and one is irrevocably caught in a devastatingly powerful cultural logic that will infinitely flip the value places of subject and object like the rabbit and the duck in the optical illusion.
At that point, the only alternative is to theoretically insert indeterminacy into the equation and say, reductively, that we now have a modish hybrid of rabbit and duck.
When was the last time you saw a quacking bunny waddle down the street?
7.06.2009
Reissue
I'm happy to report that Greying Ghost has reissued Naturalistless. As you can see, Carl's redesign is as gorgeous as the first edition. Copies are available here.
6.24.2009
One Pink Bomb
Deleuze & Guattari once suggested that literature should explode. In their guide to living a non-fascist life, they write: "The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form and content." I received my contributor's copy of Tight 5 about an hour ago and, I've got to say, this issue went kaboom in my hands. Of particular note is the featured sequence of poems by John Coletti, Me & My Falcon. Talk about an explosive device. Find a copy here.
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