Steve Roggenbuck at the New Museum

Steve Roggenbuck: http://www.steveroggenbuck.com
New Musem, NYC: http://www.newmuseum.org

Confronting limitations

CC BY Ton van 't Hof

He may be a starry-eyed idealist, a wiseacre, a whopper, a worrywart, or a dreamer, but he definitely has a story to tell: Slavoj Žižek in The LA Review of Books about ISIS – "a case of perverted modernization" – and liberalism – "drop the smug self-satisfaction" – and political correctness – "it is a hypocritical game that […] even trivializes racism" – and freedom – "a burden that deprives us of true choice" – and nationalism – "a new Dark Age is looming, with ethnic and religious passions exploding, and Enlightenment values receding" – and World War III – "we don’t believe it can really happen – and that’s why it can happen. That is to say, even if we don’t really believe it can happen, we are all getting ready for it …" et cetera.

The Enose and Beanos

Antonia Low, The Electric Return, 2010

Covertext, edited by Swantje Lichtenstein & Tom Lingnau, and based in Cologne, Germany, invited artists to answer the following question: Is the artist necessary for making art today? It needs no argument that the answers differ from one another. The most uncomplicated answer comes from Anthony Moore:

"I don’t suppose non-humans would bother with making art. So my conclusion must be, in this case, "YES", we do need humans for pursuing essentially useless pastimes like murder and painting."

Curve continuous

Last November Charles Bernstein gave a lecture in Warsaw, Poland (American Studies Colloquium Series): "The Pitch of Poetry: Moral Perfectionism, Occupy Wall Street, and the Poetics of Holocaust Representation.”

“The description of an injustice is a poetic problem. There are no neutral descriptions that speak for themselves.” –Charles Bernstein

Homage to the world

Charles Bernstein and I founded IEPI in 2008 I think. After a successful start we lost focus and energy and IEPI came through a couple of years slowly to a halt. In 2014 only four posts were published. In the past weeks I wondered what to do with IEPI. What can we as "an international point of contact for the exchange of information" still offer in these times of information overload? Not too much, I'm afraid. Not more than a personal story about what it means to be a poet in 2015. But maybe that's enough. I'll give it a try. My reporting on IEPI will be interlarded with personal opinions and anecdotes.

It was a tweet by Done Share (he has by the way more than 12K followers) that pointed me to Marjorie Perloff's essay about "the deep minimalism" of Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). To be honest, the name Finlay didn't ring my bell, but both minimalism (an attractive poetic alternative in my view) and Perloff (always good for some interesting thoughts) did. And, having read it, I can say that if you are interested in concrete poetry you certainly should turn to Perloff's essay. She does a fine job unraveling Finlay's work. About the poem pictured above this post she says:

"One's immediate response to Finlay's text is to read it as an Imagist nature poem: the four-three line stanzas invoke natural phenomena, from "Green Waters" and "Blue Spray" to "Moonlit Waters" and "Drift." "Star," furthermore, appears four times and "waters" twice. But who are "Anna T" and "Karen B," much less "Netta Croan"? And how do these proper names relate to "Constant Star" and "Starwood"? The fact, as the use of capital letters throughout hints, is that Finlay's poem is a catalogue or proper names. If we read it against related texts of the sixties, we soon see that these are indeed the names of particular fishing trawlers from Lowestoft, Aberdeen, and other ports. "These names," Stephen Bann tells us in his commentary, "are a given material, derived intact from the real world ... [they] lose the inertness appropriate to their strictly functional role. The poem restores their intrinsic delicacy." Or rather, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, one might say that the context transforms all the words and phrases, showing how variable the process of naming is, ranging as it does from proper names with initials like Karen B to names that pay homage to the watery world in which the trawlers live. One is even named Drift."

Finlay's work make me as a 2015 poet once again aware that words are the material poems are made of, and that meaning depends above all on the context.

"The Deep Minimalism of Ian Hamilton Finlay", Marjorie Perloff, The Battersea Review.

Datafication

For poets who are into data mining, personalization, and privacy issues (who isn't?):

"After all, throughout The Formula, Dormehl signals that he wants us to think carefully about what it means to be human in an age where algorithms increasingly tell us who we are, what we want, and how we'll come to behave in the future. Indeed, Dormehl goes so far as to declare that our age is marked by a "crisis of self," where the Enlightenment conception of "autonomous individuals" is challenged by an algorithmic alternative. Individuals have become construed as "one categorizable node in an aggregate mass." --Evan Selinger, Los Angeles Review of Books

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems -- And Create More, Luke Dormehl, Perigee Books, 2014, pp. 288, ISBN 9780399170539

It's too Late for Careful

I'm looking forward to meeting C.A. Conrad in March, when he's performing in Amsterdam. Since I read A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books, 2012), I follow his wanderings. Also his new book, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014) is definitely a good read. And shocking sometimes. Or, as Drew Webster is telling us in his review of this book:

"These poems are extreme, it's true. There's no way to, there’s no reason to, deny this. When Conrad explains that he wants to "create" an extreme present, he doesn't mean that the present which he creates is one that is extreme by virtue of the fact that he has bloodied his foot or inserted a plastic tube into his penis, it is extreme by virtue of the fact that we have all made it extreme—"I blame everyone when I blame / myself I'm that good a shot," he says in "Now Only 30% Taphephobic / Feeling Better by Open Holes." But, in his typical all caps approach, C.A. Conrad seems to ask us whether we can think of a more extreme circumstance than the ones we find ourselves in now, and if that's true, don't extreme circumstances require extreme measure to deal with them?" --Drew Webster, Colorado Review

More on Ecodeviance -- samples and reviews -- on this page.

Mayakovsky: A Biography

I should read this book. I really should read this. God, give me more time!

Mayakovsky: A Biography, Bengt Jangfeldt, translated from the Swedish by Harry D. Watson, University of Chicago Press, pp. 601, ISBN: 9780226056975

"Jangfeldt suggests several possible reasons for Mayakovsky’s suicide: personal turmoil, the establishment’s increasingly hostile attitude, the failure of his play, problems with his vocal cords, the drifting away of his audience Another explanation, less explicit but crucial, is his inevitable disillusion with the new order, a system he could no longer identify with. ‘The word is the C-in-C of human powers,’ was Mayakovsky’s motto. For a poet who put absolute trust in language, the Soviet doublespeak that emerged a decade after the revolution must have been unbearable. ‘Freedom’, a word that rang so true in 1917, was rapidly losing its meaning under bureaucratic collectivism, a more precise term for ‘socialism’. As he watched the language of the future being reduced to hollow slogans, Mayakovsky was bound to see his own position as a dead end." --Anna Aslanyan, in The Spectator

Latest developments in the Netherlands and Flanders

Also interested in the latest poetical developments in the Netherlands and Flanders? Read Frank Keizer's and Maarten van der Graaff's daring article in two parts - translated into English! - on this matter: "First of all, we do not write as professional scholars, who are required to adopt a systematic approach to literature, but as poets, writing from within and not from a, mostly, external position. But Perhaps more Importantly, the discussion itself is in need of revision." (I'm in the second part!)

Part One: http://samplekanon.com/?p=3203

Part Two: http://samplekanon.com/?p=3212

First, it’s hard

Why Nobody Reads William Bronk, by Daniel Wolff: "Okay, so the first reason nobody reads William Bronk’s poetry is that it’s hard. The second reason is: it's hard. [...] To read Bronk is to enlist – no, to be drafted – into an irrelevant army of fools. [...] The crowning reason not to read Bronk is that he appears to be telling you there’s no point to it."