Archive for September, 2019|Monthly archive page
Action Books action
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Action Books, poetry, poetry in translation
Leave a comment As an English-language Canadian poet, I’ve always starved and thirsted for almost anything foreign to most of what officially passes for my native poetic tradition. Action Books has been introducing some of the wildest, weirdest, far-outest poetry into English for years, and now their list is half price (with the checkout code ‘TRANSLATE’).
Do yourself and them and North American English-language poetry and line your shelves and blow your poetic mind now!
Manifesto
Action Books is transnational.
Action Books is interlingual.
Action Books is Futurist.
Action Books is No Future.
Action Books is feminist.
Action Books is political.
Action Books is for noisies.
Action Books believes in historical avant-gardes.
& unknowable dys-contemporary discontinuous occultly continuous anachronistic avant-gardes.
Art, Genre, Voice, Prophecy, Theatricality, Materials, the Bodies, Foreign Tongues, and Other Foreign Objects and Substances, if taken internally, may break apart societal forms.
“In an Emergency, Break Forms.”
Action Books: Art and Other Fluids
Praise the algorithm! Plunging into the silliness: Andrew Lloyd’s career as an Instagram poet
Filed under: Praise and Polemics | Tags: Instagram poetry, poetics, poetry, poetry criticism
Leave a comment Thanks to real poet Michael Boughn for sharing Andrew Lloyd’s article from Vice “I Faked My Way as an Instagram Poet, and It Went Bizarrely Well”—a fortuitous addendum to my last post, “Synchronicitious Critique”.
Synchronicitious Critique
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Bookninja, Insta-poets, Instagram poetry, literariness, poetry criticism, Seth Perlow, social network, William Blake
Comments (1) Bookninja‘s back, and worth keeping an eye on.
Yesterday, George Murray posted an article on Instagram poetry, with the commentary, “I work hard to be progressive. I work hard to be forward-thinking. I work hard to find joy and worth in as much of life’s silliness as possible.” As much as I share Murray’s estimation of the literary-media (media-literary?) phenomenon, the article, by scholar Seth Perlow, teaches an important lesson by example.
In the article’s introduction, Perlow sets out his purpose:
In what follows, I’ll nonetheless try to learn something from the Insta-poets, something about the technological scene of contemporary poetry, without advancing a judgment about their work. The complex intersections of Insta-poetry’s political, commercial, and literary significance have frustrated literary critics’ efforts to evaluate it. So for now, I want to suspend questions of value in order to ask how Instagram structures poetic forms and participatory reading practices.
By suspending “questions of value” what comes into view are not only otherwise overlooked aspects of the verbal art of poetry in general, but no less pressing questions concerning media, composition, reception, and various blindnesses that inevitably accompany whatever insights poets and critics might otherwise have. Canonical figures, such as Emily Dickinson and Charles Olson, come into play; the no less urgent and perspicacious studies of Byung-Chul Han on digital media and society might as well have been included. The point is that the critical (judgemental) sensibility all-too-often obscures the reality of what it judges. And however much I agree with Murray’s and Perlow’s low estimation of Insta-poetry, Perlow’s example is instructive as to what resolute, clear-eyed, and informed study can reveal, revelations of no little pertinence or consequence to “serious” poetry.
By lucky happenstance, just this morning, a review of the William Blake show at the Tate Gallery came up in the newsfeed. What struck me about this chance juxtaposition is what Blake, weirdly, shares with the Insta-poetry Perlow investigates. Both are, in a sense, cottage industries; in both, text and image are inseparable (regardless of Blake’s stripping the text from some paintings and engravings to sell them independently), and both present themselves via the handwritten as opposed to schematized typography. And who, reading the Songs of Innocence for the first time, has not been initially perplexed by the high critical regard they now receive?
The theme, as Whitman (that other great self-published self-promoter) wrote, has vista, even when what is scrutinized is silly.
September 13 Synchronicity
Filed under: poems | Tags: Dan Philip Brack, DPB, poems, poetry, September 13, synchronicity, Zsolt Sőrés
Leave a comment For me, September 11 is often shadowed (if not overshadowed) by the Dawson College shooting of 2006, which (as a teacher there) I witnessed, from a fortunate, safe distance.
Today, however, reflecting on the work, I opened Ladonian Magnitudes by chance to the poem “Epistle to Zsolti”, a versified missive to my friend, Hungarian sound artist Zsolt Sőrés. The letter, as much as it overtly expresses a desire to correspond and communicate with a distant friend, as a poem, has other motivations, one of which was remarked by the “Gefin” in the poem (Hungarian-language poet Kemenes Géfin László, a close friend at the time), namely, the death of another friend, writer Daniel Philip Brack (DPB), September 13.
In acknowledgement of this manifold synchronicity, and in warm memory of DPB and the other friends in the poem, and the attachment that motivated it in the first place, I share it here.
Epistle to Zsolti
been on a Tom Waits
immersion course
for weeks now
buying him all up
latest and lastest
new or used
listening to just one new song
a day
carefully
these days Foreign Affairs 1977
like Blue Velvet’s soundtrack
reminiscent of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch
even a couple of “One-eyed Jack’s” in the lyrics:
our cinematic interests
our show’s DAT I’m so eager to hear
because of a heightened self-consciousness about Performance
teaching again now two weeks
Primal Shamanic poetry and poetics
that is “magical”, “sacralizing”, “holy-ing” “aestheticizing”, “estranging” language-act
& “The Truth is Out Where?! Exploring the Unexplained”
eager to get you a draft of our interview (!)
write up a short article on why my favourite books today are Hungarian,
namely yours and Gefin’s
Poems for Jolanta urged me
around high noon today
to likewise edit the literary remains of dear departed DPB
Yes! He in the Budapest Suites
hopfrogging with me a parodic waltz
through that night empty streetcar subway hub under intersection of those big utcas
loud and lively red eyed Bacchic old electric blue shark skin suit skinny black tie 50s grey hat
who one Friday
September 13
overdosed OD’d
in San Francisco LA
right out of rehab
he who made
our furious correspondence
into spontaneous pseudonymous
“heteronyms” like Pessoa’s?
Kierkegaardian personae?
serial surreal literary works
whose literary remains
but for one
now lost?
novel on old 5-inch floppy
now my care
hardly able to pick them up
for grief
for guilt
the years since
so really should get together with Cronenbergian croney and computer design wiz and get to it
Did I ever send you photos of the Trabante?
Hold-ups began on our return in July
when installing Flashcard reader jammed access to my Office Suite
& December saw the whole house of cards come crashing down
Just when the Raelians announced they’d cloned a human being
& BBC Radio 4 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feuillton Times Higher Education Supplement all wanted my opinion
now I’m waiting for the cheques and checking my expectations that something poetic might come out of it
Sleeping, eating,
& now working
are all I’ve been able to do since December 3
But now apparently energetic enough to send out some feelers
which seems appropriate for someone who aspires to be
the antennae of the race
Corpus Sample: Materializations II: “Gloze”
Filed under: poems | Tags: Grand Gnostic Central, Jake the Dog, poems, poetics, poetry, Ty Hochban, videopoems
Comments (1) Last week’s “materialization” sought to concretize the language by collaging snippets of decontextualized conversation. This week’s tightens the knot, making “the language speak” about the language itself.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is remembered for remarking that “meaning is use.” Taking this maxim literally, I collaged together examples of every use of the word ‘gloze’ drawn from the examples supplied by the Oxford English dictionary under the word’s entry. The word is thereby lexically if not semantically “emptied out” in a cubist fashion, putting Wittgenstein’s contention to an ironic test. The poem is further self-reflexive, because the word means to glare or inspect closely; therefore, the title can be taken to be the imperative tense, instructing the reader to gloze, gloss (another meaning), or otherwise attend to the word itself. The word has the added bonus, aside from its polysemy, of being a pun on the plural of the substantive ‘glow’ and the third person singular conjugation of the verb ‘to glow’ among other things. Attentive readers will also note the poem is a chance fourteen lines….
Though this compositional procedure held promise, I exploited it only two more times, to write the poem “Gnarled Box” (along with “Gloze” included in Grand Gnostic Central) and a longer, much more complex, intertextual work that develops a passage from Lautreamont’s Poesies fittingly entitled “Poesies”.
‘Gloze’ is also the name of the first, self-published chapbook, that served as my calling card in Germany during my first European tour in 1996. And, like “Elenium” it inspired a videopoem by Ty “Jake the Dog” Hochban, viewable after the poem.
Gloze
No more men maye glosen withouten text
Than bylde materles. With fals talkyng
Many gloses are made. With Retorike,
Ne glosed eloquence, some to opteyn
Favour will flatter and glose, with new Glozes
Tainte the Text, and vnto you a fayned
Tale will gloze. Give a good glose from thy strain’d
Goggle eye, peep from the watry Humour,
And glow upon any word you may gloze,
The parasite glozes with sweet speeches,
With the tongue of flattery glozing deeds,
Known only to those who have glozed over
An illusory glozing of light dismally
Glimmering, glosing with the glory of day.
Corpus Sample: Materializations I: “Elenium”
Filed under: poems | Tags: collage, Jake the Dog, Ladonian Magnitudes, parataxis, poems, poetics, poetry, Ty Hochban, videopoems
Comments (1) 
Ironically, at a time when text is at its most material (as something to be cut and pasted, or mindlessly composed or translated by software) it is at the same time most invisible, the sign a mere window onto its meaning, disposable as a paper coffee cup once the latté is finished. Poets have, understandably, especially in recent decades, worked against this trend.
“Elenium” (aside from the elusiveness of its title) slows down the too-ready consumption of the language by complicating its logic. The poem collages overheard bits of conversation without any indication of which words belong to which speakers or even how many speakers there are. However old (and it is very old) this device is, it caused no little consternation to the most vociferous of the reviewers of Ladonian Magnitudes (see the “Product Description” at the book’s page at Amazon.ca) from which this poem is taken.
Happily, the poem inspired a video interpretation (by Ty “Jake the Dog” Hochban), viewable after the poem itself.
Elenium
The isle is full of voices
a tiny little yellow oval pill
Judy Garland ravaged by her phantoms
it’ll all be alright
they’re all pretty full—one’s puffed up
hashish, port, and In Memoriam
we must have some music, some more to drink
and then we are ready for “Shades of Callimachus…”
late night calls for coke are disturbing and boring
I always bring him something from Holland
what have we done yet? —I can see
the flower in the bud—and she is a bud!
let’s remember hysteria was thought to be a migrating uterus
you having sex would never look good
a colony mongrel hand-me-down genes
yet eyes are the guides of love still
that must have given you a twitch or two
with the Xanax I don’t feel like I need a cigarette
though you wouldn’t say you have beaten out your exile
Poeta Doctus 