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tags: Poetry Literature
rel:Unique Thought
NOTE
What is the place of individual genius in a > global world of hyper-information—a world > in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted > more than seventy years ago, everyone is > potentially an author? For poets in such > a climate, “originality” begins to take a > back seat to what can be done with other > people’s words—framing, citing, recycling, > and otherwise mediating available words > and sentences, and sometimes entire texts.
The publication in 1922 of The Waste Land - surely the most famous poem in English in the 20th century - met with a largely negative reception.
Reviewer Edgell Rickword, expressed admiration for the sophistication but could not condone the allusion. “emotions hardly ever reach us without traversing a zig-zag of allusion. ”
Eliot: this cultural middle layer of the poem is of no poetic value in itself. We desire to touch the inspiration itself, and the apparatus of reserve is too strongly constructed.
Mr. Eliot, always evasive in the grand manner, has reached a stage at which he can no longer refuse to recognize the limitations of his medium; he is sometimes walking very near the limits of coherency. (A poem of borrowed texts can only be the result of indolence of the Imagination)
Thought
If a piece borrows, the awareness of it being borrowed can be lost if the influence outweighs and outlasts its sources. I might not be aware of the allusion, only the result.
Blessed citation! Among all the words in our vocabulary, it has the privilege of simultaneously representing two operations, one of removal, the other of graft, as well as the object of these operations—the object removed and the object grafted on, as if the word remained the same in these two different states. Is there known elsewhere, in whatever other field of human activity, a similar reconciliation, in one and the same word, of the incompatible fundamentals which are dis- junction and conjunction, mutilation and wholeness, the less and the more, export and import, decoupage and collage? The dialectic of citation is all-powerful: one of the vigorous mechanisms of displacement, it is even stronger than surgery. - Antoine Compagnonquote
Soliloquy
rel:All Spoken Word Recorded
Soliloquy (1997) by Kenneth Goldsmith: A conceptualist text that transcribes every word its author spoke during an entire week in New York City (while omitting all the words of those he spoke to), Soliloquy blurs the distinction between “real” people—people with Internet profiles and publications—and fictional characters.
“The most boring writer that has ever lived” (as Goldsmith has called himself) has retyped a day’s New York Times (Day) and typed up a year’s worth of weather reports (The Weather). In the digital Soliloquy, he plunders his own words, offering a web version of a book edition of a gallery installation of a week’s worth of his spoken language.
Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word I spoke during the week of April 15-21, 1996, from the moment I woke up Monday morning to the moment I went to sleep on Sunday night. To accomplish this, I wore a hidden voice-activated tape recorder. I transcribed Soliloquy during the summer of 1996 at the Chateau Bionnay in Lacenas, France, during a residency there. It took 8 weeks, working 8 hours a day
This is a poetry that conceives of the poem as meaning-making machine and takes its motive from what Adorno termed resistance: the resistance of the individual poem to the larger cultural field of capitalist commodification where language has become merely instrumental.
Central to such resistance is the drive to Make It New, to avoid dependence on earlier poetic models. Form, in this scheme of things, is never more than the extension of content. Thus the look of the poem as well as its sound structures are primarily instrumental, used to emphasize the poem’s semantic density and verbal originality.
Language poetry had its explicit aim to oppose “natural” expressivist speech, such as individual voicings and accessible syntax.
rel:Oulipo
Georges Perec’s La disparition, a lipogrammatic novel written without using the vowel e (in French the most frequent letter of the alphabet), tells the story of a group of people who disappear or die, one after the other, their deaths being occasioned by their inability to name the unnamable— the let- ter ¢ in ewx (them), for example, eux being the “undesirables” who “disap- peared” in World War II.
Craig Dworkinquote
What would a non-expressive poetry look like? … One in which substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with “spontaneous overflow” supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet’s ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself. So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.”
Thought
Does this mean the individualized completion?
Futurists rejection of the “lyrical inference of the ego”
Death
quote Barthes (countering the popular belief as the Author as origin, and corollary claim we must look into the biography for an explanation of the work): “Writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black and white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body the writes.”
Never trust the author, trust the tale - D.H Lawrence
Make it (Not) New
Original Genius: tautology OED says original comes from Latin oriri, to arise, to be born. Genius, like genesis arises from gen, from Greek to be born.
Phantasmagorias of the Marketplace
Only the meeting between two different street names makes for the magic of the “corner” - Walter Benjaminquote
Garden Path Sentence The defeat of reader expectation—a kind of cognitive dissonance —is central to these poems.
Following Adorno, Jameson rejects the simplistic equation of the Modern with “the new and innovation and analogized by comparisons with scientific discovery,” in favor of a negative dialectic:
*What drives modernism to innovate is not some vision of the future or the new, but rather the deep conviction that certain forms and expressions, procedures and techniques, can no longer be used, are worn out or stigmatized by their associations with a past that has become conventionality or kitsch, and must be creatively avoided. Such taboos then produce a desperate situation in which the nature of the innovation, to continue to use such language, is not traced or given in advance; rather what emerges then determines the form by which the blocks and taboos of the next generation will be governed (and in this sense, postmodernity and its pluralisms have been seen as a final turn of the screw in which it seems to be just such taboos and negative restrictions that have themselves be- come taboo).
From Avant-Garde to Digital: The Legacy of Brazilian Concrete Poetry
Concrete Poetry is “too “pretty,’ too empty of “meaningful” content, too much like advertising copy. In the university this estimate still prevails.”
Umberto Eco had termed the “iconic fallacy” the fallacy that “a sign has the same properties as its object and is simultaneously similar to, analogous to, and motivated by its object.”
Positions: As William Marx makes clear in the introduction to Les arriére-gardes au xx* siécle, the concept of the avant-garde is inconceivable without its opposite. In military terms, the rear guard of the army is the part that protects and consolidates the troop movement in question; often the army’s best gener- als are placed there. When an avant-garde movement is no longer a novelty, itis the role of the arriére-garde to complete its mission, to ensure its success. The term arriére-garde, then, is synonymous neither with reaction nor with nostalgia for a lost and more desirable artistic era; it is, on the contrary, the “hidden face of modernity” (Marx, 6). As Antoine Compagnon puts it in his study of Barthes in the Marx collection, the role of the arriére garde is to save that which is threatened.
No poet after … was aever as radical as… “Brazil never had surrealism because the whole country is surrealist.”
The point here is that whereas the Surrealists were concerned with “new” artistic content—dreamwork, fantasy, the unconscious, political revolution—the concrete movement always emphasized the transformation of materiality itself.
Lygia Fingers: The multilingual poem “Lygia Fingers” (Lygia Fingers) turns on the number five. It has words in five colors: red, green, yellow, blue, and purple, emphasizing to the deconstruction of language units into smaller ones in five languages: English, Latin, Italian, German, and Portugese. The five colors and five languages obviously correspond to the five fingers that are capable of a variety of actions: they can pretend (finge), typewrite (datilografar), and even turn into ‘glyph’ or ‘griffin’ (grypho).
Document
A document (from the Latin documentum, meaning lesson, proof, instance, specimen, charter) is defined by the OED (no. 4, 1751) as “something written, inscribed, etc., which furnishes evidence or information upon any subject, as a manuscript, title-deed, tomb-stone, coin, picture, etc.” But the term docu- mentary was not used until 1926, and then with reference to film; the Oxford American Dictionary defines the adjective as follows: “Of a movie, a television or radio program, or photography) using pictures or interviews with people involved in real events to provide a factual record or report.” As such, Tyrus Miller reminds us, the documentary has generally been taken as the antith- esis of the modernist artwork with its obliquity, difficulty, and heightened self-consciousness: “Documentary, in contrast, seems to draw its energy and inspiration from the antithetical realm of the everyday, the popular world upon which modernist art and writing had demonstratively turned its back… . Honesty, accuracy, and openness to the contingent details of the empirical world were premium values in the documentary aesthetic, and objectively existing ‘reality’ its formal touchstone.”
Walter Benjamin
The limit: music needs no translation. Lyric poetry: closest to music —and posing the greatest difficulties for translation. Effective Summarization
Yoko Tawada
To write literature is at the opposite end from repeating and recombining arbitrarily the words that you hear on a daily basis. It is an attempt to face and confront the possibility of the language in which you write. By consciously doing so, the traces of your memory are highly activated and your mother tongue, your older linguistic stratum, intervenes to transform the actual language you use for creation.
The German word for to translate ubersetzen can also mean “to steer a boat from one shore to the other.” In Japan we use honyaku for “to translate,” which is a Sino- Japanese word, a word of Chinese origin… . The first ideogram of his word suggests a slightly dramatic and romantic gesture, which means “to turn over,” or “to flip over,” not simply turning a page. In performances I like to read my work in several languages — including in the available English translations—and I hope to visualize the act of translation through this gesture.*
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic is transcription of traffic. His work Weather transcribes a year’s work of daily weather reports for the tri-state area.
Transcribing weather forecasts, traffic reports, play-by-play Yankee Sta- dium broadcasts: what could be more pointless than such neo-Dada games? Goldsmith himself has added fuel to the critical fire by insisting that his “conceptual” pieces are “boring,” “unreadable,” and “uncreative.”
Conceptual writing or uncreative writing is a poetics of the moment, fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, one that proposes an expanded field for 21st century poetry. … Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; informa- tion management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its meth- odologies; and boredom .. . as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus… . entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media & advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality. … With the rise of appropriation-based literary practices, the familiar or quotidian is made unfamiliar or strange when left semantically intact. No need to blast apart syntax. Conceptual writing is more interested in a thinkership rather than a readership. Readability is the last thing on this poetry’s mind. Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts.
When an author uses a conceptual form of writing, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the text.
(Goldsmith’s passage is a recycling of Sol LeWitt’s foundational statement on conceptual art.)
I don’t believe,” Duchamp famously told Pierre Cabanne, “in the creative function of the artist.” “He’s a man like any other. .. . Now everyone makes something, and those who make things on canvas, with a frame, they’re called artists. Formerly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer.”