except perhaps a constellation

2011-11-01T15:19:00.005-04:00

Currently reading: On Line (eds. Butler and de Zegher), Madame Bovary (trans. Lydia Davis)

Since the summer too many things to count have come to pass, personal, professional, and otherwise. So first, instead, some things currently cluttering my desk and titillating the mind:

I just received my catalogue for the recent On Line exhibition at the MOMA dedicated to the art of drawing in the 20th Century. Among the artists included were Cecilia Vicuña, whose film Kon Kon was screened as part of the exhibition. Cecilia and I finished our collaboration on the film trailer site, which contains video, still images, and documents to provide context for the film. I'd also recommend the recorded broadcast from PENN's Kelly Writer's House presentation with Cecilia, which contains a full-length airing of the film. In any case, the book for the On Line exhibition is stunning and pleasure for hand and eye. Highly recommended.

This Thursday, Terrance Hayes visits Whitman as part of the Visiting Writers Reading Series. These lines from "Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy" draw me in especially:

[...] Other times I fall in love with a word
like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don't quit opening. I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom

Looking forward to this reading quite a bit...

2011-02-06T20:52:00.005-05:00

Currently reading:: Zadie Smith, White Teeth; Rosmarie Waldrop, Driven to Abstraction

At long last I've arrived home in Ithaca, now somewhat recovered from days of lengthy perambulation at this year's AWP conference in Washington, D.C. I hope to report on conference ongoings in greater detail soon, but suffice it to say that I attended a number of excellent panels, dined fiendishly with old friends, and met with four or five of my poetic heroes.

//

As soon as I arrived in Washington, I walked alone to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I'm at a critical point right now in the writing of Immemorial. I needed to be there, body and granite.

2010-10-30T17:42:00.013-04:00

Currently (re)reading:: J. R. Lennon, Pieces for the Left Hand; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Elizabeth W. Joyce, "The Small Space of a Pause": Susan Howe's Poetry and the Spaces Between

I still remember Charles Bernstein’s inaugural question to the participants in his Textual Conditions seminar: what was your first textual experience? I am still delighted by the question’s implication that someone’s first experience with language might be a revelation on par with budding sexuality. Bernstein stresses by association the sensory pleasures of the text, the roll of it on the tongue, its sweet or bitter taste, its grit on the hand, or trill in the ear or eye.

I don’t remember how I responded to the question at the time, but when I was very young, my mother found me in the shower alone and singing with abandon, “Diarrhea, diarrhea, diarrhea.” When she asked me about my song, I replied, “Don’t you think it sounds wonderful? Diarrhea.” My reverence was evident, so she shrugged and left me to it. I can’t blame myself now for marveling at the sound of the word, in and of itself. The sound, the visuality, and the texture of a word are not ancillary to its meaning—rather, they are central determinants of linguistic sense, and as such, they must be lived through the body, and not merely entertained in thought.

The other of my earliest memories is not strictly textual. In our house there was an illustrated children’s dictionary with which I used to abscond for hours. Each time, I hid behind a desk or a chair and opened to the entry for “color,” fixating at length not on the word itself or its definition, but on the drawing of a child with a set of watercolor paints. I could taste the pigments, the deep reds and soft oranges, the pale glow of yellow and faint violet. I was so gluttonous, so jealous of the image, that I grew fearful of discovery and went to great lengths not to be seen pouring over the book like the absolute maniac I undoubtedly was, and that I assuredly continue to be.

2010-05-30T23:47:00.004-04:00

Currently Reading:: Eudora Welty, Collected Stories

Over the last several months, Cecilia Vicuña and I have been intensely at work on the website for her new film, Kon Kon, which is now up and available at www.konkon.cl. I'm proud of our hard work. But even more importantly, every one who is able should see this film, or at least the trailer and other information available through the website. Kon Kon is really a remarkable film--one that straddles so many different dimensions of the visual and verbal arts, so many different languages, cultures, and perspectives--with absolute grace.

2010-03-27T19:14:00.004-04:00

Currently Reading:: Srikanth Reddy, Facts for Visitors

A busy week for poetry, and for me. Spring has begun to sweep through the limbs of the trees here, with the barest of buds so palely green and new. What better time to head south, to Philadelphia, to spend a solid week with the poems of The Midnight, and with the poet, Susan Howe.

On Monday, Howe read from her work at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. I admit it freely: I was overwhelmed by the nostalgia of my own homecoming. I silently rejoiced at the wetness in the air, the sounds of the city and of my own footfall on Locust Walk.

The interior of the Writers House, for those of you who haven't been there, is old Philadelphia—warm and close, with all the energy of a place that is well-lived in and loved. As soon as I walked in, I made my way to the front room, where rows of wooden chairs stood in anticipation of the poet. I put down my bag and set aside my gloves and scarf. The windows to the west were cracked open, and a sweet, wet breeze eased its way in. As I stood there—I just stood and looked—I saw a familiar and well-loved face. After five years, Greg Djanikian looks exactly the same: the same kind, interested eyes, the same wild, fly-away eyebrows. How I used to muse over them during my first poetry workshops as an undergraduate!

Before long, people began filing in, and the rooms were filled to capacity. After introductions by Writers House Faculty Director Al Filreis and student Cecilia Corrigan (with particularly wonderful reflections on The Midnight), Susan Howe opened with readings from "Secret History of the Dividing Line" and 'Melville's Marginalia." But at the heart of the reading were two prose segments from The Midnight: "Forest Lawn" and "Pandora." The first segment details the elder years of Howe's uncle, John Manning, her inheritance of his copy of The Master of Ballantrae, and some slant reflections on the interleaf contained in that book between the titlepage and frontispiece. "Pandora" is a long and remarkable passage connecting the manuscript practices of R.W. Emerson with those of her own family. It's one of the most important passages in the book, or so I think, and one of my favorites. I was so moved to hear it read. The reading ended with an excerpt from The Souls of the Labadie Tract, Howe's latest book, though her newest is slated to appear this spring. Like nearly all Writers House events, an online video Howe's reading is available for viewing on the Writers House website.

The next morning found me back in the city and at the Writers House again for a public question-and-answer session with the poet. Al Filreis served as a wonderful master of ceremonies, introducing Howe and posing a series of thoughtful questions before opening the interview to questions from the room (and, thanks to some spiffy technology, the world at large). A complete video of the interview is available at the Writers House website.

Howe's reading at Temple on Thursday night, as part of the Poets & Writers Series, had a different feel for me. The reading began with a selection of poems from a student reader, Laura Neuman, whose writing showed a keen wit and humor—slightly at odds with the poems to follow, but a pleasure to hear. I always like when people laugh at a poetry reading—we seem to forget that laughter is indeed a reaction available to us, even in such a solemn and official Affair of Cultural and Artistic Value. Even so, the audience was large, but a little more subdued, and the room felt unmarked and corporate. Rachel Blau DuPlessis offered a lovely introduction, and then Howe began, this time with the title poem from her to-be published collection, That This, forthcoming from New Directions:

That this book is a history of
a shadow that is a shadow of

me mystically one in another
Another another to subserve
__

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put

on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed
__

Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace

copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery

Brilliant title. What I find here is the beginning of an urgent questioning of writing, its textual condition, against the actuality, the apparent reality of life, the world, and being. The question is—pardon the pun—can the mere shadow of "pencil" hold a candle to the world, "that thing not shadowed"?

Following this poem, Howe returned to a passage from The Europe of Trusts, and then on, again, to The Midnight (this time to a prose segment from "Scare Quotes II" called "Concrete Central"). "Concrete Central" tells the story of one night in Buffalo, when Howe and a number of colleagues took a visiting French poet to descend into the obscurity of the now abandoned industrial district of the city. I could see Charles Bernstein with a wide smile on his face in the front row. Buffalo has become mythic in its own right.

The final poem of the night was drawn from the last section of The Midnight, "Kidnapped," which features descriptions of a Noh play, juxtaposed with descriptions of Howe's mother and the poet's own (and very short-lived) "theatrical" career. The poet's voice was so faint as she read and remembered, and so moving.

*****

There's really too much to say for a week like this last. I have been awed and overcome. And now, it turns out, there is still more to come: Thursday will bring Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez to the Africana Studies & Research Center here at Cornell, and on Friday, I look forward to a reading by Brenda Shaughnessy. As though this weren't enough, Edouard Glissant will be on campus next Thursday for a screening and discussion of the film One World in Relation.

On my own small, personal front, I have been every so slowly recrafting the current chapter of my dissertation, especially now in light of Howe's visit to Philadelphia. When I arrived home in Ithaca—home from my home in Philadelphia—I found a house out of order and a stack of mail. The routine number of rejections from a rough job market, but also some glimmers of hope: a letter informing me that my book was selected as a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and David waiting for me out by the Inlet. It is all too much, and I am so grateful.

2010-03-19T00:08:00.006-04:00

Currently reading:: "Out of Body" (Jennifer Egan)

Just a quick note to all those interested: in recent weeks, the blog Delirious Hem has been collecting remembrances in honor of the late Lucille Clifton. Contributions are posted or forthcoming from Naomi Shihab Nye, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Evie Shockley, Alicia Ostriker, GE Patterson, Sharon Mesmer, Mairéad Byrne, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Theresa Edwards, Cara Benson, Tara Betts, Kazim Ali, Deborah Poe, Imani Tolliver, and Shanna Compton (who so generously organized). Go check it out!

2010-03-06T14:37:00.008-05:00

Currently reading:: The Midnight, Maximum Gaga

This weekend I’m trying to wrap up the final loose ends on the second chapter of my dissertation—a piece on Susan Howe’s The Midnight. When I first discovered it in 2005, The Midnight struck me, and still strikes me now, as a remarkable book. It has all the usual bells and whistles that I like (which is to say that it’s difficult to categorize in terms of genre, and is by turns both abstract and lyric). It appeals so broadly to the sense—an intense pleasure to read. I’m glad for the chance to have my say on it finally.

In recent months, I’ve been pushing myself without rest on applications for fellowships, postdocs, and assistant professorships, and on submissions of poems, essays, and book manuscripts for publication. I’ve been in Ithaca and at Cornell for so long; it is too strange to think of anywhere else. One of the books I’m working on now, May Days, is in part a tribute to Ithaca, and the countless anonymous others who have walked its streets and fields before me. The major strategy in many of the poems is ekphrasis, drawn from local, vintage photographs. This one is titled “C96”:

Shoulders hitched, her frame

hangs in the garden on a mass

of verdigris foliage; her breasts drape

with her dress and jacket (black

with white piping at collar and cuff)—

toes rounded in black patent maryjanes

lift off from the lawn, graze the blades.

The contours of her body grow indecipherable,

dark torso giving way to darkening

leaves, as a figure in a Vuillard

It is her head, three-quarter bust of marbled

white skin and hair pinned in a knot, that emerges,

only the eyes dusked over, trained

on an unknowable other, an otherwise

or elsewhere beyond

the frame.

I originally began these poems as a way of getting to know Ithaca, and already, they have become a form of farewell.

Note to self: read Stevens again.

2009-05-09T21:55:00.011-04:00

Currently reading:: On Longing, Invisible Listeners, and Collected Essays (Emerson)

It’s been a busy four months, give or take, but apologies all round for not writing sooner. Here’s what’s doing:

In March, I was fortunate enough to have a short essay on my poetry course for first-year students and the work of Cecilia Vicuña, entitled “Pedagogy and ‘Technologies of Poetic Imagination’,” published with Kelsey Street Press’s blog. I count Vicuña as among my favorite poets, and Kelsey Street, among my favorite presses. For a happy marriage of the two, try reading Instan (2002).

In the months following, I completed (finally!) and handed in to my committee the first chapter of my dissertation. I’ve found a comfortable groove for my writing now, and am currently at work on the introduction and a second chapter.

With the onslaught of research and critical writing, I began to feel that poetry, perhaps necessarily, was falling by the wayside. I don’t think I had managed to put pen to paper to any great effect in nearly a year, and I was a little frightened. But convinced that writing is a choice, I’ve chosen to ignore my non-production and redirect my energies elsewhere.

And just when I thought my own writing was on pause, I received word that The Adjacent Possible was chosen as a semi-finalist for Ahsahta Press’s Sawtooth Poetry Prize. That's pretty cool, since Ahsahta also rates among my favorite presses, and its chef-de-cuisine, Janet Holmes, is a remarkable poet—only see her recent book F2F, and you’ll know what I mean.

Apparently, the news was encouraging. This afternoon, I started writing again. Somehow, I now find myself with two new manuscripts underway. What I’m thinking these days, I couldn’t tell you. Must be the fine May weather—when it rains, it pours.

2009-01-20T23:29:00.002-05:00

Would I could imagine something so beautiful.

2009-01-14T02:32:00.016-05:00

Currently reading:: Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, Selected Stories (Walser), Collected Essays (Emerson)

This blog has been characteristically silent, for which I apologize to whosoever might happen to read it. Now, on with it—

I’ve always liked having multiple projects on my plate—if one goes to hell, there’s always another to work on until the first gets back on track. But now I find myself with no less than four undertakings of no small size. The most prominent is the dissertation, which is early-on, but in process nonetheless. Also, a new poetry manuscript, but the writing is long and hard on this one, more so than usual. I’ve also started a collection of non-fiction shorts, and most recently, what may be a novel. This last is an update to the epistolary form, and it’s tentatively titled Cléance & Josephine. It’s a pity I know so little about fiction, and even less about prose. It’s all a lot to mull over.

It’s difficult to balance time between research and reading, critical and creative writing. Sometimes I even forget which I’m doing almost when I’m in the middle of doing it. For the dissertation, I’m re-reading, closely, Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. That volume, and her essays in The Open Studio, are precisely the kind of theoretical sounding board this project needs. I also noticed Stewart has just come out with a new volume of poetry, Red Rover. More on this once I’ve gotten my hands on it and read it through. But what could be more lovely than these lines from “Tag,” which appeared in a 2005 issue of The American Poetry Review:

Before you touch me,
I will run.
If I touch you, you
must stop.
If I lose you, we
won't stop
and must run on
as two
forever.

And on—talk about a smart, contemporary lyric, and with such careful sound. Other books of poetry by Stewart are Yellow Stars and Ice, The Forest, Columbarium, and The Hive.

* * * * *

We’re deep in winter in Ithaca now. Incomparable in its quiet, the winter

2007-12-11T03:22:00.002-05:00

Currently reading:: The Return of the Real, Poetry and Pedagogy, The Transformation, Pale Fire.

Finally at semester's end, with enough time to splurge a wayward word or two toward the waning blogosphere. In recent weeks, Ithaca has been all shades and variations of chill, ice, chiaroscuro—it's lovely when you're not looking. One might be idling along, a rustle of warmth in the darkening year, the dead leaves still fresh enough in the air.

I've been spending more time than ever reading and reading lately—all types of bits and bobs, really—with a view toward my A exam. Just now I am enamored with Hal Foster's The Return of the Real, a collection edited by Spahr, Poetry and Pedagogy, and a number of volumes by Johanna Drucker. Two colleagues have given excellent talks in recent memory, Theo Hummer on Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary, and Chris Nealon on Lisa Robertson. All four, of course, are forces to be reckoned with, both as poets and as thinkers.

The poetry scene in town has turned a little with the leaves this fall: Josh Corey has moved on to his first academic appointment, and his fellow SOON member, Aaron Tieger, has left Ithaca for Boston, I heard. Both will be duly missed, and I hope that even in their absence, the series will evolve and continue on. And for me personally, two important colleagues in verse have left—Marisol Baca and Tien Tran. But one might as well revel as wallow in twilight.

So far the fruits of my own return to the real have been exciting. I have now filed The Adjacent Possible with the university and soon hope to see it listed in the library's catalog. It's a silly thing, no doubt, but it was undeniably fun to see the thing bound in black with gold lettering. The project itself, however, remains unresolved—the book has always been meant to culminate in an edition of twelve hand-constructed, hand-painted books, all of which I have scheduled for production over the winter break. Before I can begin final typesetting and printing, however, there is the matter of a few revisions to the poems and the painting of twelve landscapes, one for each copy. Still, so far so good. In other good news, I recently received word that Columbia Poetry Review will publish one of my poems from Rhetorical Theater in the spring 2008 issue. RT is a book close to my heart, as it's the first significant collection of poems I wrote here in Ithaca and the first time I asked myself an important question: just what and how much, exactly, can I write? Until then, I hadn't ever thought to really challenge myself to the point of unease.

Had a pleasant (and as usual, informative) chat over coffee with Alex today. Mostly about this or that, he brandishing his uncanny recall of vast amounts of poetry verbatim and his rather odd taste for surreal B movies, and I sipping my tea with a smirk. What I like so much about him—or I should say, one of the things I like so much about him--is the way in which our frames of reference simultaneously overlap and diverge just enough, so that we have a common language, but also plenty to learn from each other. He's able to chart contemporary and avant-garde trends in British poetry in a way which eludes me, while I sometimes fancy I might know a titch more about visual-verbal relations. I have him to thank for calling J.H. Prynne to my attention, and today he mentioned the journal Quid, out from Barque, which looks quite tempting. He also suggested Hass' collection, Praise. I don't know why I'm dubious, but I admit I am. All the more reason to check it out and prove my prejudgment faulty.

It's all winding down nicely, as only Ithaca can. The rush of sleet, friends convening a last time before jetting off to distant parts of the country, the horizon shot vermilion with oncoming night, even before four in the afternoon. I'd almost forgotten to mention—I recently began reading Nabokov's Pale Fire. A rich resonance with Ithaca, and the prose—a real stunner.

Now, to the leaves. Soft—

2007-09-01T10:15:00.002-04:00

Currently reading:: Dissonance, if you are interested; Poetry and Pedagogy

An early morning in early September. It's been long since I have written anything here, and in a sense it's quite pleasant to think that here it is, all silent again. The summer was spent completing a manuscript for my MFA thesis, which was defended successfully on the 21st of August. With a few manuscripts now in pocket and none in print, it feels like it may be time to ship them out and hope. Twenty-six is a proper age.

To this end I've been researching various poetry prizes, presses, and so on—the lists are exhaustive and exhausting, and one wonders what any of it has to do with writing. But a writer will want an audience, since thinking alone changes nothing.

Still, the year ahead will turn on critical and pedagogical concerns rather than poetic. Now that I'm "just" a PhD, I have an A-exam to read for, with all its attendant reading and annotated bibliographies. The library and I will become familiars again. It's really astonishing, and sometimes daunting, to even allow oneself a sense of how much work has been done and is being done in a given field. But so far so good—per the good advice of a friend, I am trying to get through 2-3 volumes every half month, though even that is a little challenging while I am teaching. This semester I've designed my own course, something of a cross between typography, poetics, and poetry.

Not many students now seem enthused over poetry. Why? Must poetry and academia be always so marginalized? How can we give it legs. How will it change.

One of the primary questions of the course is the relation of visual and verbal arts. The last unfinished segment of this most recent manuscript is a landscape painting, for which I will visit a mountain and draw from observation. I do not know what is possible any more

The blank is ripe for painting

2007-06-08T21:06:00.003-04:00

Currently reading:: GEB, One Hundred Years of Solitude, /nor magazine

It's so lovely out tonight,

2007-06-08T21:03:00.002-04:00

Gosling update:

2007-05-20T19:32:00.003-04:00

Currently reading:: Iflife, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, Masterpieces of Japanese Poetry Ancient and Modern, GEB

Very gray in Ithaca today; I had almost mistaken it for Philadelphia. Why do we map ourselves onto the weather, the weather onto us. The sky breaks open in places, indicating a prevalent solidity / 'the clouds paint themselves'

* * * * *

Rather than pull weeds myself, I have invested in an organic minion:

2007-05-16T21:51:00.002-04:00

Currently reading:: Iflife, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, Masterpieces of Japanese Poetry Ancient and Modern, GEB

I’ve just had my first full flicker of a fundamental philosophical difference between myself and Douglas Hofstadter, circa page 99, but I’ll do both of us the courtesy of finishing out the book. Despite some relatively small grievances with the book’s approach to the visual arts and my newly-emergent qualms, GEB is weighty with potential. Only sometimes as I’m reading, my mind rolls over laughing with the silliness of it all, the fruitlessness of our intellectual pursuits (when they’re undertaken with any heartfelt seriousness), and the idiotic delights that come with embracing and even welcoming disjunction, incoherence, meaninglessness, and all those other mysterious little irksome bits and bobs of reality that poetry, in its infinite grace and stupidity, takes as among its most central and hallowed subjects.

In ornithological news, I’ve been wasting vast amounts of time compiling mallard, Canada goose, and barn swallow trivia. Those are the birds I’ve seen most often in recent months, though there are the usual starlings, and in the last couple of days, I spotted an American Goldfinch and what seemed in the distance to be a Great Egret. How lazily it flew, but then, so would you if you had to carry along those unwieldy black legs.

Mallards only mate for a season, and the hens are preyed on more often than the males, apparently for the simple reason that they’re often surprised while incubating their eggs in the nest. If approached by a predator, the hen is more likely to abandon a clutch than fight. This is in contrast to the Canada geese, who mate for life (except in the case of the death of one or the other) and confront any potential predators that approach. They begin with hissing, which increases in vigor as they become more alarmed, and they will charge or rush an opponent if necessary. Generally the geese I’ve been playing with are friendly and will take food out of my hand—that is, if they happen to be a non-breeding pair. The pairs with goslings are much more wary, often hissing and eating the food I’ve just given them all at the same time. Jerks. I’m surprised at how close they’ve allowed me to come to the goslings, all of which look and sound like tiny peeping fuzzdinosaurs. The goslings seem to stay more close to the female, while the male (at least the one I take to be the male—in spite of there being no difference in appearance between the sexes, one bird always seems a bit larger to me) stands at a slight distance, watching. He will charge and attack other pairs of geese; on Monday, a friend and I watched as an attack took place in the water. The assailant sat ‘piggyback’ on top of the other goose, which remained under the water for about 15-20 seconds before breaking the surface much farther away. Goose submarine. But back to the mallards. I happened to read, probably on wikipedia, that the breed has a higher incidence of homosexuality than other species, and that forced couplings, both within a breeding pair and without, are not uncommon. Which was interesting to me, in light of an article I read a week or so ago in the New York Times about the sexual anatomy of waterfowl. According to the article, in species where forced couplings are more prevalent, the female has often developed an intricate multi-chamber oviduct in order to ward off unwanted sperm. In response to this biological development, the gander has developed a phallus shaped something like a corkscrew, which waxes as breeding season comes on and then disappears when not needed, all so that he has a better chance of getting round the twists and turns of the hen’s oviduct. Everything, all of it, in the pursuit of—see earlier, ‘silliness of it all.’

2007-05-14T21:50:00.002-04:00

Also, for fun, my poem from the edition of broadsides I designed for the MFA final reading. It's the invocational poem from this current manuscript:

2007-05-14T21:45:00.002-04:00

Currently reading:: Iflife, GEB.

The manuscript is underway, with just under a quarter of the projected length written. It’s coming along, except that this is the type of book for which I have to do an uncanny amount of research. Now summer’s just begun, I’ve got my first chance at a real reading fest. If anything, I’m tempted just to see if I still know how to read. I made my way through Love in the Time of Cholera in a few days’ sitting, and am about to pick up GEB again in earnest. Love was interesting; someone I once respected very much referred to Florentino Ariza as a protagonist. I don’t think I can feel the same. What struck me most about the text, improbable romantic yearnings aside, was the wealth of peculiar particularities G.G.M. comes upon. I often joke with my writer friends here about how I don’t read fiction, don’t care for it, don’t know anything about it, but that’s all in jest. Except maybe the last. I have to admit, I came to Love intent on finding out what’s good in fiction, what fiction (and more broadly, prose) can do that poetry might not (all the while, of course, plotting how to realize the impossible potentialities of fiction in poetry nevertheless). And so it was the peculiar particularities that struck me so strongly. So much poetry is made of interiority and the concerns of the private. A novelist like G.G.M. really has to know how to listen to the public. His is a more diverse field of objects, places, persons, and interactions—more diverse, certainly, than my own writing. Another thing that’s tumbling over in my mind is the instable connection between the name and the referent of ‘love’ in the novel—many things are called love (sometimes to my dismay), though ultimately I’ve only thought about this broad spectrum of amorous categories very lazily. No productive reading to offer on it, in other words.

It’s been a busy spring so far. I didn’t realize it, but I managed to give four readings—a collaborative reading and show with the visual artists here at Cornell, a collaborative MFA reading with students from Syracuse, a reading in NYC in honor of National Poetry Month, and the final MFA reading here at Cornell. All that’s standing between my and my degree is the little matter of this manuscript. So far my readers have been responding positively, and I read a little bit of it at the final MFA reading earlier this month. The book is co-written, which is a challenging and surprising process. Pretty soon I’ll have to work out the painting aspect of the book. I don’t yet know what I have in mind. Hence the necessity of research. On the critical side, I’ve been feeling lackluster, and I think, finally, at the ripe old age of near-26, I ought to apply myself in earnest. I’ve been drafting reading lists toward my A-exam, scoping out journals and revisiting essays for purposes of publication, and am at work on an essay on the title poem of Bob Perelman’s latest book, Iflife. A good read, if you’re interested in the Language school, intersections of politics and poetics, and as always with Bob, a delightful wit.

As the water and earth have been warming, everything has emerged in a full and raucous bloom here in Ithaca. I’ll leave you with the latest development, goslings:

2007-02-11T01:41:00.002-05:00

On hiatus just now as I write this new manuscript. Hope to return soon; good wishes to all meanwhile.

2007-01-14T17:53:00.002-05:00

An addendum:: I am a year and a half away from my A-exam, and I have been compiling a reading list with the exam in mind. If anyone would like to suggest reading, please reply here. Areas of interest include constellations between the following:

+ contemporary poetries, esp. alternative/innovative/experimental/visual
+ visual art, esp. land art, public art, installation, sculpture, painting, graphic design
+ poetics, theory, and criticism re: dissent, aesthetics, globalization, translation, gender and sexuality, discourses of modernity

2007-01-14T15:48:00.002-05:00

Currently reading: GEB, several texts on Song and Yuan landscape painting, various texts on bookmaking and bookbinding, and Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real

All but the last are being read toward the current manuscript. I’d like to say more, but I don’t know enough to speak intelligibly about my own project yet. Zizek, on the other hand, is in preparation for this semester’s syllabus. The aim of the syllabus, with any luck, is to draw (sometimes indirect or slant) connections between media, globalization, the Vietnam War (Memorial), literature from and about Asian / the Asian diaspora, and current American politics, particularly the Gulf War, 9/11, and

Iraq

. I don’t know why I didn’t focus on Middle Eastern literatures instead, except that I think the slant connections we can make for the materials I have assigned may be more productive for discussion, if only because the connections are less obvious and will need more exposition. Hopefully the connections aren’t so subtle so as to be only in my head.

* * * * *

It’s been a largely uneventful winter break so far. As usual, I haven’t gotten nearly as much reading or writing done as I hoped. I did manage, however, to get to a number of the panels on poetry at this year’s MLA in Philadelphia. It was quite pleasant to see my old professors from PENN, as well as a number of my new colleagues and friends from Cornell. The entire conference being set in my own city had a way of estranging it from me, and as I drove in for the first night of the conference, I was simultaneously struck with the nostalgia the river and the skyline holds for me, and the newness of the city, made over again in its new purpose. The facades of the buildings had also changed here and there; I noticed some differences in the configurations of lights along the Schuykill.

The first panel I visited, “Poetries,” featured (in place of Jerome McGann) Daniel Tiffany, "Flash Crib: A Genealogy of Modern Night Life"; Michael Davidson, “The Dream of a Public Language: Cosmopolitan Poetics in the Shadow of NAFTA”; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Disjunctive Rhetorics and Cultural Studies.” For more recent writing from these and other writers (notably Marjorie Perloff, Juliana Spahr, and Barrett Watten among others), see the Poetries issue of the iowa journal of cultural studies.

The first paper considers the tavern and the nightspot as the place in and from which a poetics of the marginalized can emerge. Such poetics are derived or evolved from a kind of canting tradition, or slang of the underworld. 1881, the Chat Noir opens in Paris and provides a stage for intellectual and aesthetic coteries, often with anti-bourgeois principles in tow.

Michael opened with a series of interesting questions, situated within the tension between lyric and social models of subjectivity. I didn't notice whether or not the questions got answered, but here they are for the hell of it: Is the subject the author of her speech or the ventriloquist of institutional speech acts? If the subject is constituted by and within language, how can there be a turn toward the latter not underwritten by the former? Does discourse exist outside of the global systems producing discourse? What would a cosmopolitan poetics look like? Davidson fleshed out the talk with a consideration of the quite literally marginal art and poetry of political dissent along and on the walls of the US-Mexico border. It reminded me quite a lot of Jonathan Monroe’s “Avant-Garde Poetries after the Wall” in the 2000 Spring issue of Poetics Today.

Rachel opened by cataloguing the formal techniques of the avant-garde, and gave a definition of poetry that hinges on the concept of segmentation, if I recall correctly. That is, poetry is essentially to do with breaking the line and proceeding through fracture and segmentation rather than linearity and unity. I felt such a definition left out prose and visual poetries, although Rachel alluded to some possibility that one could think of visual poetry as segmenting the reading time of the picture plane.

What struck me most about all three talks was not just their emphasis on the marginal, but really, their implicit interest in producing the marginal and their relation to it. The margin seems more like prime real estate now than the outskirts of town. The terrain of the “authentic” margin is always moving, and the politically dissident critic? Always chasing it, quick to colonize it, package it, and export it from the margins for academic consumption and the MLA. And here I sit in this conference room in the Philadelphia Marriott, in what is undeniably a seat of privilege. Just something to keep in mind. I suppose it would make a difference, as in other cases of colonization, if the margin invited us to the margins. On another note, I wonder, is there an available position of critique that doesn't imply privileged access to knowledge? Is the work of the critic the best kind of discourse we can frame for political dissent?

On Thursday began a marathon of panels on poetry, beginning with the Presidential Forum, The Sound of Poetry. I’d say more on this, but Josh Corey has spared me the effort with his own account of the forum and the workshop that followed immediately afterward. Josh and I managed to stick it out for two other related workshops, Sounding the Visual and Poetic Sound in Translation. I stayed a little later that evening for Juliana Spahr’s panel, Orality and Sound in Poetry. M. NourbeSe Philip spoke of her own poetry and its attempt to enact the crack in silence through which the black voice can speak. The crack in silence is, for Philip, also a crack of the body and particularly, the female body. As she read some of her work, I was reminded of the unease that comes with such an overabundance of embodiment, as in Lucille Clifton’s poetry. James Thomas Stevens delivered an interesting talk entitled “A’khosa:tens—The That Aside: An Aside on Mohawk Language” on, among other things, the difficulty of translating the Mohawk language. Jena Osman offered a paper on the poetics and possibilities of BitTorrent, a client that shares digital content across its users in pieces, such that to download a file is to take a piece of the file from a number of users. Each user forms an integral piece of the whole.

Friday, I started the evening with Barrett Watten’s panel, Poetics and Cultural Studies: Engaging the Debate, and then made my way over to the MLA off-site reading at the Philadelphia Art Alliance on Rittenhouse Square. With about fifty readers and not enough seats in the house, the reading was still a blast. For those of you who weren’t able to attend, Ron Silliman has provided a recap of the reading on his blog as well as a sound recording.

Saturday morning, I managed to drag myself to an early panel at 8:30 chaired by Marianne DeKoven (whose recent edition of Q.E.D. and Three Lives I’d just thoroughly appreciated as I worked through a paper of my own on “Melanctha”), Experimental Poetry and the Visual Arts. The panel was excellent, with four talks on Creeley, Howe, digital poetry, and Leslie Scalapino. The most interesting talk for me was Maria Engberg’s “Digital Poetry’s Complex Surfaces: Navigations, Animations, Combinations.” The talk centered on a digital poem, “Leaf Life,” in which text appears, changes, and deteriorates according to user interaction. Engberg reflects on different registers of time in digital poetry: the time of writing, of coding, of reading, of performance. “Leaf Life” stages a lack of order against what is usually thought of as the processional, linear nature of computing. I wondered if this refusal of processional logic wasn’t a kind of nostalgia, especially given the poem’s representation of the natural and the non-technical (leaves, manuscript, romantic plot) against the digital means of its production. Engberg also directed my attention to The Institute for the Future of the Book, of which I wasn’t aware, and gifted me a copy of Electronic Literature Collection (V1). From thence I sat in on a panel on the future of lyric and poetry criticism, and then made my way over to the booksellers to pick up a copy of Doug Mao’s recent Bad Modernisms and Kristeva’s The Revolution in Poetic Language. The literary aside, the highlight of the day was lunch at a favorite restaurant in Chinatown, Ocean Harbor.

* * * * *

Back to writing, more soon.

2006-12-15T10:42:00.002-05:00

Are "meaning" and "meaningful" always already subjective? What value does "meaningful" have, ethical or otherwise? Do you need a subjectivity in order to recognize "meaningful" patterns and articulate them as such? How does "meaningful" become a shared category across subjectivities? How does anything become shared, except through a seeping or seeming, seaming.

Coeval, meaningful and non-meaningful. We need a fully complex model.

2006-12-15T04:08:00.003-05:00

A belated constellation:: Chad Bennett / Gabriel Gudding / Buffalo / GEB con't / representation

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of listening in on the latest installment in the SOON poetry reading series here in Ithaca, this time featuring friend and fellow PhD candidate Chad Bennett and Gabriel Gudding, Cornell alum and assistant professor at Illinois State University. Particularly interesting for me to hear Chad read his own work. I'm quite spoiled by now—having him around in classes and in the hallway, I'm accustomed to hearing his unassuming gems of literary wisdom. No surprise, then, that the poems are in the same vein. Smart, witty, just plain funny, and quite a delicate eye for form. My especial favorites, apart from a series of poems with titles taken from the captions of an illustrated version of Sherlock Holmes, was "Gerhard Richter," a 'closed-vocabulary' poem taking its cue from a New York Times Magazine article, and "To a Landscape," from a series of what Chad calls 'hermetic odes." Listening to the former is an almost giddy experience—sheer delight in the repetitions, with ever so slight differences making all the, well, difference. The poem opens "Dresden was still in ruins [...]"; from there, watch some of the permutations:

[...] We discovered
the cellars of churches and a system
of tunnels under the city. Fantastic.
It all seemed perfectly normal. We were
very happy. We made jokes. [...]

[...] Still: obliged to
work in the cellars and tunnels under
the perfectly normal, we discovered
we were clearing away fantastic jokes,

Fantastic, indeed. A non-committal, ironic, dismissive fantastic, as in, "oh, great." Or an emphatic fantastic, as in, "it is fantastic. You will think it fantastic." By poem's end, a nostalgic fantastic or a fantastic of lack, loss... what was cleared away after. And normal's drifting from adjective to noun, as though the descriptive is no longer sufficient. The language is no longer about, the language is. Normal's no longer mere descriptor—it's as concrete (not to mention as eerie) as the alien cellars and tunnels running beneath it.

What do we do in the wake of trauma? What do we make. What do we lose:

and in, around and under the jokes
we discovered—we made—the city under
the city, so still it seemed (at first) the first.

Props to Chad also for picking up and running with Vera Nabokov's "Let's rent an airplane and crash." I'm glad I was there to hear it.

Gabe followed Chad's reading—the two complemented each other well, I thought, given their senses of humor—most memorably, for me, with an anti-ode for that central orb of patriarchal order and enlightenment in the universe, the sun. The poem oscillates between smirky addresses (e.g. "You are big. / I like you. / I feel personal towards you."), riotously disrespectful epithets (e.g. "buttocks of the air / you shag the trees"), and half-assed thank-yous ("What for, sun? What for you do this? I like your clouds. Thanks" and "Thank you for gophers, sun") on the one hand, and on the other, less ironic moments of thanks for certain other things under the sun, like the familial and the beautiful. Gabe has a book forthcoming in 2008, Rhode Island: Notebook; look for it.

For Aaron's dish on the reading and photos, read on.

* * * * *

So I have been meaning to get down some of my notes from the Robert Creeley conference in Buffalo this October, On Words.

I got into town as the first gusts of what would become more than two feet of snow began to make everything white. It was cold, but poetry in Buffalo was alive and well. The first night, a Thursday, things got into gear with readings by Rosmarie Waldrop and Robin Blaser. I was exhausted and couldn't hear Robin's reading very well, but immensely enjoyed hearing Rosmarie. I hadn't yet heard her read in person, and whatever I may say about fetishization of the artist, sometimes you just want to see them anyway. She read from The Reproduction of Profiles; I happened to have my copy with me and so followed along, pages 1-7, 14-17, 23-26, 28-, and so on. She moved on to a new series of work called A Little Useless Geometry. For three of these poems, see Chicago Review's 51.4/52.1. By the end of evening snow was falling heavily, and we each of us scuttled away in the night, to wake to a white, new city in the morning.

I managed to miss the early morning and afternoon events on Friday, thinking them cancelled, and despaired as I walked over to Trinity Church late that evening. Lo, there were Susan Howe and John Ashbery. Susan read a little from Frame Structures and afterward, from The Midnight. Afterward in conversation I mentioned how important I thought The Midnight was (my basic argument being, in a paper I delivered last spring, that among other things, it teaches non-linear and experimental reading/writing practices, demands that we reconsider conventional models of reading and relation to textual and visual material). Susan said she was glad, that she had been disappointed that The Midnight had just seemed "to disappear," which she supposed was due to its generic mélange between prose and verse. If she's right, it's quite a loss and it is quite disappointing. It's precisely in the tension between the prosaic and the poetic that we find meaningful relation. As an aside and as a way of leaving off transcribing my hopelessly scrawled notes from the academic talks and readings on Saturday, I was thinking about the prosaic/poetic and public/private divide/continuum again a couple of weeks back at a wind ensemble concert. It struck me, though it must already be obvious to most everyone else, what a strange configuration a wind ensemble—or any musical ensemble—is. There are the polyphonic voicings of the ensemble, in which each individual member tacitly agrees to be subsumed within the mass. But the whole organism acts under the direction of a conductor and under the aegis of an absent master composer’s musical score. At one point there was a solo pianist accompanying the ensemble.

* * * * *

Of note in GEB so far::
15, sliding infinities
21, strange loops, or in Susan Howe's terminology in The Midnight, dialethism. Meaning/non-meaning?
37, a book which asks you to step outside it

* * * * *

A continuum:: non-representational art / the politically unrepresented. Thanks for picking up New American Paintings, spark.

2006-12-05T11:39:00.003-05:00

from Stevens, "Evening Without Angels"

Air is air.
Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.
Its sounds are not angelic syllables
But our unfashioned spirits realized
More sharply in more furious selves.

[...]

Light, too, encrusts us making visible
The motions of the mind and giving form
To moodiest of nothings, as, desire for day
Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,
Desire for rest, in that descending sea
Of dark, which in its very darkening
Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

2006-11-30T22:02:00.003-05:00

Tien asked if I had any poems recently. I'm in between two large projects, w/rest (August 2006) and the upcoming super-secret manuscript, as well as other side-projects, mostly notably Fantomina, a fantasia in verse, which has grown on me since beginning writing on it. I've also been remiss about posting my notes from the Creeley conference in Buffalo this October, but I'll try to salvage something from my notebook on that shortly. For now, "Going," which grew out of that visit:

2006-11-28T18:38:00.002-05:00

Currently reading: Gödel, Escher, Bach; Love in the Time of Cholera

Finally the semester is winding down and I am finding some time to read for pleasure and semi-pleasure (ie. long-neglected and apparently useless reading and the equally coveted reading with an eye toward various critical and creative projects. GEB falls into the latter category, Love the former). GEB is exciting so far, though Hofstadter is, in my case, mostly preaching to the converted. I'm not sure how important GEB will be for my next manuscript, but no matter... the pomp and circumstance of philosophies of emergent patterns, selves, writing is plenty entertaining for me. Hofstadter generally makes a great case for poetry (exciting for me since poets are so often asked, implicitly and explicitly, "Why bother?"): "As I see it, the only way of overcoming this magical view of what 'I' and consciousness are is to keep on reminding oneself, unpleasant though it may seem, that the 'teetering bulb of dread and dream' that nestles safely inside one's own cranium is a purely physical object made up of completely sterile and inanimate components, all of which obey exactly the same laws as those that govern all the rest of the universe, such a pieces of text, or CD-ROM's, or computers" (P-4). Pieces of text. This, coupled with Hofstadter's general suggestion that apparently meaningless patterns can become causative (for selves or other events in the empirical world), would excite a poet. Words aren't useless after all, and all those of us who thought they had a distinct weight and savor on the tongue are onto something.

Even if it's only a consequence of what I'll call a constellation of coincidence, GEB has for me some resonance with the text I am teaching this week, Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. I chose to end my class on this book in the hopes of drawing together for my students a number of (at least for me) really important issues: philosophies of self; relations between private and public, mundane and exceptional, local and global, to name a few. We began class by performing the first poem in the book, "Poem Written after September 11," each of the students voicing one of the poem's short paragraphs. For each student to hear the other students speaking, weaving their voices in and out of our collective voicing, was an important way of demonstrating the connectivity Spahr's text calls for. One of the interesting issues that came up in discussion (aside from some good observations about the form and function of this opening poem) was in response to the tone and role of the speaker. One student suggested, and justifiably so, that the speaker in the poems sometimes comes across as an irksome pedantic/didactic/condescending cocktail. Justifiable because the book clearly banks on the tradition of poet as prophet, and that's a tall order for the poetics and politics of someone like Spahr. Still, even if the text requires that the reader surrender, allow herself to be absorbed ("absorbed," I say because we are reading this book in connection with Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"), one could argue that any such surrender is a willed surrender. Cf. "decreation."

As I walked away from class and wandered amidst the unseasonably warm air of November in Ithaca, I wondered if there was any way to resist Spahr's call to relation without looking like an isolationist jerk. Probably not. And what's so bad about relation, anyway? Just being curmudgeonly, I guess. And in spite of my reservations, I have to say that Spahr’s speaker does earn my trust.

The other primary topic of interest we touched on in class was Spahr’s poem on 9/11 and whether or not 9/11 was an exceptional event (cf. “American exceptionalism,”). Many of my students seemed to think so; that is, they seem to have succumbed to the narratives that have since proliferated about that particular event and were especially resistant to understanding 9/11 within any given historical context or continuum. 9/11 as absolute rupture, go figure. I’m hoping that next semester’s syllabus will take up this problem and others with a view toward digital and pop culture’s construction of historico-political relations. I think I ought to do a unit on memorials and try to trace a dialogue between the Vietnam War Memorial and the proposed Freedom Tower.

I wanted to write about Benjamin’s Arcades project and its relation to blogging and presentness, and also something about this fabulous menu I concocted for myself Sunday night, but let this serve as a sufficient footnote.

2006-11-17T17:51:00.002-05:00

I fed this duck today while out taking photographs of the Cayuga inlet and canal. I always try to feed the females more than the males, my rationale being that the females are dully-colored (which is aesthetically unfair) and have to produce eggs (which demands a higher caloric intake). Duck feminism, maybe; just trying to right the wrongs as I see them.

2006-11-16T23:26:00.003-05:00

This past Monday I had the pleasure of meeting David Hinton, who came at noon to deliver his talk on Ch'an Buddhism, "Translating Across Cosmologies," and later in the afternoon, a poetry reading. David began his talk by letting flutter to the floor a slip of paper on which the following proposal was written: "Write a poem about nothing at all of the least possible length." I smiled; what a good Ch'an poem. David began by explaining that he thinks of translation as a philosophical project; particular cosmologies accompany particular languages and cannot necessarily always be translated into another language. He described the Ch'an universe as divided into two parts, one which is non-being, emptiness, nothingness, but which is nonetheless a pregnant void, giving rise to the second part of the universe, the empirical world as we know it. Each individual being has its own emptiness, and as a means of meeting this emptiness, the Ch'an sage dwells or meditates, and Ch'an poetry is part of this practice. If one sits in meditation, one can learn to watch thoughts. The mind can come to mirror the world, so that there is a reciprocal relation between the emptiness "outside" and "within" the mind. At least for Ch'an Buddhists, then, perception is understood as spiritual act. David went on to read a poem by Meng Hao-jan (689-740), "Autumn Begins":

Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen,
and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder,

summer's blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still.
At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers.

I'm paraphrasing David here, so here goes: Autumn is a season of clarity and silence which follows the vibrant life of summer; the frost comes, clearing a space for thinking and reflection. The thatch hut in this poem fulfills an identity between mind, hut, wind, and seasons, in which each passes through the others. The openness of the hut is like the openness of the mind; the walls for such huts were essentially windows, spaces including everything around them. The final part of the last line, "lit dew shimmers," can be read as the moment of spiritual perception. David argued that because perception is understood as spiritual act, much of the poetry is highly imagistic (as aspect of the Ancient Chinese poetry which 20th century poets like Pound and Williams will later appropriate), but this emphasis on the visual is different in Ancient Chinese because it participates in a cosmology not available to the English language. David went on to say that our truest self is that pregnant nothingness, and it is to that nothingness that we will return after a temporary period of embodiment. He suggested that Ch'an cosmology is present in the poems even at the level of grammar. For the most part, the poetic language of Ancient Chinese is emptied; it leaves out conjunctions and articles, subjects and objects, and sometimes verbs. As the reader moves through the poem, she must fill in the grammar according to context (e.g. she may find a place where a subject "I" seems to be implied or where she is able to discern a sense of the temporal). It's almost meditative, David said, "at the edge of language and silence." How wonderful. Everything that comes out of this pregnant nothingness emerges in and of itself, self-creating, and that's how this language works (Julie, cf. your current manuscript). David ended by reading a poem collaged from the lines of other of his previous translations; this collage process, he said, alows him to speak in the voices of others and for other voices to speak through him as well.

I asked him about that as we sat eating lunch together; that is, I asked him whether his decision to do translation was a way for him to write without compromising his Ch'an Buddhist practice. He said probably that was so. I also asked him what model of translation he was working with (ie. a Jakobsonian or a Benjaminian model), and he chose the former, which surprised me a little (given my preference for the latter). But it struck me that perhaps trying to make the Ancient Chinese poems English poems was the part of the writing process--a compromise between the Ancient Chinese author and his own authorial self. I can hardly fault him for that. After all, it is quite a decision to dedicate yourself to the translation of what most will perceive as other people's work, rather than trying to manufacture some indivudual and marketable voice for yourself.

We reconvened for David's poetry reading at four-thirty, and somehow I was roped into reading his visual-map-poem Fossil Sky, along with David, Stephanie Gehring and Roger Gilbert. Wonderful for me because Roger and I had once tried to read the poem together in his office but found ourselves at a loss as to how to go about it. We began by reading bits of the poem, each reader picking up where some one had left off. We continued reading as David began to read a separate set of poems at the podium. We trailed off and returned to our seats. Toward the end of the reading, we resumed reading together until the sound finally trailed away.

I picked up a copy of Fossil Sky for myself, along with David's newest anthology, Mountain Home, and chatted briefly about visual poetry, said that Fossil Sky reminded me of a book I am working on right now by Cecilia Vicunña, cloud-net. He laughed and said he and Cecilia were good friends. Go figure. I went home later only to discover that Cecilia has included in her book a part of the Tao Te Ching, translated by none other than David Hinton.

That was Monday. In other news, I got the sniffles on Tuesday and stayed home in bed, and then dragged myself to class on Wednesday (my teaching was being evaluated) and then sat down with my committee for my qualifying exam. It was quite an interesting and lively conversation (which isn't surprising given the folks assembled), and long story short, I passed. I'm delighted, my friends will get to see me again, provided they still remember who I am, and I am ready to begin work on my thesis manuscript.

2006-11-11T17:28:00.003-05:00

Currently Reading: Selected Dickinson, S.T. Coleridge, and Poe; Un Coup de Dès.

Taking a minute here before the SOON poetry reading tonight featuring Shanna Compton and Ryan Murphy. Looks promising, as usual, and I need a break from studying for my qualifying exam, which rapidly approaches. It's a good week for poetry in Ithaca; on Monday, poet and translator David Hinton will be visiting campus to deliver a lecture and poetry reading, and I have plans to drag my class with me to hear his talk at noon.

Speaking of teaching, I've been culling my friends' wealth of knowledge toward a new syllabus for next semester that will consider, among other things, the relation between digital and pop culture, the media, politics, history, and poetics (of resistance). A number of poetry titles come to mind, Watten's Bad History and Cha's Dictée, among others, and friends have suggested Empire of Signs coupled with Lost in Translation, and Chomsky's film, Manufacturing Consent.