John Bloomberg-Rissman and Conrad DiDiodato discuss 'conceptual poetry'

I'd like to thank John Bloomberg-Rissman for agreeing to talk to me about 'conceptual poetry' via Google+ 'hangout'. Below is the YouTube video of our discussion. I would like to post 'hangout' discussions from time to time. If the "medium is the message" there can be no doubt that Net technology conditions the very terms (and tone) of poetry discussion. It's quite remarkable to me that this two-person symposium could never have happened in the "paper" regime where space, means of production and meaning itself are governed by the powerful few.

The YouTube video can also be seen here.

John Bloomberg-Rissman responds to my "RS/OOO literary theory" post

Too long to put in a comments textbox, I'd like to post here John Bloomberg-Rissman's very insightful answer to my outline of  SR/OOO literary theory. Below is the text as delivered to me in an email attachment. As I've said, I will offer concluding criticisms of my own in a later post. Thanks for keeping the discussion going, John!
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Conrad: There's never a shortage of hybridism in contemporary literary criticism: and (if you'll allow the analogy) the root stock from which every new theory derives is, of course, the reigning poststructuralist critique of the text (literary or otherwise). The 'family resemblance' among them is unmistakable. I've recently discovered two very interesting appropriations of traditional postmodernist critique (with dashes of traditional ontology, Husserl & Heidegger) in the forms of Speculative Realist Literary Criticism (SR), and Object Oriented Ontology literary analysis (OOO).  

JBR: historically speaking, SR/OOO distinguishes itself from what you call “traditional postmodernist critique” via the claim that postmodernism has tended to privilege textuality as primary and SR/OOO privileges the “beyond the text”, rendering textuality just one kind of thing among others. It also distinguishes itself from Husserl and Heidegger in that both H’s do ontologically privilege the human, whether by privileging the phenomenal experience or by privileging Dasein. Admittedly, Harman’s stepping beyond Dasein begins in his analysis of Heideger’s tool-being, but Bryant uses Bhaskar’s critical realism as his stepping-stone out of the phenomenal realm into the noumenal, where texts are indeed just another object. There are differences between OOO practitioners as to whether this leads to a “flat ontology” or whether there are still degrees of real … So I don’t think that it’s quite fair to simply assert that SR/OOO derives from “traditional postmodernist critique”. In fact, I think actor-network theory, science studies, and Kant are crucial to rooting SR/OOO – tho of course so is Deleuze … But of course no one who lives after the great age of c20 French and German philosophy can (or should be) “immune” to it …  it might not have been Arnoldian, but the rise of Hitler/Stalin, the war, the Shoah etc would shake one’s humanism to – or past  - its roots …   

It's to the views of Levi Bryant and Eileen S. Joy, as I've discovered them in recent online discussions (here and here), we can turn for a full explication of the principles underlining their SR/OOO analyses of the 'text'. I believe the scope and limits of this new poststructuralist wave can be fairly simply elucidated. 

JBR: see above: I think you need to prove, not simply assert, that SR/OOO is “a new poststructuralist wave” … not saying it’s not, or that what SR/OOO asserts as it’s genealogy is accurate, just that … Oh, and by the way, other SR/OOO practitioners root themselves otherwhere, e.g. Brassier would hate the above to be applied to him, Bogost is rooted in computers and gaming, Grant in Schelling, etc etc …

Firstly, the common denominator in both is the emphasis on 'realism' or a strictly 'object-oriented' approach towards textuality.  

JBR: towards everything. 

And of the text they say, oddly enough, there's nothing before it that can be said to transmit or codify traditional meaning, nothing ontologically nor historically prior from which discussion of 'textuality' can begin. (I'm inclined to read this as a wilful destruction of an Arnoldian humanist tradition). In Bryant's sense of inquiry, "content seems to come after."  

JBR: Conrad, I think you need to distinguish between context and content. Between literature and any particular text. It’s certainly possible to discuss textuality or literature or art or whatever before the fact of any particular text/object (tho of course with the knowledge that the addition of new texts/objects to the body of existing texts/objects will change that discussion – I mean, that’s Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent, right?). But I don’t see how one can discuss a particular text/object avant la lettre … Oh, and I’ve never met or read a word by anyone in SR/OOO who denies history in any way. In fact, Levi explicity mentions that OO Criticism might fall somewhere between New Criticism and New Historicism … 

Presumably SR/OOO proponents will put something in its place: like the 'text' refashioned in some radically newer posthumanist (e.g., cybernetics, avant-garde poetics or systems theory) form or anything that serves as a theory's own operating system. Or perhaps even a more syncretistic view of humanism itself, such as that offered by Joy, will do the trick.  

JBR: what is the antecedent of your “its” in “its place”? Arnoldian humanism, right? Now in what way is that not an OS? And in what way is it privileged over any other OS? 

For Joy 'humanism' as a critical concept is looking, Janus-like, at two directions at the same time, both a "troubling" and "heroic" one:

While we are fully aware that, historically, humanism and the human have a long and troubling history that implicates them in violent exclusions, as well as in deprivations and disenfranchisements of all sorts, we would also aver that humanism (of different philosophical varieties) has also been responsible for heroic acts of psychic and material sustenance, rescue and redemption, mutually-productive alliance and overcoming, and personal freedom. It is not a question of having some sort of scale that allows us to measure whether humanism has led to more atrocities than it has to social and other boons, but rather, of acknowledging that it has done both, in separate times and places, and simultaneously... 

JBR: I certainly agree with Eileen. I think that this is exactly the case. That’s what I tried to make clear in our discussion, and in my postscript. I have to admit to not seeing a single thing wrong with this. 

Secondly, now that the possibility of a traditional source criticism has been abolished, it looks as if we are living in a "Year O" world in which SR/OOO 'post-texts' potentially thrive.  

JBR: Since, apparently, all criticism has an OS, including yours, we are no more in a Year 0 than we ever were, or, better, maybe, we are always already in a Year 0. I kind of think so. Question, why are texts now ‘post-texts’? In any case, whether we are in Year 0, whether texts are now post-texts, as long as thriving is happening, it sounds ok to me. 

But to arrive here the hard work of literary analysis must begin. If the traditional (Arnoldian) text has been 'deracinated', certainly reduced to Joy's troubling sense of humanist tradition in general,  

JBR: Joy is troubled, yes, but what in her troubled state is troubling? I mean, what is there in her analysis of traditional humanism with which you disagree? 

anything we put in its place will have to both cover the Tradition deficit  

JBR: Why is it a deficit? What have we lost, exactly, by critiquing traditional humanism in order to improve it?

and put in its place a new 'Object-Oriented Ontology' of text and reading practice. It is a question of 'origins' in a more radically 'speculative' sense. Bryant proposes an answer to the question, 'What is the ontological nature of things?' in his essay "The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology" (OP) in which he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique so that the look for origins, tentative in nature, may begin anew. As he says,

Faced with such a bewildering philosophical situation, what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naïvely and pre-critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access? 

JBR: when you write “he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique” you are absolutely right; and the key words are not “the very past”, they are “philosophical critique”. According to many philosophers and historians, the noumena were present to us (philosophically speaking) prior to Descartes, who thought only God guaranteed the reliability of our senses, and therefore our ability to contact noumena directly. But things went really wrong with Kant, who cut off all contact (Nick Land called Kant’s philosophy something like “the biggest panic attack in philosophical history”). OOO wants to get us out of our heads and back into the world, where we are anyway. It’s about time, after all, given what we’re doing to it (tar sands, global warming, etc etc) Tho every OOO philosopher gets Kant’s argument, and is troubled by it … 

Engagement with the world, textually and existentially, means to meet it and the material objects in it (like literary artifacts) as objects of open-ended enquiry. SR/OOO theorists are, Bryant says, "speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers [who] will see any secure foundation we might discover as an outcome of inquiry rather than as an αρχή governing our inquiry from the outset". Borrowing terminology from Saussure and Derrida, Bryant gives the "Ontic Principle' in terms of a pre-critical encounter with a world of objects marked primarily by a positive affirmation of their significant "differences" (causes, interrelations and entailments among things to be fine tuned in the course of inquiry itself). The nature of the textual object begins with this basic assumption (αρχή ) of the ontological (metaphysical) priority of significant differences in all discoverable 'things'. A 'thing' like a poetry text 'is' regardless of whatever's been said or thought about it, and so in that sense nothing's come before the text. A poetic text existing simpliciter is, upon encountering it, to make a significant 'difference' to the reader or it simply doesn't exist. 

JBR: Yes, exactly. Except maybe for the simpliciter. Maybe. As far as making a difference goes, I’m reminded of the title of that Kenneth Burke article, “Literature as Equipment for living.” Tho, of course, that’s only part of what Bryant means; he’s also saying that we are unaware of the myriad objects that don’t affect us in any way (e.g. intestinal bacteria when everything’s working right).

Thirdly, since a text is a "thing in itself" existing simpliciter, it's only one among a potentially myriad of things to which must be added the nonhuman, insensate, even robot objects. Bryant's completely undermined any notion of 'humanism' as a superordinate concept where Joy at least can entertain contrasting ideals. There's an unmistakable flattening of the metaphysical playing field here. In this radical 'posthumanity' objects live as 'ontic' equals, materially vital & meaningful to us and to each other only to the extent that they reveal their 'differences'. (We can set aside the technical aspects of this 'flat ontology' inference) 

JBR: Yes, exactly, exactly. OOO is profoundly non- (tho ***not*** anti-) anthropormorphic. Tho, as noted above, not all are agreed on flat ontology. 

 What are the implications for literary criticism? Bryant may have provided his answer to that in the interesting "The Principle of Translation" section of "OP" where he states "there can be no object that is a mere vehicle for the acting differences of another object", destroying at a stroke the notion of authorial agency or any sense in which texts can serve as carriers of meaning.  

JBR: While I have problems with the notion of authorial agency – I’m a traditionalist on this – it seems to me, as a writer, that an author is often the worst reader of her text – and one with no control over its social reception and significance, once it’s out in public, I asked Levi about meaning in a comment left at his blog post and I think he understands something different by meaning than either you or I. I think there’s no doubt that texts do carry meanings, tho it is difficult to say quite what this “means.” See the very beginning of A Thousand Plateaus … 

Tradition goes by the wayside. Since meanings cannot be transported through traditional avenues, literary transmission must be understood as a radicalization of the notion of 'affectivity' that's consonant with Bryant's "Year O" premise. 

JBR: tradition goes by the wayside? I mean, isn’t affectivity via what you call something like “the lyric self’s voice” (which may or may not have anything to do with authorial intention) about as traditional a way of literary (or any artistic, religious, etc) effect as could be imagined? But that may be beside the point. I think your notion of “traditional avenues” is something we never quite got to in our previous discussion. And I feel that it ties into your “benchmarks, or standards” or whatever you want to call them 

More specifically,

‘translation’ should not be understood as a hermeneutic concept, but as an ontological concept.‘ Transportation’ refers to the action of one object on another object. Not all transportations are of a causal variety, so it is important to employ terms capable of both capturing causality while allowing for other sorts of exercises of action. For example, the manner in which I am affected by a work of art differs from the manner in which a flower transports the differences of sunlight. And these manners of translating differences again differ from the manner in which the ocean transports the differences of the moon. 

Fourthly, not just objects in the world but it follows from Bryant's 'onticology' that literary criticisms have been flattened as well. It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered.  

JBR: Re: “It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered”, I don’t understand how it could be otherwise. 

In fact, to call these literary interpretations in the first place, loaded with all their traditional Yeatsian lore, is to trump "any differences that might be contributed by objects independent of language." The differences in Yeatsian interpretation are not radical enough since any weighing of alternative readings will by nature privilege (or act as if it would like to privilege) one over another.  

JBR: Yes, of course. One of the first problems I had with OOO was over its implications for “politics” – used broadly … Turns out that everyone involved in OOO has very specific “politics”, i.e. an interpretation of, and desire for, reality that they privilege. Ontology might be flat; but that doesn’t mean the end of ethics. When questioned about this the standard OOO response seems to be something like, “of course humans anthromorphize; pencils pencilomorphize, rocks rockomorphize” etc etc – and yes, they know they’re speaking metaphorically, that is, literarily.  

Strictly literary readings of Yeats' poem—by which we mean one that's too human-centric & excludes its possible impact, say, on nonhuman objects, like robots— are too exclusive given the existence (as per the αρχή or the primary 'ontic' principle of an object-oriented ontology) of "inter-ontic relations or all interactions between objects", which is to say that in the act of translating "Second Coming" we exclude the possibility that the poem (enjoying the same 'ontic' status as the rest of the world) can just as materially translate us.  

JBR: I don’t think **any** translations are excluded. Everything translates everything and each thing is translated by each other thing are not mutually exclusive. Poems translate us and we translate poems, at the same time the chair we’re sitting in as we read translates us and vice-versa, and the air we’re breathing as we read translates us and vice-versa and every bit of knowledge in our brain, e.g. Aristotle, Longinus, Arnold, Deleuze, etc etc, translates us as we read and vice-versa, and the war in Afghanistan translates us as we read and vice-versa, and the shape of the book, and the color of the paper, and the ambient temperature, and so on and so on … the deal is, it’s never just an encounter between us and some bare text. 

An encounter with the 'differences' of Yeatsian poetry can spell changes from which we may never recover. 

JBR: I should hope so! Tho he’s not much read in contemporary poetry circles these days, he should be, and will be again (tho I know that’s not what you’re getting at here …)

Here's a meeting of ontology and poetry that I find particularly interesting. There are some problems with the SR/OOO as I've found it (and my reading of the literature has so far been rather limited), as well as some very real methodological strengths, that I'd like address in my next post. 

JBR: The main thing I’m trying to say it that I don’t think we have an either / or here: either Arnoldian humanism and values or no values whatsoever. I think what we have is, as Joy has it, and as I tried to say in my postscript, and attempt to find a better humanism, which keeps what still lives in the tradition (however defined) and tries to improve on it, to further democratize humanism and all other isms (rockism, pencilism), to make life better for ALL of us. To quote Deleuze/Guattari, it’s not or, it’s and.  

John Bloomberg-Rissman's "Zeitgeist Spam" project: or the sources, syntax and paratext of "appropriation" poetry

There is no one answer
and no poem purporting to give one does
What your hand finds to do
do ( Jackson Mac Low)

 At Zeitgeist Spam John Bloomberg-Rissman writes what I can only call "appropriation" poetry. I first saw the term (used synonymously with "recombinant") as a genre-category in relation to an online New York Times 'Books' review of David Shields's Reality Hunger, a work that (in the reviewer's words)

consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix...

Bloomberg-Rissman's (B-R's) work is pretty much cut from the same "recombinant" cloth except that the product that's 'made' is decidedly poetic. It's the making of a "recombinant" poem— its origin, processes and artistic principles— that interests me. When I initially expressed some reservations at Geof Huth's dbqp visualizing poetics about a genre convention that had already been used, and that as poetic technique may have run its course, both Huth and B-R, sensing a faulty causal generalization, came to the defense of the artistic integrity of the work itself & not its place in any literary continuum. Among the artists who can said to be the putative originators of the text's "collage" style are Schwitters, Eisenstein, Tzara & Hanna Hoch so that the charge of unoriginality cannot be supported. Huth went even so far as to assert that "all writing is appropriation. It's merely a matter of degree and skill." A point that I accept but not without some qualifications.

B-R's most recent publication Flux, Clot & Froth (FCF) is described by Huth as a "modern-day epic", and certainly no one is better qualified to describe the experimentalist quality of B-R's work. Huth says of it that

[the poet] has harvested whatever sequences of words interested him and he has melded these into a single frame, a giant canvas, its mirrored surface hidden from us by the deftness with which he has woven these various and dischordant texts into a single song, as if from a single source, in much the same way that a river is enriched by the tributaries feeding into it even if it seems but a single rolling force of water to our blindered eyes

I haven't ordered my copy of the book yet but I do have the archival gold mine that is B-R's Zeitgeist Spam blog, from which his poetical texts derive. Editor and blogger Alan Baker referred to it as a collective "spoof of the epic works of High Modernism".Text and blog are practically interchangeable. There are more than enough writing samples there to base a critical appraisal & appreciation of his work in general: in fact, FCF is Part I of an overall "Zeigeist Spam" project of which No Sounds of my Own Making forms Part II. It's been described as "an epic-length mixtape composed of thousands of algorithmically/intuitively-derived fully annotated oft-mangled bits of écriture/parole", and B-R as the "poet of mixmastery, [who] dis-complicates a vastness of textonality, meticulously cites each source, then honors the poundage of forebears by locating a fresh, consistently revealing work, flush with ripening seeds." Praises every bit as purposely "oft-mangled" as B-R's own impressive project.

But technically and artistically what is at play here? How is the "appropriation' poem constructed and to what poetic principles (however they're defined) does the making of a poem pay court here? Does even the label "appropriation" apply? The "project description" given at B-R's blog even playfully parodies the work as "cutnpaste" (in reply to the critic) as if to concede the point of its obviously collagist, radically recursive and "writing through" technique. It is a "choice-determined" experiment in the tradition of Cage, Duchamp and Mac Low. The question is, to my mind, whether FCF can be experimentally successful (as Jerome Rothenberg puts it) "without any sacrifice of coherence or feeling or intelligence & in a voice that remains unified & “personal”. Sheila E. Murphy has even called it a "transcendent work". And therein lies the question and perhaps the ultimate test of the viability of an "appropriation" poetics. Can a sense (even an organic sense) of a poem's viability be maintained, and even of the poet himself who sets out to breathe life into the fragments from which he creates? I believe the "Zeitgeist Spam" experiment succeeds on both counts.

Without the FCF text it's necessary, of course, to work with Zeitgeist blog, the fons et origo of Parts I and II of B-R's epical work; and "In the House of the Hangman 307" ("307") is the particular blog text I choose for a closer look at what I see as the sources, syntax and paratext of B-R's "appropriation" poetics.To begin with, the sources are clear: the poem is a vast "appropriation" of the words, phrases & constructions of other writers. (I will fight the Marxist temptation to disclose the seamy connotations of that term.). B-R's primary text is a labour of patient gathering as well as a desire to give new life to the products of an already existent artistic life-world always ready to hand. If "307" is the text, its sources comprise as large or as small a sum of all the acknowledged sites as the poet's cared to visit, a collagist-poet who is ready to display the order of what's an otherwise seemingly scattered "sampling".

[Note: Sources: photo embedded in “Upcoming Aperture Events! including…Trevor Paglen, Jill Magid, Bruce Davidson, William Christenberry!”, at Aperture Exposures Blog, 6 Dec 010; JBR; “Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine”, at daddytypes, 11 Dec 010 (“‘When we got inside there was the cutest little girl in a pink outfit sucking her binky inside with the other toys,’ said Moon Run Fire Chief Paul Kashmer.”); Christopher Carmona, “Going To The Yonque”, as quoted in Michael Sedano, “YA Review: Of Dreams and Drums. Aztec Days Coloring Book. On-Line Floricanto Dec 7 Arizona”, at La Bloga, 7 Dec 010; “‘Lollapalooza Soundtrack’ by Purkinge”, at PennSound Daily, 10 Dec 010, etc etc

Blog articles, soundtracks, & excerpts, tv ads, mashups, & intros to academic articles, with even bits of song lyrics reported to the poet by others, etc. all comprise some of the primary sources for the final recombinant "307" product.

In a word, B-R is compelled to try to make a claim not so much for inspiration or spontaneity—the old confinements that "appropriation" poetics tries to "read through"—as a sort of methodical (though ultimately chance-directed) inquiry into untapped sources of meaning. This is presumably the "transcendent" quality attributed to FCF by Murphy. Sense derives ultimately from the syntax of poetic experience & that (as I read B-R's "Zeitgeist Spam" project) seems to come about as a result of the conscious interweaving of two creative principles at work, at the same time, in every poem-making: in the "307" verse, in other words, can be detected aggregative and synthesizing moves by which random elements (words, sounds, phrases, etc.) can be fitted into a single poetic design. By syntax I mean a system of pattern-recognition whereby poetry production is answerable to codes of learned, essentially recombinant 'reading'.  A few examples of how to read the "appropriation" poem will be sufficient.

If we consider the first block of text from "307"(copied here in its entirety), even giving it the traditional 'verse', or 'strophe' name for convenience,

As Jill Magid writes in neon, “I Can Burn Your Face.” Who’s the I here? Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine. I’m going to buy me a satellite, gonna pay the man five dollars. He says he wants Incan gold, I tell him I’m not Incan. I wear a skirt, a random party girl says, “I'm glad you're man enough to wear that.” The “piece of white bread” the man ventures in search of might be sustenance, in the form of work. In The Road, when Mortensen’s character wonders “how would you know if you’re the Last Man”, Duvall’s character responds “you wouldn’t, you’d just be it.” I don’t hate sustenance, I hate white bread. Little girl wanders market softly singing reindeer song: “And what's fate saying? / If fate’s saying anything, neither farmer nor squirrel can make it out.” The noon air, a cold compress. I am making you breakfast. We could leave this apartment and be in any city. I’ll bring you the avocado tree stolen from my neighbor’s yard. I fear my mouth is full of poltergeists. I was there when Adorno wrote Horkheimer, “I’m going

it's clear that reading is reducible to a search for levels of correspondence between poem & textual antecedents, with each verse line (such as "As Jill Magid writes in neon, 'I Can Burn Your Face.'") keyed to an exact source text, which in this case happens to be Aperture Exposures Blog, a photography blog for Aperture magazine. (At times, the sources are print publications such as Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond or online audio archives such as PennSound Daily or even song lyrics such as the "Little girl/reindeer song") The Monday, December 6th post also happens to announce, among other things, a "provocative new panel discussion" whose aim is to "explore the use of contemporary digital technologies in explore (sic) the relationship between images, surveillance and power." Above this advertisement is a neon illustration of the statement "I Can Burn Your Face". All of which serves as part of a loosely associated body of poetic material that runs throughout the entire first verse stanza and from which the poet makes his first word-selections for the opening verse line of the "307" poem.

The third verse line, "Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine" is likewise keyed directly to its source-source, in this case a blog for new dads entitled daddytypes. It, too, displays the same aggregative power as a source of the poem's textual parts. However, inserted between the first and third verse lines is the question, "Who's the I here", with the personal pronoun italicized. The fact that it doesn't seem to be derived from any listed source gives it a more than combinatory power. Here's a sign of an active synthesis at work able to reflect on and suggest links between the disparate parts, making of the poem an orderly and connected structure in its own right. The I question is perhaps the poet's own contribution to the "images, surveillance and power of digital technologies" debate introduced in the poem's first line. In any event, it certainly does offer just one of a number of other ways in which to fit disconnected fragments into a single coherent "307" poem.

Some patient affixing of sources to the remaining "307" verse lines will suggest other key meaning-makers in B-R's poem The La Bloga site is the direct source of the lines from "Going To The Yonque" poem by Christopher Carmona: "I’m going to buy me a satellite, gonna pay the man five/ dollars. He says he wants Incan gold, I tell him I’m not Incan." Again, straight aggregative work.  But soundtrack and print periodical references, appearing one after the other, must serve as the origin of the next line "I wear a skirt, a random party girl says, 'I'm glad you're man enough to wear that'" etc. Though I haven't bothered to verify the sources, even in their absence from the visible text they serve as structuring principles & can lead towards a unified presentation of the poet's materials. The "La Bloga" and the Duvall "Last Man" samplings from the Larval Subjects blog serve as brackets for non-verifiable text lying in between. The poet's direct (unprepared and unfounded) intrusion into the text ("Who's the I here?") now combines with visually absent sources to give at least two ways to read the "307" poem. (Since I'm more interested in methodology here, interpretations of the poem may form the topic of a future blog post)

The question finally arises whether the listed sources in B-R's poem form a paratext: another entirely interestingly contrastive or complementary version running concurrently with the putative primary "307" text. The question is not a fanciful one: certainly no more so than the idea of a "Zeitgeist Spam" project. Acting as more than just a series of references for the main "307" poem, perhaps the collected Sources can be read as another poem. Wikipedia (citing Gérard Genette) gives the standard definition of paratext as "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that ... is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it". In the spirit of Genette's definition, B-R's Flux, Clot & Froth comes with a Volume II in which appears the "apparatus" (as Huth calls it) for the entire series of endnotes. It would be interesting to look at even a small part of the appropriation poem "apparatus" to determine where that transition (& transaction) between "307" and its Source lies.