"Another valley marvel" by Katherine L. Gordon

Poet, friend and mentor Katherine L. Gordon (who's in the opinion of many Canada's real first Lady of Letters) has just shared with me and Andreas Gripp a beautiful description of last night's lunar eclipse told in her typical Celtic playfulness, which she's entitled "Another valley marvel". Below is Katherine's piece followed by a poem of mine inspired by it. Dedicated to Katherine, as always.

Dear bards, last night (early morning really) I watched the lunar eclipse from my bed! The moon positioned herself directly above me in the sky light and I saw her swallowed, turned pulsating orange and extinguished by our shadow. By 3 A.M. the phenomena was over. What queen could have a better observatory! Could this rare event have anything to do with the torrential tides and weather in the Maritimes? This morning the returning sun gilded in a rosy halo, the trees and stones of the cliff.

Happy return of the light and a magic solstice to each...the Newgrange dead are awakened again.
Katherine.

    Only someone

as regal and long-hemmed,

—& shadowy, starry and blue,
    as You—
    (from her bed)
    could've seen it

instructed, at last, on how to live
    and go down the one
    passage way
    to yr King—

the deeper and deeper,
not sadder and sadder
    one

"My best Council grant, yet"

What, my dear, I'd like to
  do ( should)
        is
     draw

(and turn the valley, &
     stinky bay into)

    deer.

What the hell for?

Stipple it (stiff-brushed...) &
  drop the bitter
    vetch

—o'er which the slime runs—

   rheumy
   catch basins
         &
   muck

  right into one pot
that swings over my real cdn. coals,
   held taut to
          the unstressed steel
          & 2 good screws

          of Purdy's
          A-frame,

          Layton's
          nursing home (or

         Klein's
         psych.ward)

That's the gist of it, this time

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.

Why there weren't gays on Star Trek

    Threatened with

wanting    some softer, more

              natural love

up there,

    a leaf, in an alien sense

             (a symbiont

 leaf!) is

    still closing on itself

    Which isn't why at all

    An alien's hope is to be freed

from    an elitist rock

    Anything closing

as smartly as its resistant curl

—alone in a parasitic Star—

            weirdly visible,

with one eye set on warping need

            only,          

     is bound to be mashed

    The smart alecky, leafy way to

            stay soft

            up in space!

When reading turns into writing: or my version of what the blog is

We should change our theory every five thousand miles just like we change oil in our cars. New injections improve performance and keep us from clogging up the system. (Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture)

I am drawn to imagining a cyberdrama of the future by the same fascination that draws me to the Victorian novel. I see glimmers of a medium that is capacious and broadly expressive, a medium capable of capturing both the hairbreadth movements of individual human consciousness and the colossal crosscurrents of global society. (Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace)

Among the many productive uses of the blog is its power to change reading into writing: in fact, the blog resists reading only. This is the only type of problem it can pose for the user (which really isn't one). I don't see any tension between technology (and its software creators) and the many opportunities for creative self-expression it affords. The Internet is no corollary of state power that, as communist Jodi Dean has suggested here, results in a need for a standard Marxist overthrow of media production through "street-level activity"or informed networks of cyber-hacking. This line of thinking seems comically outdated. In the Web 2.0 world workers, who are aware of their role in the new productive forces of the informational age, can no longer be seen as alienated from the fruits of their labour. Italian philosopher Antonio Negri refers to this new technologized worker as the 'cognitariat'. The blog is not just another fetish. It's part of a set of overlapping networks where technologies and new literacy strategies join and change into new cultural goods: where the program text is, in other words, constantly being rewritten by 'cognitariat' workers.

Blogging can also make you a concerned theorist of your own reading practices. Being more than just an 'archival' medium, it invites critical (and anxious) distancing from the act so that bloggers can asses the scope & limits of their practice. The question of whether blogging is or isn't a form of "communicative capitalism" (after Jodi Dean), the prevalence of online literacy in general and the relationship between ewriters and their audiences are all relevant aspects of blog theory. But what about reading? So few talk about the very thing that's being changed beyond recognition. I've always wondered why, while inviting reading and reader-responses, the blogosphere won't tolerate in the end anything but distinctively writerly impulses. Writing is what the internet is primarily for. A screen inlaid only with readable graphics, links, video & other modes of online interconnectivity isn't something with a very long shelf-life. It can't even be considered a page out of a book anymore.

The blog's a participatory subculture that by virtue of its own distinctive appeal to the Other (not as 'peer reviewer' but as a collective reader with a stake in the material) and textual interactivity is consistent with the pluricentric grid of contemporary media. What every type of communication, from plasma TV to iPad, has in common is this marked aversion to stillness. I tried to show, in a post on the relationship between Blake's "Tyger Tyger" and  iPhone technology, how the iPhone served as essential intermediary between text and a virtual plethora of 'apps', browser and sensors features. The latter, in fact, served as conditions for the former and were so pervasive as to make the two seem virtually indistinguishable. It very much looked as if the passage from Blake's "Tyger" resisted the poem and became instead a virtual platform for ways to rewrite itself (perhaps proof of the materiality of code), eager to jump from iPhone text to 'screenshot' to 'App store', etc. "The Tyger", as I concluded, has been reduced to a purely 'contextualized' piece with simultaneous visual, audio and textural properties all competing for the reader's attention.

But reading online can never be a passive sort of viewing. It's as though the senses geared for reading, once technologized in this way, must transgress their own boundaries & release a 'digitized' (liberatory) Other that is the form of Internet literacy. Rather than the illusion Dean says it is, the Other serves as an outlet for a type of differentiated being attuned to a pluricentric world. Reading isn't necessarily just a visual phenomenon: it's rather the creatively amorphous product of touchscreens, apps & competing browsers that can reveal their powers only through use.The Other is a real entity that can read the reader: lately there's even talk about the way Google, through what's termed a "contextualized discovery", can "provide you with content in the browser or on your smartphone based on information you have supplied before, or on information the device 'knows'..."The blog, as part of this communicative constellation, is seen as an expression of an emergent globalized world of socio-cultural expression that is the source of a new wealth (capital). In a reformulated version of Bishop Berkeley's famous dictum, to be is to be perceived indeed but not by god but rather by Internet media: to see yourself as part of a productive freedom that's neither illusionary nor subject to capitalist control.

The blog is the activist medium par excellence. A preoccupation with reading only is almost reactionary, in the sense of hearkening back to an old-school model of literacy that privileges pedagogy, monkish readings and slavish devotion to academic vetting. The framework of scriptoria, silent reading rooms and smoky lecture halls gives way to more privatized centres of resistance. One thinks here of the role of online activism in the case of the Zapatista movement. It marks a shift from Truth to truth in the usual post-humanist fashion: from professorial diktat to the contemporary perturbations and creative chaos of more individualized socio-cultural expression. The idea of higher education itself will have to be reformulated in view of this democratic radicalization of language & writing. Contemporary thinker Jason Rovito even envisages the idea of the university, one worth defending, "as a certain, and certainly political, organization of curiosity. "The inability of the blog to be a read-only medium is a sign of its radical contingency, suited to becoming a tool of the chronically Curious who won't brook interference of any kind.

The blog is a site that resists the tight controls of print literacy, and, in deference to it will even preserve the look of the traditional page until it's actually read, at which point the text undergoes a process of rapid 'contextualizations' that suits matter to such elements as content, links, images, data storage & retrieval, format, etc ( See the recent if:book post for an interesting discussion of the concept of pagination in "the digital era"). A case of 'scriptural being replaced by a decidedly virtual economy' (as media theorists would say).

Essentialists who are in denial about post-humanism & who try foolishly still to separate language from being, might protest, as they oftentimes do, that digitized writing is a tool only, good for problem-solving, application of algorithms to new technical uses, & ever more intrusive marketing strategies. Bloggers, they say, will never have the impact on cultural production they claim to have nor will they ever form any significant literary vanguard: not this glorified crew of chroniclers of diatribe and unedited rants. What detractors don't seem to realize is that use of Internet media equals the power & prestige of which the old 'academic' purveyors of knowledge & publication were once sole owners: that no one cultural medium, in other words, can claim ascendancy over any other just by virtue of an outmoded print technology.

The radically democratizing effect of IT on business practice is instructive. Companies actively encourage employees (in fact, offer them financial incentives) to put laptops to creative marketing & advertising uses, with even social media sites targeted as valid market research and promotion opportunities.As technical writer Mary E. Schacklett says in a recent "Internet Evolution" article, "business users are jumping on Internet social media to conduct business as they continue to face conditions that change so rapidly that they feel compelled to use any tool at their disposal to communicate, collaborate, research, and report." Workers empowered with this sort of control over IT means of production can literally (or virtually) strip CIOs of their top-down hegemony: here is a clear case of technical workers (Negri's cognitariat) who can't be seen as pawns in exploitive productive processes. Why can't a similar sort of language/writing democratization be envisaged for the blogger, one that makes a similar sort of paradigm shift in the means of literary production & distribution?

The blog is (to borrow a film analogy) the auteurist medium sans pareil. The only claim it makes on the blogger is that it be taken as a multimedia site of which the reader is the necessary but never sufficient condition. Every blog post is a text that rather than being viewed only—for the act of reading only "clogs up the system"— begs to be written, edited, linked, archived and integrated (even fed) into other sites. Perhaps the word 'fan' (after the participatory culture theory of Henry Jenkins) is a better term than reader or user to describe the interactivity between bloggers: as Jenkins says in Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, "In many ways, cyberspace is fandom writ large." (138) And in reply to Jodi Dean's rather disparaging treatment of jouissance as preliminary always to a state of "capture and entrapment", Jenkins (after Nancy Baym) offers "epistemaphilia", a kind of invigorating knowing that results from both sharing and exchanging significant content across the Web.

Ed Baker's memory theater

Poet, sculptor and friend Ed Baker has kindly given me permission to post his wonderful 'memory theater'.

My memory theater

Joseph Hutchison, in his recent post, has shown a picture of part of his library to complement a fine article by Nathan Schneider entitled "The New Memory Theater". I'd like to start a "memory theater" movement in which poets concerned about the imminent disappearance of "the printed page" proudly post online a picture of part of their own private library. As Schneider calls it, the final repository of "words, ideas, convictions, memories, identity, and language."

Poet in picture is optional.

Poet among his books