Has the Internet changed the way I read? You bet.

As I've argued in my previous post, reading of any type stands faced with a digital Other that doesn't mean the topic of technology is more popular than ever: it's, more significantly, a case of a complete absorption of traditional literacy into the history, context and rules of an emergent global capitalist system. And networked communication models seem to be the preferred way in which to read that new economic order. The old proprietary (elitist top-down) system is clearly disappearing in favour of a more interconnected model whose paradigm is a user-friendly Web 2.0 (and nowhere is this more evident than in the demise of bound books, print magazines, academic journals, etc.). The reader soon sees that hierarchized discourses of traditional literacy are giving way to a new filtering of the life world through a more radically open-sourced way to read.

The digital Other is not the negative term in a binary relationship. It's rather like the complex life-sustaining stuff of which ecosystems and entire planets are composed. The term 'cloud' seems to cover that all-pervading sense nicely enough. Cloud computing, in short, is today the new reading & writing paradigm sans pareil; as defined by  the National Institute of Standards and Technology, "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." They are transnational, ubiquitous and global structures of understanding without which any emerging notion of literacy is impossible. It's to these network 'signifieds' that language users must necessarily refer in order to understand the nature of their reading. Far from escaping they must embrace them for the connections between user and a "shared pool of configurable computing resources" are tantalizingly inseparable.

What this means is that technology has given the reader a system of distribution and mobilization of configurable data rather than ideas in a Platonist sense, static eternal essences to be extracted from words. And even the term 'consciousness' goes by the wayside, with the traditional ""Cartesian Theatre" notion replaced by what philosopher Daniel Dennet refers to as the self's "semi-independent agencies" interacting at the same time. Conservative literacy models still stuck in Cartesian paradigms give way to 'clouds' of global data banks and an almost instantaneous deployment of the technological means to store, distribute and sell them: purely processual and pro tempore. Literacy and Information Technology go hand in hand. Truth is usable, vendible and flexible in ways that make traditional rhetorical views of reading look doubly archaic: first as being too rigidly book-dependent and then as comically prescriptive. Readers with their heads in the clouds will necessarily be conscious of the social and economic orders of the day: there's a profound symmetry (and irony), in fact, between language based on IT models and the fluid dynamics of life itself . Reading's become necessarily globalized, drawn to the more current realities of civil society dissension, coalitions and movements, as to its natural element since they form the newest literary tropes of a world always in crisis & change.

Literacy will be a way to channel incoming events of a very vibrant life world through personally assimilable orders of meaning and significance. The reader's become gargantuan devourers of information in a post-print world in which interaction & accessibility are the only criteria of success:  in which cloud computing, mobile technology, and social networking, among other new research tools, form the parameters of educated debate. Interpretive options can vary among data-users as widely as information technologies will allow, irrespective of subject qualifications and any scholarly vetting.The interpretation of a poem, for example, can range from a Marxian analysis of exploitive socio-economic conditions, the text as commoditized item, to a Formalist methodology where the same text is seen as a serenely self-enclosed carrier of literary meaning, undisturbed by outside social-political forces.And anything in between, from Freud, feminism to reader response, is fair game. Nothing's changed except that it can now be one or the other, or both simultaneously without contravening some cherished law of non-contradiction that's only served to create a category of excluded ideas: and the blog, wiki and YouTube can offer their own uniquely differing takes on the meaning of 'authorial intention' as valid as anything to be found in recent academic MLA Bibliography listings. There's no substantive sense in which one viewpoint serves up the poem better than another, not in this multimedia stew: just as there's no way of marking any qualitative differences between PDF file or email documents.

The Marxist or Formalist thesis: which is the more convincing? Which one accords more closely to the nature of things? The questions are absurd. Neither alone can be adduced as the winner since the whole discussion has been made possible through the self-perpetuating algorithms of data searches (even if I'm reading from traditional books & scholarly articles). Meta-data, and the kind generated by Google searches has set the standard, are value-neutral and critically impotent. And more recently a move away from Web browsers to a post-HTML world of more serviceable Internet applications led by iPhone technology makes the transfer of data even more anti-traditional.The digital Other, rather than being seen as some transcendent force to be reckoned with, the arena of conflicts between subaltern & dominant discourses,  is simply a way of pitting individual viewpoints against those of other network users who read from the same technologized book of Nature. To read is the exact equivalent of "on-demand network access", and in this simultaneity of data exchange the winner is always the user of the system. Not just Marxist or Formalist alone or any one privileged position can be separated from the "networks, servers, storage, applications, and services" that make literary (and any type of discussion) possible.

Reading (and literacy in general )cannot be seen as the technological arm of a liberal-democratic capitalist regime that made it possible.There is, for example, no socialist alternative to the predominantly IT underpinnings of e-literacy. Literacy is not ideological but strictly technological: it always has been. It looks to me as though the only thing that can save the bound book from extinction is more of the digitized form in which it now appears & the only reading strategy than can make it appealing again, the current cloud-computing one. It's sort of reminiscent of the way the early capitalists did not so much make obsolete as profit by the new emerging business potential of scribal authors in the pre-print world, suiting print technology to literacy itself, killing the old unproductive technologies but keeping the spirit of the work very much alive. As Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin say in their The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800,

Living off and among books, in daily contact with men of letters, intellectuals and theologians, and also with students and the cultured public—in a word, with all who wrote and read—printers and booksellers naturally interested themselves in things of the mind as well as in commerce, if only to conduct their business more profitably.(143)

Has internet technology (of which cloud-computing seems to be its most etherealized and universal version) changed the way I read? Without a doubt. I'd like to end by outlining the characteristics of the 'new reader' consistent with the nature and direction of the new radically open network models of Internet communication. The 'new reader'

• insinuates himself into the text in a way that robs the traditional text/author of much of their top-down authority
• is a cultured member of a globalized world order attuned to its daily crises and changes 
• sees literacy as comprising of patterns of distribution & mobilization of technological means
• is cognizant of the absorption of inner into outer, the artist's subjective nature into the globalized conditions of every type of human expression imaginable
•  has the potential to make herself into a gargantuan devourer of cultural capital everywhere (thanks to the almost limitless resources of what Žižek's called "digital capitalism")
• can, in fact, change the digital Other into the I of a radical self-referentiality from which there's no escaping: perhaps to be best seen as a process moving in the opposite direction to the Lévinasian concept of the Face. In other words, the same reduction to Sameness but without the ethical angst

In my next post I'd like to give an example of how a 'new reader' can read a poem, and how I personally feel about it.

How the Internet has changed the way I read. Or has it?

It's not so much a case of the Internet giving different materials to read as of the same materials being read in a different medium: & actually not even read so much as skimmed for main points (as studies of typical Internet reading patterns have shown) and regarded primarily as a technologically updated version of the Illuminated page that's responsive more to software than human 'wet ware'. But I'm not interested in the question of the displacement of traditional literacy by an e-book environment of Kindle readers, e-ink and continual information distribution, with the likelihood that whole libraries with no bound books will one day appear. The growing demise of big-box bookstores  (like 'Borders', 'Barnes and Noble') is almost commonplace now. Nothing's really changed if just one type of book is being replaced by another: under these changing conditions nothing's really at stake for literacy at all. It's just a different type of hardware subject to the same rules of commodity exchange.

Even computer-generated texts must accommodate themselves to what I see as a daunting digital presence: actually an emerging Other with its own unique context, relatively recent history and rules of engagement. Something we've created out of a radically changed field of reading & writing, one to which media technologies & the Internet businesses (Google, Intel Corp, Apple Inc.etc) that exploit them have, of course, contributed greatly. A reading public, attuned to the allurements of a globalized  economy, also stands to profit greatly from a system in which to participate is to win the prize almost instantly . And the prize is access to network models of communication that have all but undermined traditional hierarchies of established viewpoints & the priesthood of 'experts' they keep in place. Network connections (usually of the social Facebook, Twitter types, etc) and the emergent Internet technologies that facilitate them have virtually effaced any qualitative differences between print and online communication.

Yes, we've become the competition, competitor and victor since networked selves follow the same exploitive global capital agenda. And the thought of losing in a competition of our own making is virtually impossible. It's ourselves we've embraced as the gargantuan devourer of information in a post-print world. And even if we're led by humanitarian gestures (as in the case of recent Humane Reader and One Laptop Per Child initiatives to spread the benefits of e-literacy to developing nations) the e-reader phenomenon can scarcely be seen as anything but a disguised techno-mastery distributing largesse to classes of e-illiterate poor it's helped to create. Reading, and it doesn't matter whether it's of the print or online type, is faced with a digitized 'alterity' comprised (in my view) of all the values of an unbounded capitalist mania for production, expropriation and domination.  Informed citizens are walking mirror-images of an unrelenting process of knowledge accumulation and distribution abetted by multimedia and a growing trend to make even democratic processes subserve a "communications and collaboration technology" model.

We've stepped out of ourselves (in the sense of having lost contact with a deep underlying aesthetic core to which we privately gain access), entrenched in a vicious self-referentiality from which there's no escaping. Because of (and not just in conjunction with) Internet technology we read primarily to set up our own little private cultural fiefdoms & become their chief interpreters & scribes: producers, consumers & editors all rolled into one. Robert Philbin in an online article entitled "Zizek, Poiesis, and Politics" makes a similar point about the cynicism of literary aesthetics in the age of "exhausted multi-media techno concepts":

Modern, Postmodern aesthetics appear redundant, insecure, self-annihilatingly cynical, while the art itself is largely passe, an accumulation of market-driven fetish models of commodities, collectables, and exhausted multi-media techno concepts, which momentarily delight or distract from the obvious mundane schizophrenic state of corporate global ideology.

The schizophrenia to which Philbin refers is precisely a condition caused by this radical intermixing of world & hyper-reader. Slavoj Žižek himself in his book First as Tragedy, then as Farce talks about a new global class of people with a penchant for privacy & exclusivity: "gated superrich" consumers who "are thus creating a life-world of their own to solve their anguishing hermeneutic problem" .(4) I'm sure he would have said the same about their reading habits. We seemed to have created a similar type of radical privacy for the act of reading and built barbed-wire fences around contents of consciousness themselves, reserving the right to exclude everyone but ourselves from straying beyond the borders of the page. In fact, we've kept firmly locked in our own heads the whole universe of discourse. The pains of interpreting the world aright (Žižek's "hermeneutic problem") can be alleviated considerably, of course, if the range of competitive viewpoints is reduced to a single globalized 'Other' whose interests and ours coalesce completely.

I've found in Jodi Dean's Thursday, 23 September I cite blog post entitled "Communicative capitalism and the commons" a very compelling list of the ways in which "networked communications" can turn into tools of exploitation & appropriation vis-à-vis a discussion of the views of Italian Marxist philosopher Cesare Casarino. I'd agree with most of it except that the enemy is not the traditional "owners of the means of production" but rather the workers themselves. The presence of the digital other has almost made the Marxist critique outdated. I think the network-user, rather than Internet corporate villain (such as the ones identified in Casarino's analysis) is the sole cause of the "self-reproducing excess" of the capitalist system, not the other way around: communication networks comprising of software, cell phones, laptops, etc cannot be seen as the generators of "surplus value" and those who use them as dupes.

I'm interested in this topic of Internet reading because I wonder if it applies to me at all. Is there, in other words, a sense in which I can consciously absent myself from the unbounded egoism spurred on by e-book literacy? Am I exempted because I understand it? Am I an exceptional reader in that sense or is the phenomenon too menacingly ubiquitous to avoid? Questions I'd like to address in my next blog post.

Some observations on a first book of poetry, Jean Genet & the nature of writing as "wound"

When I decided it was now time to assemble (for a first book of poetry) some fifty or sixty poems culled from hundreds written over the past eight to ten years, I don't think anything could have prepared me for what was to come: in particular, the degree of engagement in poetry itself (and language) and the vital necessity for honest self-assessment it entails.And, come to think of it, I've never been more acutely aware of my age either. I still can't shake the feeling that the better a poet is, the earlier the writing must have started so that late-bloomers like me are also condemned to suffer from bouts of self-denigration. I always seem to be looking over my shoulder rather than at the poem in front of me, conscious of all the writers who'd started much earlier, foolishly plotting writing proficiency on some sort of age-rated scale that has, of course, little to do with the nature of things. I wonder where this instinct to kill the artist in a work barely begun comes from. Why the insecurities now?

Meticulous editing & careful (and, at times, excruciatingly slow) sifting through hundreds of poems, combined with questions of literary style & suitability, are unpleasant aspects of the publishing game. Not to mention the question of the best publication route (mainstream, small press, chapbook, etc.), over which there is endless debate these days, and the printing costs & the horrendous expenditure of emotional & psychic energy involved in moving a literary product. I enjoy sending out the odd poem to print or ezine magazines; and I enjoy poetry readings even more. Poetry as performance has always appealed to me as does its usual theatre and tone and variable pacing: & nothing can quite hold the audience's attention more than the vital difference between personality and poem. But to turn inspired writing, almost a poem for every significantly lived moment, into a final 'codex', bound for posterity or oblivion, seems to me a bit unnerving, not to mention crassly egotistical. And to read out of that same bound book of poems (as all too many poets do) to an ever diminishing market is to reduce it to a pure spectacle: one which has, in fact, lately turned the performance into a technological 'theatre of cruelty'.

And, of course, the critics, from Internet hack to the more academic (usually 'grad school') type, hover over every verse line: my experiences with them have been so unfavourable that I also seem to have formed this 'literary committee' in my head on whose final deliberation the success of every poem depends. A committee that's every bit as Kafkaesque as it sounds. I'm embarrassed to admit how often a critic's unkind remark about a single misplaced word or unintelligible line has set me back. Eliot's famous injunction to regard the critic's role as being solely an elucidatory one leaves me cold:— it's never occurred to the great man to consider that criticism can disclose a literary intention as easily as a weapon. At least, it's felt that way to me at times. The art of critique can be predatory and it's not something to which I've become fully accustomed yet.

So why write, & why publish? And how to get over the impediments of age, endless revision, diminishing self-confidence & fear of the critic's blade? Well, I'd prefer to change a question into a statement and make the writing a reason for the knife itself. It's small (or no) comfort at all but it's the way it is. Let the imminent negatives of writing open into a wound! Writing precisely because of the gashes it's bound to inflict and because slashing is, after all, what the critics & readers are there for. French novelist, dramatist & poet Jean Genet, in his famous essay on sculptor Alberto Giacometti, said that "Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound,different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself,” (from "The Studio of Alberto Giacometti" in The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, ed. Edmund White, p. 310) and it's from him I derive this central insight into the nature of artistic creation in general. It's perhaps from this that a good deal of my own gnawing self-doubts necessarily arises (I can't claim to having attributed it to anything but a decision to publish & acquaintance with the writings of this remarkable author).

I say without reservation that writing is a wound because nothing exposes more the wound of human frailty &weakness & the essential fissure in the ground of art itself. It can almost be stated as a tautology. Writing isn't designed for dogmatism or critical posturing: the frail scaffolding of ineffective imaginations and ineffective writers who equate singularity (in the uniquely insightful sense used by critic Derek Attridge) with the boredom of a single artistic style or viewpoint. Nothing is as stultifying & unsatisfactory (to me) than awards-friendly work since a very large part of what constitutes artistic genuineness—namely, the violence of alienation and rejection resulting in injury—is always denied to these few acclaimed winners who've been too sheltered too soon from the knife. To the few who are always too few to matter, of course, precisely because they never seem to miss the mark.

Art (poetry, in my case) that's afraid of "infirmity" (318) isn't worth the bother: without the limp the work can never be known. Even the tragic shamefacedness of artists who've been all but eliminated reveals an essential space of pure beauty reserved only for them. As American poet Jack Spicer says, "You only have the right to piss in the fountain/If you are beautiful." The marginalized always stand out easily in a crowd of the self-congratulatory: at least I can spot them. On the other hand, fêted authors in a system of literacy by bureaucracy (such as we have in Canada) walk too brazenly in the open for their own good because that vital "elimination of the viewer" (320) is denied them, the invisibility they fear more than non-recognition. It's in this "total solitude" (328) the beauty of work, and of the worker, resides. Genet's estimation of Giacometti's sculptures and drawings applies to art, and the artist above all, and is worth quoting in full:

Giacometti's art, then, is not a social art that would establish a social link between objects—man and his secretions—but rather an art of superior beggars and bums, so pure that they could be united by a recognition of the solitude of every being and of every object. 'I am alone,' the object seems to say, 'hence caught within a necessity against which you are powerless. If I am only what I am, I am indestructible. Being what I am, and unconditionally, my solitude knows yours.'" (328-29)

But small comfort this is, the growing mistrust of ability & scope never having been driven home so hard. After all, Giacometti is Giacometti & and the artistic record speaks for itself; in fact, it's even likely that Genet's essay was written only as a sort of homage to the man who'd sculpted his own face. And if that's the case, Genet himself can be accused of a sort of sycophantism. But that's missing the point, obviously. The piece is autobiographical, as is my own account of the terrible inner-demons that the act of self-promotion (that is publishing) calls forth: demons from whom writers of any ability and means must receive that distinguishing mark of the damned. Derek Attridge says, "The text remains a writing as long as it is read" (The Singularity of Literature, 105): I say, respecting the same "act-event" of creativity, the poem widens into a wound even as it's being written, one that's felt long after it's been solidified into book form. Now perhaps a haunting memory.

A translation of the opening 20 lines of Lucretius' epic poem"De Rerum Natura"

                          LIBER PRIMUS

Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas,
alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
concelebras, per te quoniam genus omne animantum
concipitur visitque exortum lumina solis:
te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli
adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus
summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti
placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.

nam simul ac species patefactast verna diei
et reserata viget genitabilis aura favoni,
aeriae primum volucres te, diva, tuumque
significant initum perculsae corda tua vi.

inde ferae pecudes persultant pabula laeta
et rapidos tranant amnis: ita capta lepore
te sequitur cupide quo quamque inducere pergis.

denique per maria ac montis fluviosque rapaces
frondiferasque domos avium camposque virentis
omnibus incutiens blandum per pectora amorem
efficis ut cupide generatim saecla propagent.
_________________________

                            Book I

Mother of Aeneas, delight of gods and men,
fruitful Venus, you who celebrate under heaven's
gliding signs the ship-bearing seas & fruitful shores,
since through you every kind of living being
is conceived & coming forth visits the land
of light:—
                you, goddess, from whom the winds flee,
(even clouds of heaven shun your arrival),
& for whom the cunning earth lets sweet buds grow,
& the sea's smooth surfaces laugh and happy skies
shine in celestial light.

                               For as soon as the spring-like face
of day appears,with its strong & life-giving west-wind,
birds are first, goddess, to make your presence known,
all their resistance beaten down.

                                                 Then the wild beasts
scour the joyous fields and pass through rapids: so en-
thralling is your charm that all living things ardently go
wherever you hasten to take them.

                                                And in the midst of seas,
 mountains and violent floods, the birds' leafy nests and
 verdant plains, you entice them with an alluring love,
 the kind that keeps the species going.

The art of Bogdan Luca: reflections on the Niagara Peninsula

I'd like to thank poet Irina Moga for introducing me to the work of Bogdan Luca, a young artist living in the Toronto region of Ontario. In fact, Irina has created a site entitled "Artist’s Studio: Bogdan Luca & The Genesis of A Work of Art" dedicated to exploring the genesis of artistic production as exemplified in Luca's recent Niagara Peninsula paintings. As Irina says, "The intent of this event is to provide a view into the creative process, on how a work of art emerges from the chaos of every day life and of the themes and artistic influences at play in such an endeavor." I very much like that as a mission statement.

I feel particularly privileged to have been asked to write a guest post on Luca's work, which I shall certainly do in the near future. In the meantime I will enjoy the incredible work of Bogdan Luca, visiting Irina's site daily and posting comments. As Irina has said to me in a recent email, it is her intention to bring together a wide body of interested observers, artists & writers in this exploration of the "genesis of a work of art".

This is the idea of artistic community at its best.

A translation of two prose poems by Pierre Reverdy

TRAITS ET FIGURES

     Une éclaircie avec du bleu dans le ciel; dans la forêt des
clairières toutes vertes; mais dans la ville où le dessin nous
emprisonne, l'arc de cercle du porche, les carrés de fenêtres, les
losanges des toits.
     Des lignes, rien que des lignes, pour la commodité des
bâtisses humaines.
     Dans ma têtes des lignes, rien que des lignes; si je pouvais y
mettre un peu d'ordre seulement.


OUTLINES AND FIGURES

     A blue sky opening; a sweep of forest green; but in the town
 (a model prison!) the portal's arch, square windows,
& diamond-shaped roofs.
     The garish city comforts of lines, and more lines.
     In my head, lines and nothing but lines. Oh, to put
them in some kind of order.
    
     

L'AIR MEURTRI

     Il fait si chaud que l'air vibre et que tout bruit devient
assourdissant. Des meutes de chiens féroces aboient. Par les
fenêtres ouvertes, les cris des femmes rivalisent avec cette fanfare
barbare.
     Le froid a de la peine à geler ces paroles. Si les oiseaux se
taisaient, si les femmes se taisaient, si les chiens étaient mors
. . .Un moment les jardins sont calmes et tout s'endort; mais
bientôt le terrible bruit recommence. Ce sont les appels du soleil
et chacun y répond avec exubérance. Quelques êtres muets qu'on
accable ne peuvent protester ni se venger. Le bruit souverain les
opprime.
     Dans les fumées, par-dessus les toits qui s'en préservent
seuls, j'aurais fait tournoyer ma tête comme un grelot sans pois
au bout d'une ficelle. La vitesse ouatée jusqu'aux nuages et
permettre au ruisseau de murmurer tout seul!
     Le ciel est descendu, on a refermé les fenêtres et les bouches
sont closes. Après la chute des feuilles les oiseaux même n'osent
plus gazouiller. Il fait si froid.
     L'hiver c'est l'intervalle du silence.

DEADLY AIR

     The air vibrates, it's so hot and any noise wears you down.
Packs of ferocious dogs are barking. Through the open windows,
cries of women to rival the inhuman clamour outside.
     The cold can scarcely freeze my words.
If only the birds and women kept quiet, and the dogs were dead. . .
Gardens are still only momentarily and everything's asleep; but again
the noises start up, terrible. . . Day summons & everyone responds
with exuberance. It'd depress you to see how helpless some mute
beings are to protest or take revenge. The deadly reign of
noise.
     In the smoke above the sheltered rooftops, I'd have let my head spin
like a silent bell still tied to its string—quiet swiftness to the clouds—
and the streams murmur alone!
     The heavens descended with the silencing of windows and voices.
After the leaves fall even the birds won't prattle anymore. It's so cold.
     Winter comes before the silence.

"EUDYSIA": poetry published without "the financial assistance of Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council or any agency."

ALL RIGHTS UNRESERVED. Any part of this book may be
  reproduced by whatever means necessary without the
   prior permission of the publisher and/or the author.
  It is encouraged that those invigorated by the content
  within will use it to springboard to higher creativity.

Real poetry is a gesture that counts (Pierre Reverdy)

OmahaRisinG is a performance poet from Toronto: but more than that, a nomadic poet who breaks with genre and Canadian literary tradition: (a) by disavowing the traditional association of performance poetry with oral poetry only, aligning himself also with a social activism rooted to place, and, more significantly, (b) by freeing his poetics from the state-funded apparatus that is these days the only gateway to mainstream writing & publication. And I might like to throw his name into the Avant group (or post-Avant, as it's been lately retitled), since it's really a temperament & way of getting around by bike & not an elitism that flies off to the next Avant Writing Symposium. A true Avant is dislocation & the most radical activism designed to make everyone feel uncomfortable, one that never keeps still, never stops jabbing at the "donkey festival" that is Canada Council & CanLit, and  makes the more popular academicized versions (of Gary Barwin, Christian Bök, for example) look ridiculously tame. I'll offer the name Clifford Duffy as belonging to same class of the true few radical poetries in this country.

RISING, Omaha
     EUDYSIA

My concern is always with real poetries & real movements. I've recently read OmahaRisinG's EUDYSIA and have had the good fortune to see him read at Artbar in Hamilton, Ontario, a local "arts hub, live music venue, artists' hang-out": a social-cultural outlet for significant otherstream expression. I'm particularly pleased to be a part of. I've also commented here on bill bissett, quintessential gestural and vocal master,and the social justice drama of Melanie Skene & Simon De Abreu (a staged reading with props) told in folklorish conta storia format, two other activist art forms I've met there. As well as on the elegant figure of  poet James Deahl who founded the Artword Artbar reading series and whose 'Poets for Peace' movement, founded twenty-seven years ago, has contributed significantly to a culture of peace and non-violence & a distinctively people's poetry ethos for which the Hamilton area is now known. A place to attract OmahaRisingG & be in good company.

OmahaRisinG

Former literary editor, firefighter, amateur kick boxer and letter carrier, OmahaRisinG comes from a Toronto-based 'people's poetry' and performance poetry tradition: a figure to be associated with a liberatory poetics of peace & social activism. As a "symptomal" reader and viewer (after Louis Althusser), I can't help seeing activist poetry like his as symptomatic of a gap in contemporary Canadian literature—radical poetries must try to fill in— between the mainstream determined to "disallow control over the self" (FYRMM!!!! 1) and total "corporeal dissolution" (1) of the nomadic poet who's always circling in or always intolerably present at the borders, determined to contrast the mainstream's fake cultural life with a  "life-affirming death" (1) of its own. Through the energies of poetry performance comes a sort of Nietzschean call to life in the abyss.The OG bookends of his name suggest a snug asphyxiation, the Kafkaesque "no hide nowhere to rise/dungeonal triple-iron keep" life of unbearable confinement (COCKROACH 13) . Poetry is more than performance. In a hip-hop of  repeating sounds & rhymes, the poet in motion can represent himself as the necessarily disabled & "short/circuited" voice of dissidence that's never just staged. (Even at a reading I've noticed how restless he seems, working  the room, full of the leg-venom from which the poet & his best lyrics come):

my stance is metaphoric
the penultimate euphoric
in this wheelchair where
perambulation is electric
 a future short/circuited
   so severe selfcentric
rejects your trial denial
because I can not walk
with reality determined
 to steal this life's face
thus I must make bold
with a smile take hold
of life-affirming death (1)

Unlike the many self-satisfied mainstream lyricists out there, here's the recalcitrant performer "wreaking face vengeance/poet justice pronounced/for that evitable death" (KOTARO 3) that is the poet's world. Performance in the OmahaRisinG sense is not to be delineated into a superficial opposition of text to public presentation: a boundary that he transgresses by giving audience members a copy of each poem read. The text he offers is an active material record of live history: prequel to the event it must face outside, after the performance, in the living streets. Poetry that's read as a bar code, "red-eye scansion" ( BAR CODE 54) fit to reveal a "disembodied eloquence of lives" (LIFE SPAN 5) and the searing paradoxes of intrapersonal relations. In MAL (14), for example, he asks, "can the jew/catch a break/from the hates/of the likes/of you"? And to the anorexic girl the poet likens a "personal holocaust" (DOMINION 17). Boundaries that separate imagery and the realities of discrimination & self-willed starvation it reflects can't stop shifting or morphing because every familial & social relation is too porous for institutional fixes. It's interesting to consider, as another example of this restless shifting, that self-willed starvation, a few pages later, finds in the poem ENDURA (22) its own double in the image of ritualistic fasting and spiritual bravery of those (presumably the Cathars) who seek to redress earthly injustices through self-induced death:

you voiced the soft dead
always in red, the premise
shift in justice, the promise
blacked by stone enemies

  ballsy testimony upworded
 bewildered autumns to a sky
fazed by a perishing urgency
grasping for your last breath(22)

EUDYSIA, is not just putative title for urban utopia but (as the poet told me in email correspondence)

my neologo. It comprises two prefixes: 'eu' (from the Greek meaning 'good')and 'dys' (from the Greek meaning 'bad'/'badly'). That makes my neologism an oxymoron. Its cognate would be 'eudysic'.

I created 'eudysia' to replace 'postmodern', a term that is many decades beyond its best-before date.

EUDYSIA represents the post 9/11 period. September 11th, 2001is the defining moment of our era. Almost everything of a critical nature flows from it. We live the oxymoron of my neologo. The good (primarily inherent in technological advances) fights with the bad for dominance. And there is more bad than one can imagine: the threat of terrorism, worry about future pandemics,economic meltdowns, global warming, armed conflicts, etcetera (Saturday, August 21, 2010)

The "oxymoron of my neologo" is rather to be understood as a dream artfully mismatched with (or rather negated by) a prevalent culture of video game ontologies (KOTARO 3), 'gamer' names (like KOTARO, O MEGAMAN, KENTRON) attuned to robotic resonances rather than to things & a general picture of crumbling socio-cultural borders where "scuffling dead sand" people (DOMINION 16)— or so the actors & their dramas sometimes seem to me—can't be distinguished from real atomic death (SADAKO) and the despair of Ethiopian mothers who prefer suicide over another empty well (SEMA KEDIR).The murder of Anthony Walker can't be too easily dissociated from "manchester united" popularity either (MAYBE NEVER 43). But it's not a question of opposing names to the tyrannies of signification they oftentimes designate: for names have practically shifted into (culturally traded places with) the places reserved for their own terrible undersides. I believe the poet's purposely chosen a naturally evolving lexicon with the potential to outline an imminent cultural apocalypse.

If I'm fancifully reading titles and maybe even intentions, it's as a way of validating a more general truth about the way a neologo-title can disclose interesting pathways to cultural critique, perhaps along the lines of Naomi Klein's No Logo and the politics of branding it unearths.The title is the self-gutting name of all names and the mark of the impetus, still visibly present in our culture & subject to radical critique, to attribute personal, societal & ecological murders to the tyranny of signifiers. OmahaRisinG gives in performance & in language the terrible disconnects of this EUDYSIA-post 9/11 reality and for that alone his work is revolutionary & a pure poetry performance.

son of sam used to
    listen to that dog
     you talk to god
   sometimes saying

  then go out without
 waiting for an answer
grab a pepperoni pizza

          between bites
          you chew fact
            then sicken

               leaders
           may reverse
          but in the end
           they all say
          the same thing
              (ITE 36)

Poetry seeks to play on the difference between the title's self-canceling senses as earthly utopia (of the social-activist poet) and the reality of language appropriated by the Metropolis nightmare in which we live. I believe his EUDYSIA primarily works as both a self-emptying of language through speech & performance and critique of the tyranny of brand society in general. It's what makes the poetry a performance and moves it restlessly forward at the same time, and perhaps what makes the poet himself try to arise out of the "parisian crypt" (CID 69 32) that is his stage name. OmahaRisinG has clearly (& artfully) let the name of the poem (in almost every single case) sink into the many incongruities of life and writing always already there: and the result's a "bite-fevered perception" of what he sees and the more grotesque "distortion/creation/behind arachnoid language" that results (TICK TALK 60), perhaps a parody of a false communitarian world wide web community. Perhaps he's given a perfect illustration of Rancière's idea of the "intolerable image" in art: the obscenity that a rampant society of spectacle easily glosses over & passes for media & that poetry can convey through a slamming robotics-language:
    

 re memory branch
        memoir brain
          membrane

          skin hides
        distortion/creation
 behind arachnoid language
derma-disjoint communication

   bite-fevered perception
     immementos events
      dysremembered
        dismembered
         remembered
         unreversible

         irreversible
        spasmic clock
     thiefs wrinkled time
 leaving mutant replicants
continuators of remembrance (60)

The essential thing is then to underscore (or bold & capitalize) the poem as a false naming: specter of life & language collapsing altogether into a post 911 world of hyperreal epics and a rap-elegy reduced to a few staccato wisdom-hits. If not EUDYSIA, since the title's there been uncovered as a personal neologo artfully misaligned with the fact of "terrorism, pandemics, meltdowns" and rampant ecocide, then what: ARREX (7), legendary name for the city of Nimrod, or HOME itself (20), the place of a son's return to the absent Mother, where "he needed her to be around/to show him a life amidst death" (21), or perhaps the more exotic-sounding VERSA, ITALIA (35), a place of death too "where rat trenches/drag bodies into drowning pools"? Where is the poet-performer to turn? And a poet's restless search goes on, almost interminably, for all the unaffiliated heroes like O MEGAMAN, PYTHAGORAS or LENIN to fill in the void, names referring as much to historical personages as failed life-histories. Looking for utopia in the digital dystopia of today is a gesture as self-refuting as trying to key the name (of the poem, poet) to any one referent. As he strongly intimates in TRADE (70), poetry is the search for the absent parent:
   

knowing and distant
  unblinking and insensate
cadillac slinks mute tolerance
soft parade of skinny leather
  near-winter incongruous
   advertises windshields
     stiletto heels totter
       leggy expanses
  framed by car metal
eye-level glory silhouettes
  a neon-infected eatery

 window lowers invitation
 behind tinted moral void
  entered without words
  tires dispatch asphalt
  to urgent irrelevance
 straight-ahead silence
commandeers the interior
seals its unspoken contract

industrial-side-street familiarity
 comforts a midnight vacuum
 early fog jitters jaded glass
 dishing streetlight diffusion
 bucket-seat reality repeats
 beneath a voiceless zipper
 she kisses this month's rent
  works the new economy
  makes the rough tough

  father may never arrive

The poet's boldly exercised an anti-arts funding option (in my view) that's really the only way for it to act out its radical "eudysic" role. EUDYSIA,as a neologo for an impossible utopia, must also mean a rupture with the mainstream proprietors of any sense of good literature & with the means (primarily through the apparatus of state-funded art) of excluding Fringe styles. A system that strikes at the heart of Artbar and poetry performance must be radically dissociated from the text itself (as it certainly is here). And OmahaRisinG's text is  political in the way its condemns false spiritual-ideological underpinnings of authority (as in JUDICIUM DEI 36-37), the antidote to which is a Zarathustrian desire to "will my condition/to a perpetuity that can/respect/reflect a range meant/to encompass all degrees/latitudes and longitudes/of intersect" (DESIDERATE 39). In a world of "dyslocution" (after DYSLOCUTE 48), of language-reality "mischronicity" and the "spiritus noctis" (CITY BLUE 51) of postmodern life, there can be no place for the likes of Canada Council: the "dirty balm" of literacy by bureaucracy.

EUDYSIA is poetry published without "the financial assistance of Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council or any agency." But only secondarily. It's first and foremost the outline of the means of dislocating any poetics that relies on the supremacy of names (even EUDYSIA): for the titles in OmahaRisinG's text, and the poetries they call forth, whether read or performed, have been selected for their power to reveal the disastrous aversion of language alone to sacred places, meaningful personal relations & true people-based, participatory arts milieu. It's perhaps ultimately a case of language having to be (re-)absorbed into performance, the restless Homeric impulse to tell the story of struggle and defeat: as the poet affirms in ITE, a poem whose title translates literally into the imperative to "go out without/ waiting for an answer" (36).