Monthly : September 2008

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Proposed Poetry Bailout to Restore Readers’ Confidence

Harper’s Magazine online reports today that the poetry market is also affected by the recent downturn in the market. Charles Bernstein proposes a “bailout plan”.

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt””poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.

Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

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From the original manuscript of On The Road

Experimental Literature & Artists’ Books

There will be an exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s original manuscript for “On the Road”, at Columbia College in Chicago this fall. (Hopefully, this one will allow photographs.)

In conjunction with that, there will be another exhibition that “highlights the ongoing exploration of writers/artists in the area of experimental literature vis-a-vis artists’ books”.

Rather than focusing specifically on the Beat culture and literature, the curators have chosen to allow contributors to elucidate and interpret the terms “experimental literature” and “artists’ books” for themselves. Essays by Alastair Johnston, Susan Vanderborg, Tate Shaw and Chris Burnett will be included.

To celebrate the opening of the exhibit and special issue of the Journal of Artists’ Books on “Intersections of Experimental Literature and Artists’ Books,” there will be readings by poets based in the greater Chicago area and whose works exemplify contemporary experimental poetic practice in the tradition fostered by the small press and artists’ books.

The catalog for Experimental Literature and the Intersection with Artists’ Books will be produced as the Journal of Artists’ Books #24.

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Digital Fever: Archiving Art and Poetry Online

If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the state-of-the-art, when it comes to digitally archiving artworks and poetry on the internet, here’s a treat for you. “Digital Fever: Archiving Art and Poetry Online” is a critically-oriented (lengthy) discussion of digital media and the future of archiving, featuring alternating models for poetry and visual media currently operating online.


Project Website (with 92 min. multimedia recording): http://slought.org/content/11144/

It features Craig Dworkin, Kenny Goldsmith, Brian Kim Stefans, Darren Wershler-Henry. This discussion is part of the Conversations in Theory Series at the Slought Foundation

Craig Dworkin edits Eclipse (http://www.princeton.edu/eclipse) and is the author of _Reading the Illegible_ (Northwestern U.P.), a critical investigation of the politics of misuse. Recent articles have appeared in October, Sagetrieb, and American Letters & Commentary. _Signature-Effects_, a book of visual poetry, is available from Small Press Distribution, and _PARSE_ is forthcoming from Atelos Press. Currently editing the selected poems of Vito Acconci and working on a book tentatively entitled _Misreading: A User’s Manual_, he teaches 20th and 21st century avant-gardes in the Department of English at Princeton University.

Kenneth Goldsmith is a poet living in New York City. He is a music critic for New York Press and a DJ on WFMU. He is founding curator of http://ubu.com

Brian Kim Stefans runs the media mini-empire http://www.arras.net, which includes arras.net, Free Space Comix: The Blog (www.arras.net/weblog) and Circulars (www.arrras.net/circulars), a multi-author anti-war blog maintained by poets. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Angry Penguins (Harry Tankoos, 2000). He edits the /ubu series of poetry ebooks on ubu.com (www.ubu.com/ubu), and his forthcoming book of essays, Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics, will be published by Atelos in the April 2003. He is a prolific critic and writes for the Boston Review among other publications. New work, including an interview, will soon be appearing on the Iowa Review web (www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/).

Darren Wershler-Henry, the former senior editor at Coach House Books, http://www.chbooks.com, is a writer, critic, and the author of two books of poetry, _NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs_, and _the tapeworm foundry_, shortlisted for the Trillium Prize. Darren is also the author/co-author of five books about technology and culture, including _FREE as in speech and beer_ and _Commonspace: Beyond Virtual Community_. Darren teaches in the school of Communications Studies at York University.

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Generative Writing Exercises

At the California Institute of the Arts, there’s a class you could take about Generative Art.

“Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.”
““ Philip Galanter from What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory

Thanks to the class’ companion website, you can have some fun at home with the list of generative writing exercises, even without being a student. Since most of the exercises were borrowed from Bernadette Mayer, I don’t feel too bad about borrowing them again for inclusion here.

Generative Writing Exercises

1. Pick a story from the newspaper (or a magazine, whatever-usually something from a business or science text is good; the Tuesday Science Times section of The NY Times is particularly useful). Choose 20 words from the story that you have never used in a poem before: try to pick the most interesting words you can, the ones that seem to leap out at you for some reason. Write those words down on a separate sheet of paper (so you’re not looking at the original text anymore””if you want you can burn the original text, using proper fire safety procedures). Write a poem that is 20 lines long. Each line must use one of the words you wrote down from the article, and they must be used in the order in which they appeared in the article.

2. Select a particular time of day when you know you won’t be disturbed for a few minutes: early morning, lunch time, before going to sleep, etc. At that time each day, in a notebook begin writing down whatever happens to be going through your mind. Once you begin writing, don’t stop to think, fix your language, etc. This isn’t a poem, just write about ten lines or more, then put the notebook away. Do this for five days. It’s important not to do this on a computer, but handwritten in a notebook and you should keep the notebook with you, because you probably will find after the first day or so that you feel like doing this more than once a day, when you see something interesting or just have time to kill. On a day when you have a chunk of time to work on a poem, take the notebook and write a poem using only the lines (or parts of them) that you’ve written during these sessions.

3. Think of 50 titles, all of them for poems or short pieces of writing that you have no intention of writing. It’s a good idea to carry a notebook everywhere with you when you do this. Give the list to someone else in the class. Choose a title from the list you’ve received and write a poem.

4. Homolinguistic translation: Take a poem (someone else’s than your own) and translate it “English to English” by substituting word for word, phrase for phrase, line for line, or “free” translation as response to each phrase or sentence.

5. Homophonic translation: Take a text or poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate the sound of the poem into English (Ex: French “˜blanc’ to blank or “˜toute’ to toot).

6. Lexical translation: Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate it word for word with the help of a bilingual dictionary.

7. Acrostic Chance. Pick a book at random and use the title as an acrostic key phrase. For each letter of the key phrase go to the page number in the book that corresponds (a=1, z=26) and copy as the first line of a poem form the first word that begins with that letter to the end of the line or sentence. Continue through all key letters, leaving stanza breaks to mark each new key word. Variations include using author’s name as code for reading through her or his work, using your own or a friend’s name, devise alternative acrostic procedures.

8. Tzara’s hat. Everyone in a group writes down a word (phrase or line) and puts it in a hat. The text is composed according to the order it is randomly pulled from the hat. (On your own, pick words or lines from books, newspapers, magazines, your own work.)

9. Burrough’s Fold-in: Take two different pages from a newspaper or magazine, article or book, and cut the pages in half or thirds vertically. Paste the mismatched pages together.

10. Write a text with words cut somewhere in the middle and recombined with the beginning parts following the ending parts.

11. General cut-ups: Write a text composed entirely of phrases lifted from other sources. Use one source for a poem or other text and then many; try different types of sources: literary, historical, magazines, advertisements, manuals, dictionaries, instructions, travelogues, etc.

12. Cento: write a collage made up of full-lines of selected source poems, or texts.

13. Substitution (1): “Mad libs”. Take a poem (or other source text) and put blanks in place of three or four words in each line, noting the part of speech under the blank. Fill in the blanks being sure not to recall the original context.

14. Substitution (2): “7 up or down”. Take a poem or other, possibly well-known, text and substitute another word for every noun, adjective, adverb, and verb; determine the substitute word by looking up the index work in a dictionary and going 7 up or down, or one more, until you get a syntactically suitable replacement.

15. Substitution (3): “Find and replace”. Systematically replace one word in a source text with another word or string of words. Perform this operation serially with the same source text, increasing the number of words in the replace string.

16. Serial sentences: Select one sentence from a variety of different books or other sources. Add sentences of your own composition. Combine into one paragraph, reordering to produce the most interesting results.

17. Alphabet poems: make up a poem of 26 words so that each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Write another alphabet poem but scramble the letter order.

18. Alliteration (assonance): Write a poem in which all the words in each line begin with the same letter.

19. Doubling: Starting with one sentence, write a series of paragraphs each doubling the number of sentences in the previous paragraph and including all the words used previously.

20. Collaboration: Write a piece with one or more other people: alternating lines (chaining or renga), writing simultaneously and collaging, rewriting, editing, supplementing the previous version. This can be done in person or otherwise.

21. Group sonnet: 14 people each write one ten-word line (or alternate-Write a text trying to transcribe as accurately as you can your thoughts while you are writing. Don’t edit anything out. Write as fast as you can without planning what you are going to say)

22. Dream work: Write down your dreams as the first thing you do every morning for 30 days. Apply translation and aleatoric processes to this material. Double the length of the dream. Weave them together into one poem, adding or changing or reordering the material. Negate or reverse all statements (I went down the hill to I went up the hill, I didn’t to I did). Borrow a friend’s dreams and apply these techniques to them.

23. Write a text made up entirely of neologism or nonsense words or fragments of words.

24. Write a text with each line filling in the blanks of “I used to be —, but now I am —.” (I used to write poems, but now I just do experiments; I used to make sense, but now I just make poems.)

25. Write a text consisting entirely of things you’d like to say, but never would, to a parent, lover, sibling, child, teacher, roommate, best friend, mayor, president, corporate CEO, etc.

26. Write a text consisting entirely of overheard conversation.

27. Nonliterary forms: Write a text in the form of an index, a table of contents, a resume, an advertisement for an imaginary or real product, an instruction manual, a travel guide, a quiz or examination, etc.

28. Imitation: Write a text in the style of each of a dozen poets or writers who you like and dislike: try to make it as close to a forgery of an “unknown” work of the author as possible.

29. Write a text without mentioning any objects.

30. Backwards: Reverse or alter the line sequence of a poem of your own or someone else’s. Reverse the word order. Rather than reverse, scramble.

31. Write an autobiographical poem without using any pronouns.

32. Attention: Write down everything you hear for one hour.

33. Brainerd’s Memory: Write a text all of whose lines start “I remember “¦”

34. “Pits”: Write the worst possible poem you can imagine.

35. Counting: Write poems that conform to various numeric patterns for number of words in a line or sentence, number of lines in a stanza or paragraph, number of stanzas or paragraphs in a work. Alternately, count letters or syllables. Use complex numeric series or simpler fixed-number patterns.

36. Write a text just when you are on the verge of falling asleep. Write a line a day as you are falling asleep or waking up.

37. List poem: Write a text consisting of favorite words or phrases collected over a period of time; pick your favorite words from a particular book.

38. List poem 2: Write a text consisting entirely of a list of “things”, either homogenous or heterogeneous (common lists include shopping lists, things to do, lists of flowers or rocks, lists of colors, inventory lists, lists of events, lists of names, “¦).

39. Chronology: make up a list of dates with associated events, real or imagined.

40. Transcription: Tape a phone or live conversation between yourself and a friend. Make a poem composed entirely of transcribed parts.

41. Canceling: Write a series of lines or rhymes such that every other one cancels the one before (“I come before you / to stand behind you”).

42. Erasure: Take a poem of your own or someone else’s and cross out most of the words on each poem, retype what remains as your poem.

43. Write a series of ten poems going from one to ten words in each poem. Reorder.

44. Write a text composed entirely of questions.

45. Write a text made up entirely of directions.

46. Write a text consisting only of opening lines (improvise your own lines, then use source texts).

47. Write poems consisting of one-word lines; of two-word lines; of three-word lines.

48. Synchronicity: Write a text in which all the events occur simultaneously.

49. Diachronicity: Write a text in which all the events occur in different places and at different times.

50. Visual poetry: write poems with strong visual or “concrete” elements-including combination of lexical and nonlexical (pictorial) elements. Play with alphabets and typography, placement of words on the page, etc.

51. Write a series of poems or stanzas while listening to music; change type of music for each stanza or poem.

52. Elimination: cut out the second half of sentences.

53. Excuses list poem: Write a text made up entirely of excuses.

54. Sprung diary: write a diary tracking and intercutting multiple levels of thoughts, experiences, anticipations, expectations, from minute to major.

55. Make up more writing experiments

Combine any two of these experiments. Rewrite and recombine, collage, splice together the material generated from these experiments into one long ongoing text.

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Illuminated Manuscript

At a show called Documenta 2002 in Kassel, Germany, an unusual kind of electronic book was featured. It was called “The Illuminated Manuscript.” As the author describes the book:

A handbound book is set in a spartan room. Projected typography is virtually printed into the blank pages with a video projector. Sensors embedded in the pages tell the computer as the pages are turned. In addition, sonar sensors allow visitors to run their hands over and to disrupt, combine and manipulate the text on each page. The book begins with an essay on the four freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Each page explores a different text on the topic of freedom.

Of course, it doesn’t take lights and circuits to create an illuminated manscript. The tradition goes way back. For an interesting overview of that tradition, read Concrete Poetry In Analog And Digital Media by Roberton Simanowski.

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The Validity of Experimenal Literature

In 2002, there was a big debate over the validity of experimental literature. It was sparked by an article in the New Yorker, September 30 2002, where “Jonathan Franzen writes about the career of William Gaddis, one of the most imposing modern novelists, and considers the question of whether a novel’s difficulty is related to its quality as literature“. In the online interview that accompanied the article, Franzen raised a few concerns about what he calls “difficult literature”.

As a student, you’re handed Milton or Shakespeare, you’re told that it’s great literature, and you find it difficult to read — at least, at first. If you think of a novel as a contract between the reader and the writer, an agreement to entertain and be entertained, difficulty doesn’t make much sense. But, as soon as you have “important literature,” books with some sort of cultural status, the notion of difficulty sets in.

Once you bring in “Ulysses,” [. . .] it’s now our leading model of a work of great literature. It’s the iconic modern text; it routinely tops lists of the best novels of the twentieth century — which sends this message to the common reader: Literature is horribly hard to read. [. . .] This is fucked up. It’s particularly fucked up in an era when the printed word is fighting other media for its very life.

He draws an important distinction here, between a “contract writer”, whose contract is to meet the reader in an entertaining middle ground; and on the other hand there is the “difficult” literature with a “great” reputation that he says owes more to its difficulty than to its quality.

You could group athletes similarly — wrestlers for example. On one hand, there’s Hulk Hogan, who is under contract to be entertaining, and then there’s an Olympic wrestler, whose “greatness” depends largely on the difficulty of his athletic feats. Franzen makes a fair distinction, in other words. He used a similar athletic comparison himself. The interviewer never asked, but many readers got the impression that Franzen would be more entertained by Hulk Hogan, and he probably couldn’t be bothered to watch the Olympic variety of wrestling. The athletic analogy is wearing thin.

In Defense of “Difficult” Literature

In response to Franzen, Ben Marcus wrote an article in Harper’s, sarcastically titled “Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it“. In this article, Marcus devotes more than a dozen pages to ripping Franzen a new asshole for suggesting that difficult literature isn’t good literature. An article in Slate magazine summarized the argument as “an unnecessary, and disingenuous, attempt to repolarize American literary culture.” (Repolarize? Go to a lit class. Now go to a bookstore. Compare. Note the polarity. It is not a new polarity, and the argument here is just another episode in an ongoing epic.) Anyway, Slate’s Jess Rowe sums the whole argument up very well.

It would be one thing if the literary world really did comprise omnipotent insiders and destitute outsiders, arrogant avant-gardists and thoughtful Contract novelists. But Marcus and Franzen are both shadowboxing around a more complicated truth: that the modernist credo — “To Make It New” — is part of every contemporary novelist’s DNA, as is a certain degree of ambivalence about the gravitational pull of narrative toward certain well-established forms. We need a vocabulary that can explain a novel like Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, which at times feels deeply archaic and yet unfamiliar, rewarding the reader’s expectations on one level and frustrating them on another. Resorting to terms as all-encompassing and diluted as “realist” and “experimental” isn’t furthering the debate.

Rowe must mean by “repolarize” that there’s an additional polarity here, not that an existing polarity has been rehashed. First, we have the dichotomy between “difficult” and “digestible”literature. That’s the dichotomy that concerns Franzen. Then, we have the dichotomy between “realist” and “experimental” literature. It has been pointed out, fairly so, that this isn’t really much of a dichotomy at all. An experimental form of literature can still depict reality, albeit in novel ways. The electronic book review describes the argument in familiar terms, as being between “mainstream” and “alternative”.

More importantly, The Electronic Book Review enters the debate with a focus on the experimental literature itself, with an eye toward the merits thereof (finally). Where Ben Marcus’ argument is mostly a personal attack, it’s refreshing to see a more objective approach to the argument. There is even some discussion of compromise in “Notes from the Middleground“.

The pedagogical task, then, is not so much to convert one side to other, which would prove equally frustrating and useless, but [. . .] to transcend the limiting strictures of the debate. There is always a cell of students who become more interested in the functioning of language over character, of structure over story, during the progress of these sessions; yet, as Franzen observes, Gertrude Stein is simply not accessible for many readers – no matter how engaged with her composition-as-process they might become. [. . .] How to argue away the distinction between a faux-elite/populist constriction – as an aesthetic issue – when the reader who desperately wants to be sympathetic knows, with post-ironic savvy, that these distinctions are primarily economic. . .

At the end of the day, perhaps the debate does come down to economics: some people try to sell books that everybody likes, while other try to get everybody to like the books that they sell. On the other hand, there really is an aesthetic difference between these two types of literature, just as there is between abstract expressionism and neoclassicism.

It is unfortunate that there doesn’t seem to be an appropriate vocabulary for discussing or comparing the differences in the literature, the way there is for discussing the art. In the visual arts, the various styles seem to enjoy a more peaceful cohabitation. With the literary arts, there’s a lot of bickering.