DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

The Powers of Horror (Kristeva 1980)

dagseoul:

My personal favorite Kristeva. Great work on Lacan’s objet petit a, the object of desire. Whereas the object permits the creation of a symbolic order, the abject (death, shit, sewage, skin, vomit, et al.) is “radically excluded” and brings us to a place where meaning collapses, where the distinction between subject and object or between self and other breaks down.

I’ve always wanted to take this reading and the subsequent work done with it, say Kristeva through Zizek and other later Lacanians, and apply it to poetics, and to mix traditions. It seems the Germans, via Holderlin, have an answer to this via poetry and poetics, in a way the French don’t. I don’t know how to put it because I’ve never spent time with it more than to quickly ponder it.

We’ve also got theater and the novel as primary examples where protagonists experience the loss of meaning when confronted with the abject. It’s a predominant mode in high modern works of drama and fiction. It becomes a method to experience the difference between subject and object, or to call forth that experience in viewers and readers. It certainly works in cinema. Poetry on the other hand demarcates such difference qua poetry without the need to worry about a collapse between distinctions and the loss of meaning, and poetry dwells in its demarcations, that liminal space, the margins, so to speak.

what I’m actually working on, P.

The Powers of Horror (Kristeva 1980)

My personal favorite Kristeva. Great work on Lacan’s objet petit a, the object of desire. Whereas the object permits the creation of a symbolic order, the abject (death, shit, sewage, skin, vomit, et al.) is “radically excluded” and brings us to a place where meaning collapses, where the distinction between subject and object or between self and other breaks down.

I’ve always wanted to take this reading and the subsequent work done with it, say Kristeva through Zizek and other later Lacanians, and apply it to poetics, and to mix traditions. It seems the Germans, via Holderlin, have an answer to this via poetry and poetics, in a way the French don’t. I don’t know how to put it because I’ve never spent time with it more than to quickly ponder it.

We’ve also got theater and the novel as primary examples where protagonists experience the loss of meaning when confronted with the abject. It’s a predominant mode in high modern works of drama and fiction. It becomes a method to experience the difference between subject and object, or to call forth that experience in viewers and readers. It certainly works in cinema. Poetry on the other hand demarcates such difference qua poetry without the need to worry about a collapse between distinctions and the loss of meaning, and poetry dwells in its demarcations, that liminal space, the margins, so to speak.

"For the mo­ment, for the writer, the poem is a mind."

Lyn Hejinian 

For me, and no offense intended, but this is a rather trite expression from an otherwise amazing essay. “The Rejection of Closure” is a wonderful essay packed with instruction and method that this line, in its frank openness, ignores. And it’s one of those lines about verse that get passed around as if it means something out of context and without Hejinian’s detailed and disciplined practice in poetics. 

Often apotheoses can leave us with rather pointless but nevertheless beautiful lines like this. Afterglow. Afterthought. 

All the important stuff comes before and after this line. For example:

Repetition, conventionally used to unify a text or harmonize its parts, as if returning melody to the tonic, instead, in these works, and somewhat differently in a work like my My Life, chal­lenges our inclination to isolate, identify, and limit the burden of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line). Here, where cer­tain phrases recur in the work, recontextualized and with new em­phasis, repetition disrupts the initial apparent meaning scheme. The initial reading is adjusted; meaning is set in motion, emended and extended, and the rewriting that repetition becomes postpones completion of the thought indefinitely.

But there are more complex forms of juxtaposition. My intention (I don’t mean to suggest that I succeeded) in a subsequent work, “Resistance,” was to write a lyric poem in a long form—that is, to achieve maximum vertical intensity (the single moment into which the idea rushes) and maximum horizontal extensivity (ideas cross the landscape and become the horizon and weather).(6) To myself I proposed the paragraph as a unit representing a single moment of time, a single moment in the mind, its content all the thoughts, thought particles, impressions, impulses—all the di­verse, particular, and contradictory elements—that are included in an active and emotional mind at any given instant. For the mo­ment, for the writer, the poem is a mind.

(Source: daysofchad, via heteroglossia)

"

17

The roots of words
Dim in the subways

There is madness in the number
Of the living
‘A state of matter’

There is nobody here but us chickens

Anti-ontology—

He wants to say
His life is real,
No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public
Of rootless speech

George Oppen Of Being Numerous (via dagseoul)

"

17

The roots of words
Dim in the subways

There is madness in the number
Of the living
‘A state of matter’

There is nobody here but us chickens

Anti-ontology—

He wants to say
His life is real,
No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public
Of rootless speech

George Oppen Of Being Numerous

ebookcollective:

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Formats Available

.PDF

“To great writers,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years—“the theater,” as Benjamin called it, “of all my struggles and all my ideas.”

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism—Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as “Fashion,” “Boredom,” “Dream City,” “Photography,” “Catacombs,” “Advertising,” “Prostitution,” “Baudelaire,” and “Theory of Progress.” His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things—a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed “true history” that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by “progress,” Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

—Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Translated from the German Edition by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

Note to Self: I believe this is what is most commonly referred to as “striking the motherload.”

hellz bellz i’m going to have a good time with this. my copy has been in a box for five years.

(via deactiavtedhookedonsemiotics)

from The Book Of A Thousand Eyes - Lyn Hejinian

hookedonsemiotics:

Some people insist on exercising the sincerity of their intentions
No sunglasses
I cannot produce any more posterity than my grandparents could and
      they will not begin to understand
In the course of a beautiful allegory a coursing god kills a child
Children return but only if their deaths are individually acknowledged
Deaths occur in a milieu without laws or so we think, finding them
      scattered unequally throughout the world
We have never yet remained all the way through the sequence of
      vignettes that’s said to be their original
One death alone is enough to turn one’s brain—we twist our imagination
      to the maximum 
We are forced to cry stop but like a horse with a cart the imagination
      trots on 

(via deactiavtedhookedonsemiotics)

ghostorballoon:

hookedonsemiotics:

poetsorg:

Happy B-day to Academy Chancellor Lyn Hejinian!

IT’S LYN HEJINIAN’S BIRTHDAY SO YOU SHOULD DO SOME READING

She worked on this recently and you should read it, especially “Sun and Necessity” and the Editors’ Statement and “Necessity/Immensity”

then go here and read all her stuff (if you’re lazy, you should focus on “The Guard” which is my favorite, but “Gesualdo,”  “A Mask of Motion”, “Redo,” “A Thought Is The Bride of What Thinking”, and “Writing Is An Aid to Memory” are also all very good and come highly recommended)

then go buy her new book The Book Of A Thousand Eyes and while you’re at it The Fatalist and Saga/Circus and if you’re feeling really ambitious My Life and A Border Comedy (which is the densest but also a personal favorite in terms of how it engages with critical theory)

then write some poetry of your own dammit

I thought you didn’t like My Life. Anyway, I like it more than I did before, partially because in My Emily Dickinson Howe keeps referring to “My life had stood a loaded gun…” as “My Life” and so now I think everything good about that poem also applies to Hejinian’s book. 

Edit: Oh yeah, and Lyn Hejinian owns.

I love Happily.

(via ghostorballoons)

dagReading: Nick Piombino’s Theoretical Objects (Green Integer, 1999)

No. Your poetry is awful.

some lists stitched together

Our leaves of grass can never surpass platonic tradition alone.
 
(((You!((
 
                      Empty signifiers, cocks and cock suckers,
                                   defining taste rather than tasting,
                                   stroking a long rigid dialect
                                   meaning for imagination,
                                   consuming,
                                   giving rather than
                                   learning to give,

)or(

                     Empty signifiers, cocks and cock suckers,
                                   defining taste rather than tasting,
                                   stroking a long rigid dialect
                                   meaning for imagination,
                                   giving rather than
                                   learning to give,
                                   consuming,

))and(

                    You will fade arbitrarily so out-

                    standing perpetually.

                    A spectacle.
                    A thing that subtracts.

))and((

                    Maya Deren, at land, extravagant

)or(

                    Allen Ginsberg half-naked, snapping cymbals, singing 
mantras, fondling heads
                    and lettuce          pushing some thing on us          and 
his generation          dead
                    now.

)or(

                    A photo of A and PO on my desk submits not wholly to my 
critiqueó
                    smoke and            black and white              horned 
rimmed glasses

)or(

                    a sinister nostalgia for a time I never spent but can 
afford.

)))&((((

                     If modernity is a movement between presence and absence,
                     then a post time is a whip for cynical earnestness.
                     She moves, our Gertrude, for an academic Hamlet,
                     something to hold false images towards

                     to mirror our erections.

)or(

                    Think for one instant only and only all time
                    about those towers we built and our forests undone.
                                   A wilting-shriveled remonstrance
                                   from an ideal corner of thought.
                                   Maybe modernity's false appeal to thought
                                   a grotesque cogito out-reaching,
                                   I think therefore I can undo,
                                   should be read not be or never am.

))and((

                     I ran outside in my boxers
                     painted: I was not here!

and

                     In Lombardia a Milanese
                     sprayed on a Rinascente wall: STO MALE!

)or(

                    In our contemporary being eksists a word,
                    between you and me endures an attendance,
                                   the housewife
                                   the tree between
                                   the poet in the car
                                   the voyeur
                                   the snowman         
                                   the moment to be,
                                   the day to come,
                                   the proper cliché,
                                   the faked orgasm.

)or(

                    a fancied image not the thing itself
                    some B between
                    my A, your C.

)))and(

                    aren't we a fortunate joke? a punch line tossed out
                    with reflective acuity
                    at just the right moment
                    into an empty room.
 
))))

(2004)

시 (이창동 2010)

Monody for the King of the Cadillac Queens of Welfare (12/14/2005)

this is what i’m doing today. revising revising revising. working on the MS.

see you tomorrow or the next day. you should be doing more of this, too. like socrates before he drank the hemlock: just in case, it’s important. or something.

dagseoul:

Who sings for the man? They listen. Who sings?

They, re-enforced 
	
	us 	 and 
	them, will forget what 
	he      said about
	my     family and neighbors 
	our    mothers fathers students 
	our

        Multiplicity.

                                                   His cracks chuck rain from both 
                                                   an omen forward-looking
                                                   response back-clapping) whirling 
                                                   clouds   over    eight-year-old's 
                                                   Tulsa, over thirty-three year-old's 
                                                   somewhere, out there
	
	points
                    
	Planes

moves to	(o)	ward the other		gone     

        pulls.

                                                   Or, rubs east into west.  Rubs IT 
                                                   in cracked skin: tarped, a cover.
                                                   Our games began, settled, name-
                                                   calling just the same
                                                   to fist-tackling punches, smears, 
                                                   dirt-clod tossing twice
                                                   a stabbed knee-cap once.

        Accountancy.

Poor kids earn nothing 
more than their parents
	inherit ) a 
	campy father-figure ) a 
	patriot dropping dope 
	floating signifiers:

        Mothers cry
        Sons die
        Daughters try
        Fathers sky

A Spielberg housewife faints because her son dies
A daughter cries because she slaps her father, 

       falls apart 

       when 

                                                  one afternoon four teams hid in a ditch 
                                                  Arkansas-side from lightning, 
                                                  too-heavy falling clouds, weight
                                                  of rolling, a shame 
                                                  all that westward expansion,
                                                  manifest destiny.
                                                  Game was called.)

       Working dad
 
disappears into obscured Hopper horizons.
Got it.  Always with Dreyfuss, 1989.  Big R flies, leaves 
his touch, a legacy, Spielberg returns to war and fighting sons.
Dads take more modifying.  

					Maybe a story: 

                                                  my dad took us cruising post 
                                                  flash floods and tornados,
                                                  chased green pea skies or red
                                                  bean clouds—Arkansas thick 
                                                  with nothing, a sore gash cut 
                                                  through ever-pulled southward
                                                  plains to low Oklahoma, a red 
                                                  river before Texas, or thick 
                                                  with dirty bean water like to dry 
                                                  into cement to fill my mouth 
                                                  with anti-words my mother gave 
                                                  me to sing.  OK, so it was in a 
                                                  station wagon bought new but 
                                                  beat bad before it was used, 
                                                  before the children claimed it, 
                                                  before we drove it:

                                                  I hung unto the roof rack tight 
                                                  while you drove mad into the 
                                                  Division.

Counting.

We ate free cheese yellow milk culture.
We took WIC vouchers.
We rationed food stamps.
We wore used protestant clothes.

He was a terrible actor.
He hated his last film, his best film.
He authored an Austrian ascendency.

                                                  Broken-Arrow-bound in a lo-
                                                  riding cadillac, shaved 
                                                  legs all girly-soft, comfort-top, 
                                                  secret-scent, racing-
                                                  river, bankside blind-calling for 
                                                  the mean rains to drown
                                                  our low-neighbors in their (not 
                                                  quite) middle-class snoring
                                                            —politely submit
                                                  "aspirations"— working or not, 
                                                  his memories contra our
                                                  memories.

All the hateful politics 
his everyman muscle squeezed, suckled 
from the His Democrat, nourished via a slow trickle 
	along a flaccid sac. 

Casket-side they weep for the mother 
he isn't of bringing us all together.

                         Her absence absent: A president
                                        turned inside out

                                                   Dangles.

                         His presence present: A precedent
                                        stuck into history

                                                    Rots.

                                                    The bird I found in our planter 
                                                    not old enough to fly. 
                              
                                                    Dead, too.  Self-thrown from its
                                                    nest, bootstraps and all. 

                                                    Gnats, sticky over-grown flies, 
                                                    slowly eat wing meat.

                                                    The bird I found spread eagle
                                                    beneath

                                                                 Black-eyed Susans.

Reading The Cantos

I like reading Pound’s Cantos without worrying about knowing the facts behind the narrative. I try to convince myself the story he is telling is less important than the images and sounds the verse evokes. It’s hard for a reader to behave this way. What occurs when I read the cantos in this manner? I’m confronted with a significant tension between my desire to interpret meaning for myself and a sense that I’m supposed to know what Pound’s writing about. The former is concerned with the verse and permits me to actively listen the latter with my oppressive education that taught me that to understand a text I must know what the author knows. The former permits me to focus on the poetry and possibly the poetics, if I choose to, while the latter requires me to leave the poetry behind for other literary objects and other authority.

I try to teach myself to disobey the other authority and to remain faithful to the poetry.

I think the story Pound tells and the authority it insists I seek can be referred to as the fiction in the verse. It requires a different kind of reading than poetry asks for.