ON2-Final-PDF-Dluw.Pdf
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
ON 2 © 2009 ON: CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE. All rights reserved. ON is a poetics journal commied to contemporary practices in the arts. ON does not publish book reviews, individual poems, chapbooks, performances, etc. ON is facilitated, not edited. Please read our contributor guidelines online at www. cuneiformpress.com or write [email protected]. Distributed by: Published by: Small Press Distribution Cuneiform Press 1341 Seventh Street University of Houston‑Victoria Berkeley, California 94710‑1409 3007 North Ben Wilson Tel. (800) 869‑7553 Victoria, Texas 77901 www.spdbooks.org www.cuneiformpress.com ON: CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE MICHAEL CROSS, THOM DONOVAN, & KYLE SCHLESINGER ON ON: CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE 7 ROSA ALCALÁ ON MÓNICA TORRE 9 STAN APPS ON STEPHANIE YOUNG 13 CARA BENSON ON SUSANA GARDNER 19 DAVID BRAZIL ON BRANDON BROWN 23 LAYNIE BROWNE ON LEE ANN BROWN 27 CACONRAD & BRENDA IIJIMA ON THE POETICS OF DIRT 33 CORINA COPP ON RODRIGO TOSCANO & POETS THEATER 41 MICHAEL CROSS ON JUDITH GOLDMAN & JENNIFER SCAPPETTONE 45 ROBBIE DEWHURST ON DOROTHEA LASKY 51 THOM DONOVAN ON BHANU KAPIL 55 PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN ON EDMUND BERRIGAN, JEFF KARL BUTLER & JOHN COLETTI 63 JOEL FELIX ON WILLIAM FULLER 65 ROBERT KOCIK ON STACY SZYMASZEK 75 CHRIS MARTIN ON JOHN COLETTI 79 C.J. MARTIN ON ROB HALPERN 81 LAURA MORIARTY ON CONCEPTUALISMS 91 RICH OWENS ON FLARF, CONCEPTUALISM, & C. 103 EVELYN REILLY ON ROSMARIE WALDROP 115 MICHELLE TARANSKY ON STACY SZYMASZEK 123 DAN THOMAS‑GLASS ON JASPER BERNES & BAY AREA PUBLISHING 125 ROBIN TREMBLAY‑MiGAW ON JOCELYN SAIDENBERG 129 BRIAN WHITENER ON DOLORES DORANTES 135 TYRONE WILLIAMS ON ERICA HUNT 145 CONTRIBUTORS 155 FROM CENTER TO MARGIN MICHAEL CROSS, THOM DONOVAN, & KYLE SCHLESINGER It’s intriguing to track how margins respond to centers, and that at the centers of po‑ etry discourse one oen finds the accelerated erosion of the United States as a viable model for democratic multitude. If this drastic erosion is an epicenter for our cultural dilemma, how can we measure repercussion adequately? The M.F.A. (from which many of us derive some sustenance, if only in the form of adjunct wages), the con‑ test/residency/guest appointment, the academic proceduralism of the Ph.D., job/ten‑ ure search, etc., the bureaucratic function of state and national poetry laureates: the professionalization of poetry embodies a form of cynicism that has become, as Paolo Virno argues, a discernible expression of multitude in our contemporary geopolitical climate. In lieu of this analogy between political‑economic disaster and poetry as a force of culture, ON: Contemporary Practice serves as a space for dialogue, discourse, and the emergence of new cultural expressions, if not a space for the acknowledgement of unrecognized subjects. On the outskirts of culture, we believe poets offer one of the most vital and exciting discourses among a larger landscape of visual artists, academ‑ ics, activists, and public intellectuals (those typically responsible for shedding light on current cultural phenomena and showing their stakes). How to extend poetry through our work as teachers, activists, culture workers, and responsible human be‑ ings? How, likewise, can poetry put multiple cultural realms in relation with works which may affect larger political, economic, and social spheres? Transmissibility and critical conversation are of the utmost importance to grounding an activist function of poetry, a function not so much for a people (in the Hobbesian sense), but for a multitude which is always arriving but has yet to realize its vari‑ ous potential libratory manifestations. How can the magazine (and other cultural spaces) create a new “common sense?” How can what was otherwise submerged, suppressed, or invisible have the opportunity to emerge so that we might read and address it? How, what’s more, can we observe a present while it is still occurring; that is, before it has ossified into events consigned to a representative past (so‑called ‘historical narration’). Critical writings about one’s contemporaries should not be consigned to the back pages of magazines and journals of record; nor should we approach them without a sense of consequence (a cynicism which book reviews, blurbs, and other staid criti‑ cal formats oen inspire). As an apocalyptic despondency increasingly befalls our culture, it seems all the more important that poets act out of a sense of consequence, compassion, and conspiracy (breathing together). Why speak otherwise? Who are EDITORS 7 your most cherished and important contemporaries? Why does their work maer to you and how may it touch others? How can the poem upset, transcend, or overcome the sequestering of poetry from larger cultural exchanges also consequential for the fate of multitude? How to bring the community dynamics and tools of poetry across cultural fields to other problematics, emergencies, sites of need (to “outsource” poetry as Robert Kocik says)? ON, as the inflection of an idea shared by other magazines, institutions, cultural locations, and singularities would like to create a possible world. This world starts, for many of us, by writing about one another’s work as if to find purchase for what we most believe and will therefore tend to do. 8 ON CLICK HERE IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR MONICA DELATORRE MÓNICA DE LA TORRE’S PUBLIC DOMAIN ROSA ALCALÁ “Sorry, but more than one, it is always necessary to be more than one in order to speak, several voices are necessary for that…” (Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom) Admit it. You Google yourself. What are you looking for? A mention on someone’s blog? Some type of recognition that you exist beyond the confines of your office? What are you avoiding? Grading papers? Facing your fears? Whatever the mundane and existential reasons that lead us to search for our selves, our names are the vehicle. They are the extension of our bodies in the world, how others know us, our origins and on‑going documentation. Yet, how many share our names? The young woman murdered by her husband in California? The track star? Their existence both discon‑ certs and intrigues us; they are nothing like us, yet we feel connected to them in some way. The last poem in Mónica de la Torre’s Public Domain, “Doubles,” explores this very issue: the problem of expectations surrounding who we are; our connections and disconnections with others who might be like us. She achieves this by following the correspondence of an Argentine woman raised in Spain, Mercedes Correche, who searches on the internet for her mother, “Mónica de la Torre.” Her mother, Correche explains, returned to Argentina from Spain when Mercedes was two and disappeared aer being accused by the Argentine government of subversive activities. The series of email exchanges, all with the subject line “abandoned,” are between Correche and various people named Mónica de la Torre, all who turn out not to be her mother— from a “transsexual top model” in Veracruz, México, whose English is, by her own estimation, “no good,” to a high school cheerleader in the U.S. who gets bad grades in Spanish class. The email exchanges between Correche and these de la Torres become like split screens of miscommunication in an Almodóvar film. While all the Mónica de la Torres have some relation to Spanish‑speaking cultures, their overt demographic differences exemplify how a name might stand for certain false expectations of, or sense of unity amongst, those with the same designation. It reminds us of Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, in which she writes, We saw an electric sign moving around a building and it said Gertrude Stein has come and that was upseing. Anybody saying how do you do to you and know‑ ing your name may be upseing but on the whole it is natural enough but to sud‑ denly see your name is always upseing. Of course it has happened to me prey oen and I like it to happen just as oen but always it does give me a lile shock ALCALÁ 9 of recognition and non‑recognition. It is one of the things most worrying in the subject of identity (qtd. in Spahr, 36). What Stein comes to realize, Juliana Spahr explains, is that “naming, the thing that she once thought defined a person, [is] flexible and variable” (37). Similarly, what worries “Doubles,” is how the presumed identity of “Mónica de la Torre” shis from one person to the other, yet each person with that common Span‑ ish‑sounding name is trapped by what others expect of them. “I am sick,” writes one of the de la Torres, “of receiving sales calls and junk mail in Spanish! If your last name is Hungarian does that mean that AT&T will send you Hungarian promotional material?” Another stateside de la Torre, revealing her own limited notions of Ar‑ gentine culture shaped by American marketing, says to Mercedes, “I love dulce de leche Hagen Daas ice cream, isn’t it from the same place as you?” We ask, too, what is expected of a poet with a Spanish‑sounding name like Mónica de la Torre? What do we expect of someone from the U.S. with that name, or from Latin America, or Spain? What assumptions do we make? How does marketing (of frozen desserts, of litera‑ ture, of cultures) shape those assumptions? Also important to note is that some of the characters Correche corresponds with are “Mónicas,” while others are “Monicas.” This small, yet acute, accent doesn’t just indicate a different set of vowel sounds or the trilled “rr” of Torre, it designates a cleave, a crack, separating them. Still, their desire and ability to communicate in both languages via the internet, to find common ground, also suggests a relationship that persists despite the fact that none of these women are Mercedes Correche’s genetic kin, despite their dissimilarities.