Style and the Experiment: the Coherence of Experimental Writing
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Bernadette Mayer - Poems
Classic Poetry Series Bernadette Mayer - poems - Publication Date: 2012 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Bernadette Mayer(12 May 1945 -) An avant-garde writer associated with the New York School of poets, Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has spent most of her life in New York City. Her collections of poetry include Midwinter Day (1982, 1999), A Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), Another Smashed Pinecone (1998), and Poetry State Forest (2008). Known for her innovative use of language, Mayer first won critical acclaim for the exhibit Memory, which combined photography and narration. Mayer took one roll of film shot each day during July 1971, arranging the photographs and text in what Village Voice critic A.D. Coleman described as “a unique and deeply exciting document.” Mayer’s poetry often challenges poetic conventions by experimenting with form and stream-of-consciousness; readers have compared her to Gertrude Stein, Dadaist writers, and James Joyce. Poet Fanny Howe commented in the American Poetry Review on Midwinter Day, a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts: “In a language made up of idiom and lyricism, Mayer cancels the boundaries between prose and poetry, . Her search for patterns woven out of small actions confirms the notion that seeing what is is a radical human gesture.” The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters consists of prose poems Mayer wrote during her third pregnancy. She also combined poetry and prose in Proper Name and Other Stories (1996). -
The Internet As Playground and Factory November 12–14, 2009 at the New School, New York City
FIRST IN A SERIES OF BIENNIAL CONFERENCES ABOUT THE POLITICS OF DIGITAL MEDIA THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY NOVEMBER 12–14, 2009 AT THE NEW SCHOOL, NEW YORK CITY www.digitallabor.org The conference is sponsored by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and presented in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, Yale Information Society Project, 16 Beaver Group, The New School for Social Research, The Change You Want To See, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York University’s Council for Media and Culture, and n+1 Magazine. Acknowledgements General Event Support Lula Brown, Alison Campbell, Alex Cline, Conference Director Patrick Fannon, Keith Higgons, Geoff Trebor Scholz Kim, Ellen-Maria Leijonhufvud, Stephanie Lotshaw, Brie Manakul, Lindsey Medeiros, Executive Conference Production Farah Momin, Heather Potts, Katharine Trebor Scholz, Larry Jackson Relth, Jesse Ricke, Joumana Seikaly, Ndelea Simama, Andre Singleton, Lisa Conference Production Taber, Yamberlie Tavarez, Brandon Tonner- Deepthie Welaratna, Farah Momin, Connolly, Jolita Valakaite, Cynthia Wang, Julia P. Carrillo Deepthi Welaratna, Tatiana Zwerling Production of Video Series Voices from Registration Staff The Internet as Playground and Factory Alison Campbell, Alex Cline, Keith Higgons, Assal Ghawami Geoff Kim, Stephanie Lotshaw, Brie Manakul, Overture Video Lindsey Medeiros, Heather Potts, Jesse Assal Ghawami Ricke, Joumana Seikaly, Andre Singleton, Deepthi Welaratna, Tatiana Zwerling Video -
Defamiliarization: Flarf, Conceptual Writing, and Using Flawed Software Tools As Creative Partners Richard P. Gabriel*
Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal, Vol.4, No.2. 134 Defamiliarization: Flarf, conceptual writing, and using flawed software tools as creative partners Richard P. Gabriel* IBM Research 3636 Altamont Way, Redwood City CA 94062, USA E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] *Corresponding author Abstract: One form of creativity uses defamiliarization, a mechanism that frees the brain from its rational shackles and permits the abducing brain to run free. Mistakes and flaws in several software tools are shown to be the starting points for increased creativity and better art, and a theory explaining the phenomenon is proposed. Keywords: Writing; Poetry; Creativity; Flarf Biographical notes: Richard P. Gabriel received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 1998. He has been a researcher at Stanford University, company president and Chief Technical Officer at Lucid, Inc., vice president of Development at ParcPlace-Digitalk, a management consultant for several startups, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is an ACM Fellow. He is a researcher at IBM Research, looking into the architecture, design, and implementation of extraordinarily large, self-sustaining systems as well as development techniques for building them. Until recently he was President of the Hillside Group, a nonprofit that nurtures the software patterns community by holding conferences, publishing books, -
Rereading Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day and Lyn Hejinian's
WOMEN'S STUDIES 2017, VOL. 46, NO. 6, 525–540 https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2017.1356301 Experimental Poetry from the Disputed Territory: Rereading Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life Lucy Biederman Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland When asked, at the start of a 2011 interview for the Poetry Foundation, whether she was born in Brooklyn or Queens, the poet Bernadette Mayer gives a neither/both answer. “The Disputed Territory,” she says, “Brooklyn/ Queens, New York,” adding, “I’m honored to be part of the Disputed Territory.” Perhaps Mayer’s early geographical designation—or non- designation—influenced her later attitude toward poetic allegiances and groupings. In anthologies and critical studies, Mayer has been variously placed with New York School, Language, and conceptual writers, a variety that in itself suggests the unclassifiable nature of her work.1 Mayer conveys something of the discomfort with which she approaches poetic classification when, later in the same interview, she answers an inquiry about Language poetry: “I like it now that they—I shouldn’t say ‘they’—that they’ve developed a sense of humor. For a long time it was in abeyance; now it’s back—well, I don’t think it ever existed, but now it does” (Interview). That cryptic response, jammed with strong proclamations quickly half-retracted, is char- acteristic of Mayer. Writing on this moment elsewhere, I have noted that Mayer’s “self-admonishing ‘I shouldn’t say “they”’ is followed almost imme- diately—and humorously—by another ‘they’” (Biederman). Had she not mentioned her origins in the Disputed Territory, one might know that Mayer was a native, anyway, by how skillfully she eludes apprehension (Biederman). -
Conceptualisms, Old and New Marjorie Perloff Before Conceptual Art Became Prominent in the Late 1960S, There Was Already, So
Conceptualisms, Old and New Marjorie Perloff Before conceptual art became prominent in the late 1960s, there was already, so Craig Dworkin has suggested in his “Anthology of Conceptual Writing” for Ubu Web (http://www.ubu.com/), a form of writing identifiable as conceptual poetry, although that term was not normally used to discuss the chance-generated texts of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low or the “word events” of George Brecht and La Monte Young. In his Introduction to the Ubu Web anthology, Dworkin makes an interesting case for a “non- expressive poetry,” “a poetry of intellect rather than emotion,” in which “the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with [Wordsworth’s] ‘spontaneous overflow [ of powerful feelings]’ supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process.” The first poet in Dworkin’s alphabetically arranged anthology of conceptual writing is Vito Acconci, whose early “poetry,” most of it previously unpublished, has now been edited and assembled, again by Dworkin for a hefty (411-page) volume called Language to Cover a Page, published in MIT Press’s Writing Art Series (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). I place poetry in quotes here because, strictly speaking, Acconci’s word texts —constraint-based lists, dictionary games, performance scores, or parodic translations-- are not so much poems as they are, in the Wittgensteinian sense, complex language games, in which the page has not yet been replaced by the video screen, the tape length, or the gallery space. Indeed, as Dworkin argues in an earlier piece on Acconci for October (95 [Winter 2001], pp. -
Transatlantica, 1 | 2019 Interview of Alice Notley 2
Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal 1 | 2019 Gone With the Wind after Gone With the Wind Interview of Alice Notley David Reckford Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/13862 DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.13862 ISSN: 1765-2766 Publisher Association française d'Etudes Américaines (AFEA) Electronic reference David Reckford, “Interview of Alice Notley”, Transatlantica [Online], 1 | 2019, Online since 01 June 2020, connection on 04 May 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/13862 ; DOI: https:// doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.13862 This text was automatically generated on 4 May 2021. Transatlantica – Revue d'études américaines est mise à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. Interview of Alice Notley 1 Interview of Alice Notley David Reckford AUTHOR'S NOTE This interview took place in Alice Notley’s apartment in Paris, in June 2018. 1 Alice Notley is a major American poet of our day, who has been living in Paris since the early 1990s, when she moved there with her second husband, the English poet, Doug Oliver (1937-2000), because Paris was where his professorial career was taking him. At that point Alice Notley was finding New York less amenable and was keen to go somewhere else. When he died in 2000, Alice Notley was sufficiently settled into Paris to remain there. 2 Although she is a Parisian now, Alice Notley was also a key figure on the Lower Manhattan poetry scene particularly of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Her first husband, Ted Berrigan, was an equally charismatic figure among an influential group of downtown poets. -
Laynie Browne Laynie Please Bernadette
Laynie Browne a ConCeptuaL assemBLage an introduCtion To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. - Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V Scene I, Prospero Looking for a title for this collection I turned first to the work of Bernadette Mayer, and found in her collection, The Desires of Mothers to 0: Introduction Please Others in Letters, the title “I’ll Drown My Book.” The process of opening Mayer to find Shakespeare reframed seems particularly fitting in the sense that conceptual writing often involves a recasting of the familiar and the found. In Mayer’s hands, the phrase “I’ll Drown My Book” becomes an unthinkable yet necessary act. This combination of BROWNE BROWNE unthinkable, or illogical, and necessary, or obligatory, also speaks to ways that the writers in this collection seek to unhinge and re-examine previous assumptions about writing. Thinking and performance are not separate from process and presentation of works. If a book breathes it 14 can also drown, and in the act of drowning is a willful attempt to create a book which can awake the unexpected—not for the sake of surprise, but because the undertaking was necessary for the writer in order to uproot, dismantle, reforge, remap or find new vantages and entrances to well trodden or well guarded territory. My contemporaries for the most part have often been distinguished by their lack of camps, categories, or movements. -
Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment, Conceptual Writing and the Subject
Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment, Conceptual Writing and the Subject-of-No- Subjectivity: "Pink Faeries and Gaudy Baubles" Dr Isabel Waidner (University of Roehampton, UK) Keywords Xenotext Experiment; conceptual writing; feminist science and technology studies; subject-of- no-subjectivity; avant-garde poetics Abstract Despite the wide impact of transdisciplinary scholarship that has theorised the interconnectedness of literature and science not least within the pages of this journal1, this article argues that the Canadian poet Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment2 (and conceptual writing in general) reproduces historical epistemologies (including positivism and relativism) 1 Melissa Littlefield and Rajani Sudan, "Editorial Statement", Configurations, 20:3 (2012): pp. 209–212. 2 Christian Bök, "The Xenotext Experiment", SCRIPT-Ed 5:2 (2008): pp. 227-231. 1 that rely on the presumption of disciplinary autonomy. In the sciences, these epistemologies are connected to sociocultural and economic power, extreme resistance to criticality, and the production of normative subject and object positions (including what I term the subject-of-no- subjectivity on the one hand; and the passive, inert object of scientific positivism on the other). The article explores the implications, problems, and affordances of reproducing historical epistemologies in conceptual writing. The key argument is that the reproduction of historical epistemologies in the disciplinary context of literature yields avant-garde credentials, marginalising often content-led experimental -
Reconceiving the Actual in Digital Art and Poetry
humanities Article Code and Substrate: Reconceiving the Actual in Digital Art and Poetry Burt Kimmelman Department of Humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA; [email protected] Received: 12 December 2016; Accepted: 5 July 2017; Published: 14 July 2017 Abstract: The quality of digital poetry or art—not merely as contained within our aesthetic reaction to digitally expressive works but as well our intellectual grounding in them—suggests that the digital’s seemingly ephemeral character is an indication of its lack of an apparently material existence. While, aesthetically, the digital’s ephemerality lies in the very fact of the digitally artistic enterprise, the fact is that its material substrate is what makes the aesthetic pleasure we take in it possible. When we realize for ourselves the role played by this substrate, furthermore, a paradox looms up before us. The fact is that we both enjoy, and in some sense separately understand the artwork comprehensively and fully; we also allow ourselves to enter into an ongoing conversation about the nature of the physical world. This conversation is not insignificant for the world of art especially, inasmuch as art depends upon the actual materials of the world—even digital art—and, too, upon our physical engagement with the art. Digital poetry and art, whose dynamic demands the dissolution of the line that would otherwise distinguish one from the other, have brought the notion of embodiment to the fore of our considerations of them, and here is the charm, along with the paradoxical strength, of digital art and poetry: it is our physical participation in them that makes them fully come into being. -
Part of His History 1944-2020 by Steve Clay Originally Published in the Brooklyn Rail Dec 20 – Jan 21, 2021 Issue
IN MEMORIAM Lewis Warsh: Part of His History 1944-2020 By Steve Clay Originally published in The Brooklyn Rail Dec 20 – Jan 21, 2021 Issue Working with Lewis Warsh was always an effortless pleasure and indistinguishable from our friendship. I first met him in Brooklyn in 1995, introduced by Mitch Highfill. We spoke about his archive and collection of rare books he wanted to sell, and arranged to meet at his apartment. During that visit I looked at his treasures, among which was a small book he'd assembled by hand when he found a set of black and white photographs taken in 1968, primarily on Bustin's Island, Maine and in Bolinas, California. The photographs were classic family-style vacation snapshots of Lewis and Anne Waldman, Ted, Sandy, and Kate Berrigan, Tom, Angelica, and baby Juliet Clark, Joanne Kyger, Jack Boyce, and others. Lewis had mounted the photos into a store- bought hardcover photo book, then typed captions and placed them across from the pictures: The front cover read Bustin's Island '68. I immediately proposed that Granary Books publish Portrait of Lewis Warsh, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. an edition. I was impressed with the spontaneity of the photographs and the sincerity of the writing. They gave me a private glimpse into a community of poets whose work and stories I knew but was now seeing in their formative years as friends and collaborators. It's a remarkably lucid portrait of a time and place. The captions, written 28 years after the fact, brought perspective to the changes during the intervening years. -
Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, Which Was First Printed in 2009 in an Edition of 1,000
This PDF is provided for free by UDP. It documents the existence of the book, Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, which was first printed in 2009 in an edition of 1,000. If you like what you see in this PDF proof, we encourage you to purchase the book directly from UDP, or from our distributors and partner bookstores, or from any independent bookseller. If you find this PDF useful for your research or as a resource for teaching, please consider making a donation. If you make copies of this PDF for your students or any other rea- son, we ask you to include this page. Please support nonprofit & independent publishing by making do- nations to the presses that serve you and by purchasing books through ethical channels. UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE uglyducklingpresse.org Notes on Conceptualisms © Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman 2009, 2010 NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS ISBN-13: 978-1-933254-46-3 Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress VANESSA PLACE / ROBERT FITTERMAN Distributed to the trade by Small Press Distribution / SPD 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 www.spdbooks.org Available directly from UDP and through our partner bookstores: www.uglyducklingpresse.org/orders.html www.uglyducklingpresse.org/bookstores.html First Edition 2009 Second Printing 2010 Printed in the USA Ugly Duckling Presse The Old American Can Factory 232 Third Street #E-002 Brooklyn NY 11215 www.uglyducklingpresse.org NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS Foreword 9 Notes on Conceptualisms 13 Ventouses 59 Appendix 73 9 Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman [2009] PDF proof FOREWORD In the winter of 2008, at a launch for The noulipian Analects (C. -
University of Birmingham Space Occupied
University of Birmingham Space occupied Cran, Rona DOI: 10.1017/S0021875820001073 License: Other (please specify with Rights Statement) Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Cran, R 2020, 'Space occupied: women poet-editors and the mimeograph revolution in mid-century New York City', Journal of American Studies. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875820001073 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: This article has been published in a revised form in Journal of American Studies [https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875820001073]. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © Cambridge University Press 2020. General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document.