March 29, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente
I am always interrogating the idea of what it means to be a creative writer today. I think it's important to consider one's role in the community. How can you create a space in which to work -- which will help you develop your vision and your writing practices. Outreach can help this effort, not only by helping to fertilize the intellectual desert that exists among young people, but also getting writers out of our cloisters and comfort zones. Frankly, sometimes we need a prompt.
Below is an interesting segment by Robert Glück from a class reading that speaks to this notion of community building. He's describing how he and Bruce Boone began to formulate what would become New Narrative in San Francisco.
"In 1976 I started volunteering in the non-profit bookstore Small Press Traffic and became co-director not long after. From 1977 to 1985, I ran a reading series and held free walk-in writing workshops at the store. The workshops became a kind of New Narrative laboratory attended by Michal Amnasan, Steve Abbott, Sam D'Allesandro, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Camille Roy, and many other writers whose works extend my own horizon. I would start by reading some piece of writing that interested me: Chaucer, Robert Smithson, Lydia Davis, Ivan Bunin, Jim Thompson, a book of London street games, Thomas Wyatt, Sei Shonagon. We were aspiring to an ideal of learning derived as much from Spicer and Duncan as from our contemporaries."
He later describes how that effort led to a "Left/Write Conference" that Bruce Boone and Steve Abbot mounted in 1981 at Noe Valley Ministry that brought together writers from disparate communities.
"We felt urgent about it, perhaps because we each belonged to such disparate groups. To our astonishment, 300 people attended Left/Write, so we accomplished on a civic stage what we were attempting in our writing, editing and curating: to mix groups and modes of discourse."
It's as if our external practices and dialogues can parallel often compliment our creative output on the page. I find that very interesting.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
The Nitty Gritty
March 22: 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente
Today, we went granular. Terry showed both classes a film on World War II while we four volunteers set up in the library. We each worked one-on-one with students to clean and edit their favorite pieces for publication in the "fake" history book. We also had them fill out a form with autobiographical details for an authors' section at the end of the book. We managed to sit with every student, although not all had a completely finished product. Most of the students are using their 2020 assignment where they speculate on life in the year 2020. Sadly, many have very unrealistic expectations of what their lives will be like.
Today, we went granular. Terry showed both classes a film on World War II while we four volunteers set up in the library. We each worked one-on-one with students to clean and edit their favorite pieces for publication in the "fake" history book. We also had them fill out a form with autobiographical details for an authors' section at the end of the book. We managed to sit with every student, although not all had a completely finished product. Most of the students are using their 2020 assignment where they speculate on life in the year 2020. Sadly, many have very unrealistic expectations of what their lives will be like.
Monday, March 28, 2011
A Case Study at Roberto Clemente
March 15, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente
Keeping Students Focused
Our biggest challenge has been keeping the students focused on seeing their assignments through completion. They may write it, but not put it in Google Docs; or type it into the computer, but not share it. Or perhaps not do any of it. They had folders for their hard copy papers, but their assignments were still not getting done.
Logistics was the biggest issue of getting the assignments complete. The students, I think, found they could too easily slip through the cracks of accountability and goof off for an hour, listening to music on a laptop or just walking around and talking.
So last month we changed tactics a little and divided up the students by the four volunteers – about four students per volunteer. We sat down with our four students one on one, identified at least one assignment they wanted to see published and focused on getting that piece ready for publication.
Katie put this chart up on Google Docs. The colored squares are those pieces that have been submitted and then edited by a volunteer. The goal at the end of class was to color in a box. That seemed to work a little better. It empowered the volunteers to assume more responsibility in pushing the students more rather than waiting passively for students to come to us, which they were not doing.
Coming into the project in the middle of the year kept me a little in the dark in terms of visualizing the process of oversight. I was surprised at how little anyone seemed to care about the project. I think I was too light gloved with the kids, afraid of alienating them, when I think what they need is more accountability. They often leave the room in disarray, their laptops open, sometimes their personal folders still on their desk or even on the floor. The volunteers and teacher end up picking up after them. I think these kids need some discipline. They’re also rude sometimes to their very agreeable teacher.
They’re way too deficient in attention to be assigned laptops with Internet connectivity. And often they just end up cutting and pasting research from Wikipedia at the end of the hour. It’s very disheartening. One can easily feel overwhelmed, that it’s too late to reach these kids, and we need to start earlier.
Every quarter, the students are reassigned to different classes. And you can see how one or two bad actors can bring down the entire class.
I’ll see this project through to the end of the term and publication. And I’ll stay involved in 826Michigan. I think as an artist, you realize that your body of work doesn’t have to live only between the bindings of a book. That strikes me as a limited existence. Becoming involved in communities, a social volunteer community like 826Michigan, an alternative school community, a writer’s community in and outside the classroom – has been essential to helping to create an environment in which I can work and see myself as an artist – which isn’t defined by business cards and company flow charts – in fact it resists such delineation and prefers to operate on the margins.
I may be doing some good for the kids at Roberto Clemente, but I’m also forming my own consciousness as an artist, which will carry me onto future community outreach efforts.
Keeping Students Focused
Our biggest challenge has been keeping the students focused on seeing their assignments through completion. They may write it, but not put it in Google Docs; or type it into the computer, but not share it. Or perhaps not do any of it. They had folders for their hard copy papers, but their assignments were still not getting done.
Logistics was the biggest issue of getting the assignments complete. The students, I think, found they could too easily slip through the cracks of accountability and goof off for an hour, listening to music on a laptop or just walking around and talking.
So last month we changed tactics a little and divided up the students by the four volunteers – about four students per volunteer. We sat down with our four students one on one, identified at least one assignment they wanted to see published and focused on getting that piece ready for publication.
Katie put this chart up on Google Docs. The colored squares are those pieces that have been submitted and then edited by a volunteer. The goal at the end of class was to color in a box. That seemed to work a little better. It empowered the volunteers to assume more responsibility in pushing the students more rather than waiting passively for students to come to us, which they were not doing.
Coming into the project in the middle of the year kept me a little in the dark in terms of visualizing the process of oversight. I was surprised at how little anyone seemed to care about the project. I think I was too light gloved with the kids, afraid of alienating them, when I think what they need is more accountability. They often leave the room in disarray, their laptops open, sometimes their personal folders still on their desk or even on the floor. The volunteers and teacher end up picking up after them. I think these kids need some discipline. They’re also rude sometimes to their very agreeable teacher.
They’re way too deficient in attention to be assigned laptops with Internet connectivity. And often they just end up cutting and pasting research from Wikipedia at the end of the hour. It’s very disheartening. One can easily feel overwhelmed, that it’s too late to reach these kids, and we need to start earlier.
Every quarter, the students are reassigned to different classes. And you can see how one or two bad actors can bring down the entire class.
I’ll see this project through to the end of the term and publication. And I’ll stay involved in 826Michigan. I think as an artist, you realize that your body of work doesn’t have to live only between the bindings of a book. That strikes me as a limited existence. Becoming involved in communities, a social volunteer community like 826Michigan, an alternative school community, a writer’s community in and outside the classroom – has been essential to helping to create an environment in which I can work and see myself as an artist – which isn’t defined by business cards and company flow charts – in fact it resists such delineation and prefers to operate on the margins.
I may be doing some good for the kids at Roberto Clemente, but I’m also forming my own consciousness as an artist, which will carry me onto future community outreach efforts.
Creative Space
March 8, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente
I'm coming to understand the mantra that communities are essential to creative artists. The hermit hammering away at his posthumous masterpiece notwithstanding, many of us want to believe we not are writing into a vacuum. Being published is a wonderful affirmation. But what about feedback on work in process or a response that doesn't come with a 90 percent rejection rate? To the purist, there is certainly satisfaction in a well-written text lying on a hard drive, but what about bringing it into the light of a community? We don't live in a vacuum. Writing to a community helps keep us working.
The house reading, which is an honored tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area, provides an informal space for writers and poets to share their work, explore creative practices and activate new ideas. Poet Rob Halpern, an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University who comes to us from San Francisco, held his inaugural Ypsilanti house reading Friday. SF poet Allie Warren, who read the night before at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and publisher Brian Whitener shared their recent work and held a conversation on taking the creative space into the community at large.
Rob had a full house of about 25-30 people from Eastern Michigan and Wayne State, who brought beer and wine and hors d'oeuvres. As a newcomer to Michigan and graduate student in literature and creative writing, finding a venue to discuss of all things literature and creative writing is a wonderful novelty. I'm heartened by the turnout and hope it continues.
Here are the bios on Allie and Brian that Rob sent out.
Alli Warren's chapbooks include Acting Out, Well-Meaning White Girl, and Cousins. Recent poems appear in Jacket, LUNGFULL!, and pax americana. Collaborative works can be found in ON: Contemporary Practice (with Suzanne Stein), con/crescent 2 (with Lauren Levin), and Bruised Dick (with Michael Nicoloff). From 2008-2010, she co-curated The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. Alli lives in Oakland.
Brian Whitener works in project called Displaced Press. His most recent publication is a translation of Colectivo Situaciones Genocide in the Neighborhood (ChainLinks, 2010).
Poems by Alli Warren and Brian Whitener:
PLOW POSE
by Alli Warren
I feel like it’s a matter of economics
this rotgut wine
and bad lilt
it takes an industry of
experts, spreaders
their dual-purpose
for tillage and for trade
packing on the path
carting on the plain
who will account for
the kingdom is interested
in crossed high spears
is this the proper place
for oppositional defiant disorder?
that’s the second time this week
my mouth’s mouth
by turns inflated & empty
yanked on the latch to say
in the ether and the air
in the fire that produces things
the fairly specific things
you do with the left hand
a string of endeavors
and yawning and starting to rub
in the dark middle
in a package
in what is wet
in the tempo of circulation
so many relay points
from a single satellite
how I hold it up as an example
of joining through distortion
the bread is plentiful
and life unstrenuous
in bright array
honeycomb in the drone
from FALSE INTMIACY
by Brian Whitener
If I was no longer human, would
I finally see what it means to be
blank, or rather how to be a feminista in Exico, would I finally see that -scape that we, a Antigonean performance,
carefully placed little openings
in George Oppen, I mean fuck
it, they are a bunch of assholes,
that we which would be an affirmation, a non-autonomous autonomy, a skin, an autonomy not of people. Meaning: right now, there is no war. Which is what gives it its importance, as
a critique of landscape, I mean
as a critique of bourgeois landscape, I mean sex and
history do not mix,
my body is a
(possible)
enunciation, without
value, that is,
like an image
If it
is, I mean, true that there
is
no
war, that
is, there
is
no longer a war
no no longer a future from
which to access
If value, the body was not just
“mine” would I finally cease to
be “human,” that is without a future? without access? you
know, in all senses of the word
rather just a skin, full of exits?
What I mean to say is, you’re a language that disgusts me, I’m
thrust into a kind of metabolic, plastic revolt. You disgust me. This is a site-specific act.
I'm coming to understand the mantra that communities are essential to creative artists. The hermit hammering away at his posthumous masterpiece notwithstanding, many of us want to believe we not are writing into a vacuum. Being published is a wonderful affirmation. But what about feedback on work in process or a response that doesn't come with a 90 percent rejection rate? To the purist, there is certainly satisfaction in a well-written text lying on a hard drive, but what about bringing it into the light of a community? We don't live in a vacuum. Writing to a community helps keep us working.
The house reading, which is an honored tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area, provides an informal space for writers and poets to share their work, explore creative practices and activate new ideas. Poet Rob Halpern, an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University who comes to us from San Francisco, held his inaugural Ypsilanti house reading Friday. SF poet Allie Warren, who read the night before at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and publisher Brian Whitener shared their recent work and held a conversation on taking the creative space into the community at large.
Rob had a full house of about 25-30 people from Eastern Michigan and Wayne State, who brought beer and wine and hors d'oeuvres. As a newcomer to Michigan and graduate student in literature and creative writing, finding a venue to discuss of all things literature and creative writing is a wonderful novelty. I'm heartened by the turnout and hope it continues.
Here are the bios on Allie and Brian that Rob sent out.
Alli Warren's chapbooks include Acting Out, Well-Meaning White Girl, and Cousins. Recent poems appear in Jacket, LUNGFULL!, and pax americana. Collaborative works can be found in ON: Contemporary Practice (with Suzanne Stein), con/crescent 2 (with Lauren Levin), and Bruised Dick (with Michael Nicoloff). From 2008-2010, she co-curated The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. Alli lives in Oakland.
Brian Whitener works in project called Displaced Press. His most recent publication is a translation of Colectivo Situaciones Genocide in the Neighborhood (ChainLinks, 2010).
Poems by Alli Warren and Brian Whitener:
PLOW POSE
by Alli Warren
I feel like it’s a matter of economics
this rotgut wine
and bad lilt
it takes an industry of
experts, spreaders
their dual-purpose
for tillage and for trade
packing on the path
carting on the plain
who will account for
the kingdom is interested
in crossed high spears
is this the proper place
for oppositional defiant disorder?
that’s the second time this week
my mouth’s mouth
by turns inflated & empty
yanked on the latch to say
in the ether and the air
in the fire that produces things
the fairly specific things
you do with the left hand
a string of endeavors
and yawning and starting to rub
in the dark middle
in a package
in what is wet
in the tempo of circulation
so many relay points
from a single satellite
how I hold it up as an example
of joining through distortion
the bread is plentiful
and life unstrenuous
in bright array
honeycomb in the drone
from FALSE INTMIACY
by Brian Whitener
If I was no longer human, would
I finally see what it means to be
blank, or rather how to be a feminista in Exico, would I finally see that -scape that we, a Antigonean performance,
carefully placed little openings
in George Oppen, I mean fuck
it, they are a bunch of assholes,
that we which would be an affirmation, a non-autonomous autonomy, a skin, an autonomy not of people. Meaning: right now, there is no war. Which is what gives it its importance, as
a critique of landscape, I mean
as a critique of bourgeois landscape, I mean sex and
history do not mix,
my body is a
(possible)
enunciation, without
value, that is,
like an image
If it
is, I mean, true that there
is
no
war, that
is, there
is
no longer a war
no no longer a future from
which to access
If value, the body was not just
“mine” would I finally cease to
be “human,” that is without a future? without access? you
know, in all senses of the word
rather just a skin, full of exits?
What I mean to say is, you’re a language that disgusts me, I’m
thrust into a kind of metabolic, plastic revolt. You disgust me. This is a site-specific act.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
An Accoustical Experience
March 1, logged 3 hours 15 minutes at Roberto Clemente
For my ideal public art project, I would construct an audible experience in an urban core. And then I would allow communities within a city to build upon it. Here's how it would work. I would divide the city into geographic zones. Within each zone, place an acoustical device that could be heard throughout the zone. The zones would be drawn with acoustical principles in mind.
I think this project offers a hybrid of the permanent and ephemeral installations -- not a permently visual interruption and more permanent than David Antin's skypoems. But I don't think it compromises the disruptive nature of the aesthetic -- which is oppositional but not combative.
In the first zone, I would install an carillon bell system either in an existing building or new construction depending on the location. Throughout the zone I would set up small pedestrian stations with a single button that activates the bells. They would play the song dedicated to that particular station. If a song is playing, the station's request would simply be queued. I would also provide a manual keyboard at the bells to allow a player to perform pieces.
That would be my contribution. The residents and businesses of each zone could then come together and decide what kind of acoustical device or player to establish in their area with stations similar to the original one. They could erect a pipe organ, a symphonic orchestra or something else. I would leave it up to them. Through my "unlimited" funds, I would help them organize community meetings where individuals, agencies and businesses could develop their vision and then apply for the funds to make it happen. Their projects would have to meet a loose set of parameters: that the acoustics be loud enough to be heard -- to disrupt idle worrying -- but not encumber conversations or compromise pedestrian and traffic safety.
For my ideal public art project, I would construct an audible experience in an urban core. And then I would allow communities within a city to build upon it. Here's how it would work. I would divide the city into geographic zones. Within each zone, place an acoustical device that could be heard throughout the zone. The zones would be drawn with acoustical principles in mind.
I think this project offers a hybrid of the permanent and ephemeral installations -- not a permently visual interruption and more permanent than David Antin's skypoems. But I don't think it compromises the disruptive nature of the aesthetic -- which is oppositional but not combative.
In the first zone, I would install an carillon bell system either in an existing building or new construction depending on the location. Throughout the zone I would set up small pedestrian stations with a single button that activates the bells. They would play the song dedicated to that particular station. If a song is playing, the station's request would simply be queued. I would also provide a manual keyboard at the bells to allow a player to perform pieces.
That would be my contribution. The residents and businesses of each zone could then come together and decide what kind of acoustical device or player to establish in their area with stations similar to the original one. They could erect a pipe organ, a symphonic orchestra or something else. I would leave it up to them. Through my "unlimited" funds, I would help them organize community meetings where individuals, agencies and businesses could develop their vision and then apply for the funds to make it happen. Their projects would have to meet a loose set of parameters: that the acoustics be loud enough to be heard -- to disrupt idle worrying -- but not encumber conversations or compromise pedestrian and traffic safety.
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