I'm looking forward to Sunday's open mic in Detroit organized by Sean Kilpatrick. This will be my first time reading/performing a poem outside of a classroom, which is an excellent opportunity to discuss Peter Quartermain's Sound Reading essay. How should we read a poem, how is a poem heard?
Despite conventional wisdom that a poem is best read by its writer, Quartermain argues this is not the case.
Wordsworth's Cumberland dialect -- which was provincial and specific to a limited group of people -- rhymed water with chatter, July with duly, according to Quartermain. Audience expectation also determines the success and nature of a performance. But should a poem be read in the dialect of the audience? What audience is so homogenic as to share a single dialect?
"Most of us manage our vowels with consistency and precision (or we suppose) but each of us manages them differently, and if we move into an unfamiliar dialect region we may find (as a result of our listening) that our vowels begin to slide all over the place," Quartermain writes.
Pronunciations are inconsistent -- even to a single reader. Since living in Michigan -- going on 10 months now -- I've notice my a's taking a provincial turn from their audible iteration in San Diego. Like many people, I've moved around so much my original accent -- central Louisiana -- is so over-layed with other influences it doesn't recognize itself. I don't sound like my childhood friends who stayed there.
These days, I'm picking up a Michigander intonation. Words such as that and fat -- I now catch myself stretching out my a's -- that becomes thyatt and fat becomes fyatt. My o's have taken on a high stretch. Words like Pop sound like phhhaaaap. The effect might be lost in translation here, and I don't meant to make fun. My point is that pronunciation is always slippery.
Now that poetry is printed on the page, there are other variables in play. The poem may have a visual rhyme scheme in similar spellings, where July and duly could work even if we don't hear them as rhyming.
"There is a wide and inevitable disparity between how we hear the poem when we read it silently, and how we sound it, saying it aloud; the poem performed in the head is an imagined poem int he world of sound," Quartermain says. "This may be why, when we voice the poem, we can never match what we breathe to what we think we hear."
I am notoriously poor at performing my poems in class -- and prefer them to be read by a competent reader who might bring his own and different interpretation of meter and annunciation. That to me is the best treat. When you work becomes new to even you!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Response to Lucy Lippard Lure of the Local
Lucy Lippard's piece Lure of the Local discusses how the narrative history of place personifies a place -- which is the aggregation of culture, nature and history.
You can't separate a place from its narrative history, which continues to be informed by people's intersections with it. We're constantly cross pollinating places moving from one to the other.
"Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all "local places" consist of, writes Lippard. "By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we may play a different role.
Places are just as dynamic and organismic as people. This takes me on a slight tangent to another "place" where I spent a lot of time living. That's New Orleans. I lived there before the storm and near there during the event. When I returned afterwards, there was a period of rebuilding, which was as much about rebuilding damaged structures as rebuilding the narrative of the city. Deciding who was going to come back and who wasn't. Many newcomers arrived -- hispanic migrant workers because of all of the construction jobs, and pioneering artists and entrepreneurs that wanted to be part of its cultural recovery.
They all spoke about the unique vibe of New Orleans. The thing I kept returning to in my mind was -- that if so many people are not returning, what vibe is it these newcomers were sensing? Was it a vibe of architecture? Were there enough New Orleanians still around to share it or was it the vibe of the narrative of the city before the storm waiting to resume? For a while New Orleans was a ghost town -- its vibe was of abandonment and despair. These days six years later, it feels very much as it did before Katrina, except a little different. Less stagnant in some way. A lot of the driftwood has been shorn away. But there's still the palimpsest of identity that is comprised by a number of things: from buildings, to street names, to old homes, to people, to the creation legend of the city itself. However it changes, that deeper imprint of will always find a way to interact and interrogate its latest incarnation.
"The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand--our land, our place, the local. the lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies," says Lippard.
New Orleans is a cultural and artistic laboratory right now. It was completely emptied of people at one time and slowly repopulated with slightly different people who brought different stories to the city. Locals who returned had their own tales of woe. Much international attention has been focused on it too. All of this has created an outside narrative of New Orleans that has to influence life there and influence visitors' attitudes when they arrive.
That would be a great dissertation project to somehow -- without being too reductionist -- track the change in attitude and civic and social character with the change in narrative about the city. Maybe more of an artistic project. And I wonder what kind of tension is registered between the various narrative constructions and the various realities on the ground?
You can't separate a place from its narrative history, which continues to be informed by people's intersections with it. We're constantly cross pollinating places moving from one to the other.
"Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all "local places" consist of, writes Lippard. "By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we may play a different role.
Places are just as dynamic and organismic as people. This takes me on a slight tangent to another "place" where I spent a lot of time living. That's New Orleans. I lived there before the storm and near there during the event. When I returned afterwards, there was a period of rebuilding, which was as much about rebuilding damaged structures as rebuilding the narrative of the city. Deciding who was going to come back and who wasn't. Many newcomers arrived -- hispanic migrant workers because of all of the construction jobs, and pioneering artists and entrepreneurs that wanted to be part of its cultural recovery.
They all spoke about the unique vibe of New Orleans. The thing I kept returning to in my mind was -- that if so many people are not returning, what vibe is it these newcomers were sensing? Was it a vibe of architecture? Were there enough New Orleanians still around to share it or was it the vibe of the narrative of the city before the storm waiting to resume? For a while New Orleans was a ghost town -- its vibe was of abandonment and despair. These days six years later, it feels very much as it did before Katrina, except a little different. Less stagnant in some way. A lot of the driftwood has been shorn away. But there's still the palimpsest of identity that is comprised by a number of things: from buildings, to street names, to old homes, to people, to the creation legend of the city itself. However it changes, that deeper imprint of will always find a way to interact and interrogate its latest incarnation.
"The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand--our land, our place, the local. the lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies," says Lippard.
New Orleans is a cultural and artistic laboratory right now. It was completely emptied of people at one time and slowly repopulated with slightly different people who brought different stories to the city. Locals who returned had their own tales of woe. Much international attention has been focused on it too. All of this has created an outside narrative of New Orleans that has to influence life there and influence visitors' attitudes when they arrive.
That would be a great dissertation project to somehow -- without being too reductionist -- track the change in attitude and civic and social character with the change in narrative about the city. Maybe more of an artistic project. And I wonder what kind of tension is registered between the various narrative constructions and the various realities on the ground?
Calling an Audible
I just received word that the folks at 826Michigan are concerned that there are not enough good pieces by students for the book. This has been my concern as well. I received this email from the project coordinator yesterday.
"Amy and I met last week and went over lots of the pieces that have been submitted for the book. Both of us feel that a lot of the writing isn't up to the standard we'd like to see--this book is something that 826michigan as an organization needs to be able to fully stand behind. All of you have done an amazing job working with the students on editing, and have been really patient and wonderful even when the students have resisted the work. Most of the pieces that really reflect this work are the 2020 stories. Amy and I were thinking that we could use this Tuesday to gauge the students' energy levels/interest in the book, and to propose a new focus for the publication:
- using the 2020 stories as the main focus of the entire book. The publication would be centered around these pieces, as just about everyone has written one that's good enough to be published--or better. The theme of the book would be about looking toward the future, and how that connects to history, rather than attempting to create a straight up (alternative)-history textbook..
- since there are many suitable pieces in the other genres, the book would also feature a substantial appendix of "Further Readings." That way the students who *did* work to create many types of writing could be featured several times, and the most historically-focused writing could be used to support and inform the future/2020 theme."
"Amy and I met last week and went over lots of the pieces that have been submitted for the book. Both of us feel that a lot of the writing isn't up to the standard we'd like to see--this book is something that 826michigan as an organization needs to be able to fully stand behind. All of you have done an amazing job working with the students on editing, and have been really patient and wonderful even when the students have resisted the work. Most of the pieces that really reflect this work are the 2020 stories. Amy and I were thinking that we could use this Tuesday to gauge the students' energy levels/interest in the book, and to propose a new focus for the publication:
- using the 2020 stories as the main focus of the entire book. The publication would be centered around these pieces, as just about everyone has written one that's good enough to be published--or better. The theme of the book would be about looking toward the future, and how that connects to history, rather than attempting to create a straight up (alternative)-history textbook..
- since there are many suitable pieces in the other genres, the book would also feature a substantial appendix of "Further Readings." That way the students who *did* work to create many types of writing could be featured several times, and the most historically-focused writing could be used to support and inform the future/2020 theme."
Monday, April 18, 2011
Brenda Iijima on Language
Language poet Brenda Iijima measured the amount of garbage that arrived at the dump of her hometown of North Adams, Mass. in a single day.
She constructs her poetics out of the discarded. Likewise, language to her can be of equal permanence, the bones, rock and plastic of our experience.
She read from her works in Ypsilanti last month
I write this from scraps of borrowed unnumbered paper from that night. The felt marker bleeding outside of its appointed letters. Which seems to have some bearing on this project.
Her weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Poetry is the canvas, and the food, the expression, and the wholeness. It is the biological cataclysm when body and mind collide. Poof.
Here are some of the phrases I jotted down as she read:
Rabbit Pause
Pickled Gorillas.
Isn’t it perverse that there are less than 10,000 Polar Bears in the world, but it’s one of the most dominant, ubiquitous commercial images, especially in China?
Ham, the space chimp.
(My note: Brenda has a body of work coming out called: "Some Simple Things Said by and About," a chronicle of how humans have used animals as surrogates.)
Untimely death is wiggled out of the horizon.
Preservation -- from formaldehyde to land preservation -- is a problem.
We’re meant to be inter-relational.
Tone down, simplify.
Words can be dealt with on their own terms. There are words to disappear and words to call attention. Poetry is the saturated concentrated eventful modality of communication.
These are themes she returns to in her readings. "Language is a matrix" she says in Eco Language Reader. "Everything is pertinent to linage it is the impetus of language to pertain to the environment in interchange, nothing excluded."
Heady stuff. I believe what she's saying is that instead of merely being representational of objects in the world, language is the conduit (she uses the word conduit) between bodies to communicate and inter-relate. Inter-relate in this case is to communicate on an intellectual as well as sensual and perhaps spiritual level.
Utterances become bodily substance. It's becomes matter that the body sheds through words.
Brenda is also doing research on women who were murdered in North Adams during the 1970’s when she was growing up there. Here is a YouTube video of her performing a witch dance in North Happens.
She constructs her poetics out of the discarded. Likewise, language to her can be of equal permanence, the bones, rock and plastic of our experience.
She read from her works in Ypsilanti last month
I write this from scraps of borrowed unnumbered paper from that night. The felt marker bleeding outside of its appointed letters. Which seems to have some bearing on this project.
Her weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Poetry is the canvas, and the food, the expression, and the wholeness. It is the biological cataclysm when body and mind collide. Poof.
Here are some of the phrases I jotted down as she read:
Rabbit Pause
Pickled Gorillas.
Isn’t it perverse that there are less than 10,000 Polar Bears in the world, but it’s one of the most dominant, ubiquitous commercial images, especially in China?
Ham, the space chimp.
(My note: Brenda has a body of work coming out called: "Some Simple Things Said by and About," a chronicle of how humans have used animals as surrogates.)
Untimely death is wiggled out of the horizon.
Preservation -- from formaldehyde to land preservation -- is a problem.
We’re meant to be inter-relational.
Tone down, simplify.
Words can be dealt with on their own terms. There are words to disappear and words to call attention. Poetry is the saturated concentrated eventful modality of communication.
These are themes she returns to in her readings. "Language is a matrix" she says in Eco Language Reader. "Everything is pertinent to linage it is the impetus of language to pertain to the environment in interchange, nothing excluded."
Heady stuff. I believe what she's saying is that instead of merely being representational of objects in the world, language is the conduit (she uses the word conduit) between bodies to communicate and inter-relate. Inter-relate in this case is to communicate on an intellectual as well as sensual and perhaps spiritual level.
Utterances become bodily substance. It's becomes matter that the body sheds through words.
Brenda is also doing research on women who were murdered in North Adams during the 1970’s when she was growing up there. Here is a YouTube video of her performing a witch dance in North Happens.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Response to Hal Foster's Artist as Ethnographer
One of our readings this semester was by Hal Foster whose 1996 essay, "Artist as Ethnographer" criticized the practice of artists acting as quasi-anthropologists. He appears particularly concerned with site-specific art that acts in critique of its surroundings -- and often fails to truly digest its surroundings before forming its critique. Another problem is that site-specific art is often commissioned by the institution in which it attempts to critique.
Foster is working well beyond my range, but I found few of his points to be resonant. Artists who are marginalized socially and culturally -- by ethnicity or affluence -- are perceived as having automatic access to transformative "otherness". or access to "primal psychic and social processes from which the white bourgeois is blocked." In other words, we lack the street cred.
He argues that this "primitivistic fantasy" was exclusionary and limited Bataille's surrealism and Cesarie's Negritude movement.
Foster says post modern deconstruction has pushed art into the field of social anthropology. Such quasi-anthropological artists who seek to work with sited communities or institutions may have the bet motives and only partly want their work to be received as social outreach. (sarcasm intended)
The problem he says is that the representation of the surroundings are more often fitted into an artistic guise rather than the artist getting to know the surroundings.
Foster is working well beyond my range, but I found few of his points to be resonant. Artists who are marginalized socially and culturally -- by ethnicity or affluence -- are perceived as having automatic access to transformative "otherness". or access to "primal psychic and social processes from which the white bourgeois is blocked." In other words, we lack the street cred.
He argues that this "primitivistic fantasy" was exclusionary and limited Bataille's surrealism and Cesarie's Negritude movement.
Foster says post modern deconstruction has pushed art into the field of social anthropology. Such quasi-anthropological artists who seek to work with sited communities or institutions may have the bet motives and only partly want their work to be received as social outreach. (sarcasm intended)
The problem he says is that the representation of the surroundings are more often fitted into an artistic guise rather than the artist getting to know the surroundings.
Squeezing Water from Rocks
April 12, 3 hours and 15 minutes at Roberto Clemente Learning Development Center.
My project has not been exactly stellar in terms of the quality of output of my students. We've had to circle back. (Many were cutting and pasting information from wikkipedia for example.) Just getting them to turn in SOMETHING has been a challenge. The project coordinator sat down with the liaison with 826Michigan and came up with short essay for the students to write something about the present. A day in the life, or what a day at Roberto Clemente is like or the prompt: if I wish someone had told me this.... about high school.
The students had to write a half page by hand in order to receive a laptop and go to the library yesterday. A few of them hung back in the classroom particularly stumped about what to write. I sat with them trying to get them to think about anything. Not to censure themselves but just get their pen moving and allow the creative process to start. It was a mixed bag. By the end of the hour, the goal was get them to open a Google document and share it with the teacher so that they could go back and add to it.
These kids, not all but many, are clearly done with this project. Makes me worry about the book.
Where is their apathy coming from? Many don’t have relationship to books in general, which is one reason they're not connecting to the project. Others show so little motivation that people end up doing things for them. Many are kids from broken homes, often in poverty. Some of their parents are in jail or substance abuse problems. Over the course of the semester, I've realized that they are used to just being neglected. They assumed we would go away and take our book project with us.
We started out trying to get them to write imaginary versions of history. But many didn't know the original version. Then we had them write about an imaginary future.
In these essays they have very unrealistic views of what their future will be like.
I read an article recently by Malcolm Gladwell, I think, that said American kids for all their short-comings don’t lack self-esteem. In face, they tend to over-estimate their performances on tests when compared to their results. Whereas in South Korea and Japan, where secondary students test much higher than American kids, students underestimate their performance. American kids have a huge disconnect between their self-perception and objective measurements. This study suggests we might be giving them too much positive conditioning and not enough tough love. A little too simplistic but clearly expectations are low.
My project has not been exactly stellar in terms of the quality of output of my students. We've had to circle back. (Many were cutting and pasting information from wikkipedia for example.) Just getting them to turn in SOMETHING has been a challenge. The project coordinator sat down with the liaison with 826Michigan and came up with short essay for the students to write something about the present. A day in the life, or what a day at Roberto Clemente is like or the prompt: if I wish someone had told me this.... about high school.
The students had to write a half page by hand in order to receive a laptop and go to the library yesterday. A few of them hung back in the classroom particularly stumped about what to write. I sat with them trying to get them to think about anything. Not to censure themselves but just get their pen moving and allow the creative process to start. It was a mixed bag. By the end of the hour, the goal was get them to open a Google document and share it with the teacher so that they could go back and add to it.
These kids, not all but many, are clearly done with this project. Makes me worry about the book.
Where is their apathy coming from? Many don’t have relationship to books in general, which is one reason they're not connecting to the project. Others show so little motivation that people end up doing things for them. Many are kids from broken homes, often in poverty. Some of their parents are in jail or substance abuse problems. Over the course of the semester, I've realized that they are used to just being neglected. They assumed we would go away and take our book project with us.
We started out trying to get them to write imaginary versions of history. But many didn't know the original version. Then we had them write about an imaginary future.
In these essays they have very unrealistic views of what their future will be like.
I read an article recently by Malcolm Gladwell, I think, that said American kids for all their short-comings don’t lack self-esteem. In face, they tend to over-estimate their performances on tests when compared to their results. Whereas in South Korea and Japan, where secondary students test much higher than American kids, students underestimate their performance. American kids have a huge disconnect between their self-perception and objective measurements. This study suggests we might be giving them too much positive conditioning and not enough tough love. A little too simplistic but clearly expectations are low.
Case Study of Community Outreach at Cal State Monteray Bay
April 5, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente
As Eastern Michigan Creative Writing looks to develop its community outreach program, one of the most impressive case studies I've seen and something we discussed this semester in the inaugural outreach class is at Cal State University at Monterey Bay.
Sited on the former army base of Ford Ord, closed in 1993, the university was founded on the core principles of service learning and community outreach based on an agreement reached with the local community that was losing 35,000 local soldiers and dependents.
In her article "Relationship, Reciprocity, Reclamation: The Arts at Cal State Monterey Bay," Jan Freya says consultants were brought in from several service learning movements to help articulate a core vision that created a campus uniquely suited to the region's needs.
The 22 page article impressively describes how this came to pass and how the service projects often lead to other unexpected collaborations between various departments and folks in the community.
I'm going to discuss only a couple here in broad strokes. Each fall, students in Gilbert Neri's digital public art class initiate a yearlong collaboration with a local community organization to develop a public art project. In 2003, they paired with the alternative Watsonville community school, whose students have behavioral and other learning difficulties. Most of them come from Latino farm worker families.
In the first semester, the Cal State Students worked on meeting the students and listening to their aesthetic issues and interests. They focused on building trust. In the second semester after all the interviewing, ice breakers and time spent with the high school students, they came together to start a digital art project.
In this case, the high school students wanted windows in their prison like building. With limited resources, they settled for an artistic answer to this. They worked with the college students in the digital art lab to create large scale images -- which acted as metaphorical windows.
That project led to a second project with teen moms at the school. The art students connected the teen moms to students in the humanities and communications department who helped them tell their stories and design scripts for a digital format like digital scrap-booking.
Other collaborations followed -- and I'm only giving a rough sketch here, but the point is that focusing many resources on a single mission led to a meaningful service learning project that helped the community and enabled Cal State students develop skills and pedagogy in their particular interest. The project-based learning engaged college students with the local community and shared common interests with people they might have other preconceived notions about.
We on the other hand were much more diffuse this semester on our projects. Most of us joined existing projects through nonprofits. Perhaps in the future -- and maybe not every time the class is offered -- the class might work as a single unit to tackle something in a unique way.
Incidentally, the writer of the piece, Jan Freya, also co-wrote the screenplay of the 80s break dancing classic: "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo."
As Eastern Michigan Creative Writing looks to develop its community outreach program, one of the most impressive case studies I've seen and something we discussed this semester in the inaugural outreach class is at Cal State University at Monterey Bay.
Sited on the former army base of Ford Ord, closed in 1993, the university was founded on the core principles of service learning and community outreach based on an agreement reached with the local community that was losing 35,000 local soldiers and dependents.
In her article "Relationship, Reciprocity, Reclamation: The Arts at Cal State Monterey Bay," Jan Freya says consultants were brought in from several service learning movements to help articulate a core vision that created a campus uniquely suited to the region's needs.
The 22 page article impressively describes how this came to pass and how the service projects often lead to other unexpected collaborations between various departments and folks in the community.
I'm going to discuss only a couple here in broad strokes. Each fall, students in Gilbert Neri's digital public art class initiate a yearlong collaboration with a local community organization to develop a public art project. In 2003, they paired with the alternative Watsonville community school, whose students have behavioral and other learning difficulties. Most of them come from Latino farm worker families.
In the first semester, the Cal State Students worked on meeting the students and listening to their aesthetic issues and interests. They focused on building trust. In the second semester after all the interviewing, ice breakers and time spent with the high school students, they came together to start a digital art project.
In this case, the high school students wanted windows in their prison like building. With limited resources, they settled for an artistic answer to this. They worked with the college students in the digital art lab to create large scale images -- which acted as metaphorical windows.
That project led to a second project with teen moms at the school. The art students connected the teen moms to students in the humanities and communications department who helped them tell their stories and design scripts for a digital format like digital scrap-booking.
Other collaborations followed -- and I'm only giving a rough sketch here, but the point is that focusing many resources on a single mission led to a meaningful service learning project that helped the community and enabled Cal State students develop skills and pedagogy in their particular interest. The project-based learning engaged college students with the local community and shared common interests with people they might have other preconceived notions about.
We on the other hand were much more diffuse this semester on our projects. Most of us joined existing projects through nonprofits. Perhaps in the future -- and maybe not every time the class is offered -- the class might work as a single unit to tackle something in a unique way.
Incidentally, the writer of the piece, Jan Freya, also co-wrote the screenplay of the 80s break dancing classic: "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo."
An idea born from outreach
Proposal for Post New Narrative -- submitted April 12 for the &Now conference. This idea came from my experience in community outreach this semester and the work in Rob Halpern's class on cross genre from Prose Poetry to New Narrative.
Market pressures, fewer publishers and a declining appetite for confrontational and challenging works have pushed literary art to the margins of mainstream society. I also think we can embrace this.
We can use literary art to create a community in which it can be received, fostered and amplified. In this way, literary art remains alive and relevant.
I propose to compose and perform a cross-genre piece that will use new narrative techniques. as a means to create community. As a model, I am following the work of New Narrative writers Robert Glück and Bruce Boone who re-textualized the narrative of the gay experience in San Francisco in the 1980s. Their work speaks directly to creating and acknowledging a community of readers and participants within their story telling. They name names in their community and weave narratives around them. They also implicate and invite the reader into the community in various meta-text moves.
Modern literary artists must find new canvases that provide alternatives to market-driven channels. Our community should comprise part of our canvas. Literary art can do the work of creating community within its aesthetic. It can be instructive in how it can be experienced as well as sustained.
I am a graduate assistant in Eastern Michigan University’s MA creative writing program. My goal is to advance literary art in a society less and less hospitable for it. The commercial forces of publishing and media, and the corporate gospel of commodity culture are pushing art and artists aside. While commercial forces control their channels – we can intervene in real time and space.
We have started that process at Eastern Michigan where creative writing graduate students complete a required community outreach class. We spend at least three hours a week in the community developing a public art project such as a poetry workshop and competition or work with a nonprofit on an existing project. We attend a handful of graduate seminars during the semester responding to literary and artistic theory and case studies on community art projects. We keep a blog, give a multimedia presentation on our experience and write a final reflection paper. The idea is to encourage community building in the arts – to help develop our own creative practices within the context of building a “creative space” in the community.
Boone and Glück were concerned with redefining the gay narrative. They intervened in this narrative and reclaimed it. Their work synthesized intent and product. I think a similar way can be found here. Not only can we create communities in where art making is possible, but we can sustain these communities with the art itself.
My creative piece will be a hybrid form of critique and narrative that performs the work of community building around marginalized cultural production. The text will in both form and theme a manner in which artistic community can be built, advanced and embodied. My text will engage the reader both as an outsider and one who is implicated and invite the reader into the community.
Market pressures, fewer publishers and a declining appetite for confrontational and challenging works have pushed literary art to the margins of mainstream society. I also think we can embrace this.
We can use literary art to create a community in which it can be received, fostered and amplified. In this way, literary art remains alive and relevant.
I propose to compose and perform a cross-genre piece that will use new narrative techniques. as a means to create community. As a model, I am following the work of New Narrative writers Robert Glück and Bruce Boone who re-textualized the narrative of the gay experience in San Francisco in the 1980s. Their work speaks directly to creating and acknowledging a community of readers and participants within their story telling. They name names in their community and weave narratives around them. They also implicate and invite the reader into the community in various meta-text moves.
Modern literary artists must find new canvases that provide alternatives to market-driven channels. Our community should comprise part of our canvas. Literary art can do the work of creating community within its aesthetic. It can be instructive in how it can be experienced as well as sustained.
I am a graduate assistant in Eastern Michigan University’s MA creative writing program. My goal is to advance literary art in a society less and less hospitable for it. The commercial forces of publishing and media, and the corporate gospel of commodity culture are pushing art and artists aside. While commercial forces control their channels – we can intervene in real time and space.
We have started that process at Eastern Michigan where creative writing graduate students complete a required community outreach class. We spend at least three hours a week in the community developing a public art project such as a poetry workshop and competition or work with a nonprofit on an existing project. We attend a handful of graduate seminars during the semester responding to literary and artistic theory and case studies on community art projects. We keep a blog, give a multimedia presentation on our experience and write a final reflection paper. The idea is to encourage community building in the arts – to help develop our own creative practices within the context of building a “creative space” in the community.
Boone and Glück were concerned with redefining the gay narrative. They intervened in this narrative and reclaimed it. Their work synthesized intent and product. I think a similar way can be found here. Not only can we create communities in where art making is possible, but we can sustain these communities with the art itself.
My creative piece will be a hybrid form of critique and narrative that performs the work of community building around marginalized cultural production. The text will in both form and theme a manner in which artistic community can be built, advanced and embodied. My text will engage the reader both as an outsider and one who is implicated and invite the reader into the community.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Notes on Funk
In the 1980s performance artist Adrian Piper held a series of participatory social events where she taught white people how to dance to funk. She found that white people can indeed dance given the right approach, despite the disparaging cliche.
Piper understand dance and funk in particular as a language of interpersonal communication and self expression -- a medium of expression inaccessible to white culture. Social dance, she surmised, plays different roles in white culture than in black culture, according to her analysis and reflections about the project.
While social dance among whites is typically a spectator sport or a mark of social grace and achievement, among blacks it is a collective means of self-transcendence based on a system of symbols and patterns of movement.
In funk, she says, the movement must be experienced. So Piper arranged large-scale performances with 60 or more people. She introduced basic dance movements with their cultural references and their roles. She would break down the basic movements into their essentials so that the patterns were accessible.
Deeper into the exploration, she would add a quasi theoretical discussion about the relation of dance and music. The music would continue to play which allowed participants to listen and think while also respond to the to the melody and rhythmic qualities by dancing to it. They listened with their bodies, which was a major breakthrough. The dance became a collective, participatory activity.
Piper understand dance and funk in particular as a language of interpersonal communication and self expression -- a medium of expression inaccessible to white culture. Social dance, she surmised, plays different roles in white culture than in black culture, according to her analysis and reflections about the project.
While social dance among whites is typically a spectator sport or a mark of social grace and achievement, among blacks it is a collective means of self-transcendence based on a system of symbols and patterns of movement.
In funk, she says, the movement must be experienced. So Piper arranged large-scale performances with 60 or more people. She introduced basic dance movements with their cultural references and their roles. She would break down the basic movements into their essentials so that the patterns were accessible.
Deeper into the exploration, she would add a quasi theoretical discussion about the relation of dance and music. The music would continue to play which allowed participants to listen and think while also respond to the to the melody and rhythmic qualities by dancing to it. They listened with their bodies, which was a major breakthrough. The dance became a collective, participatory activity.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Proposed Project Redoux
I'm re-posting this as an update to include references to Guy Debord's influence in finding a situational aesthetic. Rereading Debord's call for an intervention in urban continuity, I realized from my marked passages that I was writing from this influence without noting it below. So I've noted it.
For my ideal public art project, I would construct a carillon bell system that could be heard throughout an urban core. The bells would be installed 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. Each station would activate a different song. 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.
The different songs would provide an acoustic dialogue between people and neighborhoods of the zone. The bells would be loud enough to disrupt idle worrying -- but not encumber conversations or compromise pedestrian and traffic safety.
I think this project offers a hybrid of the permanent and ephemeral installations -- not a permanently visual interruption and more permanent than David Antin's skypoems. But I don't think it compromises the disruptive value of the aesthetic which I see as oppositional but not combative.
And as I said it borrows from Debord's situational aesthetic, specifically his unitary urbanism. "Unitary urbanism must control the acoustic environment as well as the distribution of different varieties of drink or food."
His idea was to create new forms through constraints -- much like a poetic aesthetic can be generated by constraints, such as Christian Bok's Eunoia or the French Oulipos who compose without certain vowels.
"It must take up the creation of new forms and the détournement of known forms of architecture and urbanism -- as well as the détournement of the old poetry and cinema."
He wanted to disrupt the commoditization of the individual and reclaim agency from cities that were built on the interests of capitalistic motives rather than humanistic or emotional motives.
My carillon bells would be in the initial zone. That would be my contribution. And then I would provide money to allow communities within a city to build upon the concept and add their own acoustical experiences. 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.
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 other stakeholders 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 throughout the zone.
Let me go back to Debord here. His more radical version of unitary urbanism would create districts in various experimental cities -- each district would be able to lead to a precise harmony broken off from neighboring harmonies." Another colleague of his articulated trying to create a pure state of mind in each district that would induce a single emotion to which the subject would constantly expose herself.
Architecture would strive for atmospheric effects of rooms, corridors, streets, atmospheres linked to the behaviors they contain. Architecture would embrace "emotionally moving situations, more than emotionally moving forms" as its materials.
This far exceeds my modest proposal and perhaps for different purposes. But there is something to creating unique personal identities within urban areas which are more often known for their absence of the person -- the alienation of the individual and disruption of community.
For my ideal public art project, I would construct a carillon bell system that could be heard throughout an urban core. The bells would be installed 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. Each station would activate a different song. 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.
The different songs would provide an acoustic dialogue between people and neighborhoods of the zone. The bells would be loud enough to disrupt idle worrying -- but not encumber conversations or compromise pedestrian and traffic safety.
I think this project offers a hybrid of the permanent and ephemeral installations -- not a permanently visual interruption and more permanent than David Antin's skypoems. But I don't think it compromises the disruptive value of the aesthetic which I see as oppositional but not combative.
And as I said it borrows from Debord's situational aesthetic, specifically his unitary urbanism. "Unitary urbanism must control the acoustic environment as well as the distribution of different varieties of drink or food."
His idea was to create new forms through constraints -- much like a poetic aesthetic can be generated by constraints, such as Christian Bok's Eunoia or the French Oulipos who compose without certain vowels.
"It must take up the creation of new forms and the détournement of known forms of architecture and urbanism -- as well as the détournement of the old poetry and cinema."
He wanted to disrupt the commoditization of the individual and reclaim agency from cities that were built on the interests of capitalistic motives rather than humanistic or emotional motives.
My carillon bells would be in the initial zone. That would be my contribution. And then I would provide money to allow communities within a city to build upon the concept and add their own acoustical experiences. 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.
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 other stakeholders 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 throughout the zone.
Let me go back to Debord here. His more radical version of unitary urbanism would create districts in various experimental cities -- each district would be able to lead to a precise harmony broken off from neighboring harmonies." Another colleague of his articulated trying to create a pure state of mind in each district that would induce a single emotion to which the subject would constantly expose herself.
Architecture would strive for atmospheric effects of rooms, corridors, streets, atmospheres linked to the behaviors they contain. Architecture would embrace "emotionally moving situations, more than emotionally moving forms" as its materials.
This far exceeds my modest proposal and perhaps for different purposes. But there is something to creating unique personal identities within urban areas which are more often known for their absence of the person -- the alienation of the individual and disruption of community.
Permanent versus Ephemeral in public art
I'd like to return to David Antin's essay, "Fine Furs," to explore public art as a specific form rather than theme or purpose. I've been exploring this general idea all semester in consideration of a potential public art project, as well as during my introduction in February of Eric Lorberer of Rain Taxi Review of Books and language poet Barrett Watten who appeared for our BathHouse Reading Series event.
Typically, when we think of public art it's some kind of permanent installation that requires approval by various community stakeholders and bureaucratic layers of municipal government. That's especially true if it's in a public space or on a private space that's overseen by a historic district or redevelopment zone, or frankly anything that requires a permitting process for aesthetic consideration. Art installed on a public building is sometimes further scrutinized. What is the effect of having so many hands in the pot?
In his essay, "Fine Furs," David Antin describes his involvement in two kinds of public art projects -- both ephemeral and permanent. Both illustrate a case study in different receptions for art forms.
He arranged to write a poem in the sky above San Diego with bi-planes. The poem in his estimation would be, "a commercial that isn't selling."
He envisioned this to create an event followed by dialogue.
"I was counting on a certain randomness of interest among the onlookers. Some would know about the skypoem in advance and come to a certain viewing place where they'd be waiting for it, because they'd read about it or been invited. Some might drift in when they saw the others gathering. Some might happen to be looking u while they were walking on the beach or driving on the highway. Some might pick it up in the middle or at the end, and some might leave before the end because they had to or because they didn't care to stay. And I liked it that way."
The lines would read:
IF WE GET IT TOGETHER
(pause)
CAN THEY TAKE IT APART
(pause)
The poem required no permits or governments or citizen input, just money, which is not the case with permanent installations.
He was invited by a consultant in a Miami art in public spaces program to submit a proposal for a public installation at the Miami International Airport in 1985. His concept was to run an uncut newswire over monitors in a waiting area that was randomly interrupted with segments of poetry, one-liners and aphorisms, sometimes in English and sometimes Spanish. "My idea was that the news was something like an airport. Predictable in general and surprising in detail."
The work started in 1986. He secured approvals from the Associated Press for the newswire and then found a software program to perform the machinations of what he envisioned. He could have been the first poet in the world to have a maintenance contract with an airport, he said.
But getting clearance form the Miami airport's advisory boards and integrating it with the airport's master plan in concert with the Miami Art in Public Places program, unanswered letters, unanticipated costs, unanticipated collaborators assigned by the board -- and finally the project stalled and was killed.
What happened? It wasn't the costs, since the whole thing would have about $20,000 to $30,000. It was something else. It was the duration, Antin surmised in his essay. "It could have gone on for years, for as long as the Miami International Airport lasted, as long as the AP wire continued to transmit and phone company lines persisted in working. Skypoems are gone in twenty minutes. And this is the major point of most of the issues surrounding public art. Permanence."
No one really knows who the public is or what it wants or needs. There are many people who claim to act on the public's behalf. And no one is sure what space belongs to them, he says. Usually it's the space that's discarded and leftover. Rights of ways, parks, streets. There's so little of it, that any artwork on it is seriously debated by all constituencies. As Antin says: once something is going to be permanent everybody cares about it.
Typically, when we think of public art it's some kind of permanent installation that requires approval by various community stakeholders and bureaucratic layers of municipal government. That's especially true if it's in a public space or on a private space that's overseen by a historic district or redevelopment zone, or frankly anything that requires a permitting process for aesthetic consideration. Art installed on a public building is sometimes further scrutinized. What is the effect of having so many hands in the pot?
In his essay, "Fine Furs," David Antin describes his involvement in two kinds of public art projects -- both ephemeral and permanent. Both illustrate a case study in different receptions for art forms.
He arranged to write a poem in the sky above San Diego with bi-planes. The poem in his estimation would be, "a commercial that isn't selling."
He envisioned this to create an event followed by dialogue.
"I was counting on a certain randomness of interest among the onlookers. Some would know about the skypoem in advance and come to a certain viewing place where they'd be waiting for it, because they'd read about it or been invited. Some might drift in when they saw the others gathering. Some might happen to be looking u while they were walking on the beach or driving on the highway. Some might pick it up in the middle or at the end, and some might leave before the end because they had to or because they didn't care to stay. And I liked it that way."
The lines would read:
IF WE GET IT TOGETHER
(pause)
CAN THEY TAKE IT APART
(pause)
The poem required no permits or governments or citizen input, just money, which is not the case with permanent installations.
He was invited by a consultant in a Miami art in public spaces program to submit a proposal for a public installation at the Miami International Airport in 1985. His concept was to run an uncut newswire over monitors in a waiting area that was randomly interrupted with segments of poetry, one-liners and aphorisms, sometimes in English and sometimes Spanish. "My idea was that the news was something like an airport. Predictable in general and surprising in detail."
The work started in 1986. He secured approvals from the Associated Press for the newswire and then found a software program to perform the machinations of what he envisioned. He could have been the first poet in the world to have a maintenance contract with an airport, he said.
But getting clearance form the Miami airport's advisory boards and integrating it with the airport's master plan in concert with the Miami Art in Public Places program, unanswered letters, unanticipated costs, unanticipated collaborators assigned by the board -- and finally the project stalled and was killed.
What happened? It wasn't the costs, since the whole thing would have about $20,000 to $30,000. It was something else. It was the duration, Antin surmised in his essay. "It could have gone on for years, for as long as the Miami International Airport lasted, as long as the AP wire continued to transmit and phone company lines persisted in working. Skypoems are gone in twenty minutes. And this is the major point of most of the issues surrounding public art. Permanence."
No one really knows who the public is or what it wants or needs. There are many people who claim to act on the public's behalf. And no one is sure what space belongs to them, he says. Usually it's the space that's discarded and leftover. Rights of ways, parks, streets. There's so little of it, that any artwork on it is seriously debated by all constituencies. As Antin says: once something is going to be permanent everybody cares about it.
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