Richard Curtis and Chris Mansel

What follows is a conversation between Richard Curtis and Chris Mansel inspired by the e-mail and manifesto that appeared at 9th St. Labs earlier this month. For reference I am including the original pieces before the conversation. Here as well are websites of Chris Mansel's writing:
http://chrismansel.blogspot.com
http://themanselreport.blogspot.com

(Editor's note: The following is excerpted from an e-mail from Richard Curtis. I sent him the link to David Byrne's online journal. I was interested in how Richard felt about some things that Byrne had to say about performance art, particularly regarding Marina Abramovic and Miranda July. We discussed Abramovic in person, but Richard covers some of the things we discussed in his e-mail below and adds a manifesto.)

Richard Curtis's website: failureoflanguage.com

David Byrne's online journal: journal.davidbyrne.com

Miranda July's website: mirandajuly.com




I would imagine it's pretty hard to actually get David Byrne
to respond "in person" to an email or other form of
communication. Not that he wouldn't want to engage
each of his readers like that... About like trying to
get five minutes with Barrack Obama.

Miranda July is an interesting artist. I really loved
Me and You and Everyone We Know, the feature length
film she did. She's pretty great. Although it's
sometimes disheartening to see she and I are the same
age. When I see that I just think to myself, " I need
to go to California or New York, damnit!!!!!! I am
just spinning my wheels here!"

She does have interactive components to her work.
Web-based mostly... which is something Byrne hasn't
even begun to touch on. The democratizing of
information and image, and thus the dissemination of
power and exchange, (which he is participating in thru
blog and webradio) through the internet is really
being capitalized by many artists. I don't like this
form of interconnectivity as much. The human element
is too important to me.

Cyber networks of collected autonomous subjects,
extensions of our presence as "cyborg" bodies... This
is a kind of performance. (One that I think is
replacing our analog performing bodies) Performance
exists without its definition in art context. We are
constantly performing a shifting multitude of
subjectivities. Performance only exists
co-extensively, as a collective enterprise. Even
private or solitary activities have implications in
the realm of inter-relation.

The point I was trying to make about 'performance art
proper' is that it is an extension of the
specialization of art constructed by the capitalist
drive to segment and package cultural production. That
is why, as much as people like Allen Kaprow were/are
pushing for a re-unification of art practice into a
post-media practice, art cannot transcend media in
capitalist frameworks. The cultures they cite as
examples are of "primitive" or indigenous groups of
people. But, these peoples were not creating rituals
for the same reasons we do. We are inherently secular.
The "whole art" experience of those peoples who did
not distinguish among media were/are not creating art
as we know of it. Interaction and participation are
not negotiated by these people, it is understood as
imperatives, like eating. It is a form of collectively
worshiping the moment. No money is exchange for the
services of one person's specialized painting and
another's specialized costume design. It is a
collective enterprise...

Whether Western contemporary performance art
incorporates public interaction, participation, or
other ways of restructuring the art/viewer
relationship, it is still called "performance art".

To my earlier exclamation that I should run off to LA
or NYC... I am admittedly longing to fit into the
capitalist framework I am trying to critique. There is
a strong push-pull to want to change the structure and
understanding of others in the structure, and the
drive to measure my "success" as an artist by how well
I "perform" as an agent of it.

My interest to create that moment of "art as lived
experience" dabbles in many forms, from interactive,
to installation, to sound work, to painting, etc. But,
again, they are feeble attempts. They are
automatically a failure of language. Because it is an
impossible task.

So, where does that leave anyone? Or, cultural
production? Arthur Danto proclaimed (20 years ago) the
"end of art"... and yet it is still being produced.
That's because, beyond the politics of art there is
still the overriding need for expression,
self-as-collective, collective-as-self,
autonomy-in-unity. Coextension.


I have a manifesto I have been
meaning to share with you. I intentionally wrote it as
a kind of Dada throw-back with a post modern twist.


The Art of Coextension

I hereby declare a moratorium on all art that is bound
by object, confined to space, stagnant and left to
collect the ancient dust of museums and little white
boxes. I announce the death of art that piddles in the
strictly aesthetic world of space, trapped by concerns
over materiality. I stand firmly against preciousness
and craftiness. Materiality is unsatisfying!

I hereby declare art is but the theater of
relationships, of connectivity, of the conversation or
argument between two people. It is multiplicitous and
ever expanding. It is the experiment of life enacted
with precision and intension. There is purposefulness
in the actions and breadth of concept. The time for
tinkering unmindfully has past.

I hereby declare all ways of working, all forms of
expression, are of an equal footing in the pursuit of
building connections. The object is still reasonable
only when it is merely a rung in the ladder reaching
up to the highest potential of desire, to connect. But
so can gesture be reasonable, a sound, a word, a
moment, a taste, a scent, a found relic. All things
are reduced to the service of finding connections.

I hereby declare curating, educating, protesting,
cooking, and any other form of engagement designed to
foster relationships are the tools most suitable for
art making. Processes that kindle the rhizome of
interconnectivity that exists in human lives are these
(which cause desire).

I hereby declare the purpose for these desires is to
bring awareness to the net of relationships that
characterizes our lives. The human potential for
cross-modal thinking, of drawing ideas from multiple
sources into a cohesive sense of the world, makes this
art the highest potential form of expression.

I hereby declare a new dimension. No longer confined
to the surface of things(2D). No longer satisfied by
the mere arrangement of space(3D). No longer awe
struck by compartmenting time (4D). These are the
dimensions to which art were once relegated. No
longer! The new dimension is COEXTENSION. Coextension
is the space where two bodies overlap. This
overlapping is the basis of connectivity. This
connectivity is the basis of forming relationships (of
desire).

I hereby declare the realization of coextension is the
highest achievement of this new art. It is what I
strive to attain. It is what must ultimately define
the world.

Richard Curtis




A Brief Reaction to Richard Curtis On Performance



I have the highest respect for Richard Curtis and his performance art though I have never seen it. I have however read poetry alongside him. I am only reacting to what he has written here. It is not my intention to be rude or insulting or even complimentary, just to express myself.


"I announce the death of art that piddles in the
strictly aesthetic world of space, trapped by concerns
over materiality. I stand firmly against preciousness
and craftiness. Materiality is unsatisfying!"


The American Heritage Dictionary defines materiality in two ways, one is, "Physical substance; matter." If physical substance is unsatisfying than I assume we are dealing with sound or disposable art. Richard Curtis is well known for his ability in using sound but once it is used and the waves rush over the listener its remains do in some ways have a substance even if it is what they carry with them in their memory and it is debateable whether or not that has preciousness or craftiness. You can't pick your audience.


"I hereby declare all ways of working, all forms of
expression, are of an equal footing in the pursuit of
building connections."


This sounds to me like someone who has never had to work day after day after day. It is important to seperate work from expression unless you are paid to do one or the other or both. Allen Ginsberg asked the question, "When can I go into a supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?" Every action is a form of expression. I have been paid before to clean out a trash compactor in the same two hour span of time I was also asked to help apprehend a shoplifter from the premises. I don't know about pursuit of connections but they both were means of expressions and in some ways were on equal footing depending on your opinion.


- Chris Mansel


For Chris, with much respect for his work:

1. The language of the "manefesto" was intentionally
over-the-top. In some places it feels even
contradictory and absurdist. It is as much a parody of
manefestos as it is a device to make an over-arching
point. The point I am referring to is the definition
of a new direction that I see in my own work, as well
as the work of others.

2. "Materiality", in the sense I am referring to, is
as co-opted jargon used in art school academia to
refer to the physical sense of an object (of art).
"Dwelling on the mere physical aesthetics of an object
is unsatisfying" it could have read.

3. The "work" I am referring to, which you cite, is
meant to be understood as "art work". All ways of
creating interrelative bonds (the chosen persuit of
art as defined in the manefesto) are equal- meaning
there should be no distinction between higher and
lower forms of art making (an old arguement). But,
extending that old arguement into forms of cultural
production once thought of as seperated from art.
Cooking is a prime example of this. Several artist
have taken the act of cooking and recontextualized it
to become a relational tool within an art setting
(cooking and serving food for a group of people in a
gallery setting).

4. You, perhaps inadvertently, raised an interesting
point regarding the intentionality of art. When you
stated that it sounded like someone who never had to
work day to day (I'm paraphrasing), it seems you took
my use of the word "work" to mean "job". Again, I was
referring initially to artwork. But, your comment
actually is a nice feedback on my idea of art as a
way of being, art as lived experience. In this sense,
your job can be your art if you so deem it and work
with that purposefulness in mind. In fact, if you did
all things throughout your life with equal
intentionality, then the separations between art and
life would desolve. Of course I am speaking in ideals.

And before you critique my use of "intentionality" I
will say that I am referring to yet another bit of art
school speak. I am using it to describe how people
define what is art from what is not. There is a
difference between someone working at a grocery store,
for instance, and an artist who is performing the act
of working in a grocery store. Both have the same job.
But, the degree of intention is what seperates their
"work". Therefore, if you do all things with the same
level of intention, "I am an artist performing the
activity of taking out the trash...brushing my
teeth...bathing my dog..." the mundane activities of
life become your work, your art.

This is a way of beginning. Sure, it is a cumbersome
way forward. Trying to dissolve the distinctions of
cultural production that have been so rigidly
delineated for so long is a laborious task. One that
not everyone agrees, especially the current art
establishment, is even necessary or possitive.

I hope that clarifies some of my points. Again, the
manefesto is not to be taken so seriously. The
implications are sincere but the delivery is meant to
be problematic and over the top.

Much Love,
Rich


Chris responds:

"A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is..."

Hunter S. Thompson, age 16



Richard,

I understand absurdity as I have associated with many intellectuals and artists over the years and I have discovered one thing, they speak in quotations and grand equivalents and wear sports jackets and drive newer cars than most and seem to hold themselves in a light above others but still manage to drive home on the same road I do and read the same books I do. The real absurdity is believing for a second that a college education can guarantee or entitle one to pontificate or elabaorate. Joseph Conrad wrote, "Art is long and life is short and success is very far off." What is success? That college education or the better cut of sport jacket? An audience? Publication? Shall we discuss the highly paid self-trained artisan?
You refer to a definition of a new direction, well by stopping to consider the fork in the road a few cars have passed you by but don't be alarmed because none of those riding in those cars have what you have inside of you Richard, not a damn one. By materiality I understand your meaning I certianly do, but you must understand that most of my life I have had a hard enough time with struggling to obtain food and medicine, especially since I have been married with a child the last twelve years. At one part my wife and I were living on five hundred dollars a month, this was during the time we read together in Nashville at Joe Speer's gathering and the recording of Alabama Dust. So when I read Materiality I think naturally of survival. Call it a knee jerk reaction or not but poverty which knows no color can lend one to violence when confronted with words.
You reference art school academia and I reach for a photograph of cave drawings or the dialects you learned in your travels. Niether one needed the co-opted jargon. A young painter doesn't need a particular professor's opinion of how to paint just to get another opinion from another professor the next semester. I know you are only referring to what you were taught but surely you saw through most of it as you turned the page.
I understand the work as you mean it. The work, the blank page as I have struggled with, the merciless demon that has hounded me to attempt suicide before. As far as cooking and serving food in a gallery setting this is something I have little experience with since I have usually no place in such an event. Either uninvited or unwanted or just no desire to act accordingly. The terms are as described by Wallace Shawn in the film, My Dinner With Andre, as a "New York evening". A soiree I believe they are called. A salon or gathering. Whether in an alley in a town like Tuscumbia or on an island off the coast of America like Manhattan. Celebrated or not with wine and cheese or just a simple turn of the pages or years later on a shelf the work is judged simply by the next.
People define what is art and what is not by their level of understanding or ignorance, or simple avoidance of the subject at all. There is a difference between someone working in a grocery store and someone acting like working in a grocery store if the person acting like it is doing so on a stage or what passes as a stage. If they are acting it in the grocery store they are a nuisance and should be stomped on the way out the door. The work in the grocery store is demeaning and too poorly paid to have someone doing so for any other reason, even art.
I was working at Wal-Mart years ago and a national politican came in and everyone stopped what they were doing, cashiers everyone. This individual walked over to everyone and held out his hand for it to be shook and eventually he held it out to me and I just looked at him. His smiled faded and it quickly went to a grimace as if to say, "People are looking, shake my fucking hand!" He said, "What's wrong buddy? Having a rough day?" I noticed his handler eyeing the crowd. I refused to speak to him and would not shake his hand and he eventually made his way to theirs and I received a bunch of dirty looks for not shaking his hand. Of course he was acting a role and I wanted no part because it offered no part for me. I didn't feel the role pertained to me and I didn't and still wouldn't believe the inclusion of the two belong.
Not once in a day at work have I ever considered one action as a work of art. I understand your point but whether struggling in pain from headaches or the pain my body has endured from epileptic seizures the last thing I feel is a process of artistry at work. I'm proud for you that you have the kind of life that affords you this kind of outlook. I'm thrity-nine years old, I've moved fifty-six times in my life and my body is worn out. I have been writing since I was eight years old and I can say with all honesty that it has been anything but absurdity that has brought me to where I am today.
The most thing out of all of this Richard is to follow your bliss as Joseph Campbell suggested. As Jake suggests read The Heart Sutra. As Ginsberg wrote in his poeersonals Ad, "Going to see lady Psychoatrist who says make time in your life for someone you can call darling." I say just stop and think.

Only you know what you can do,

- Chris

IMMERSION

(e-mail conversation between Jim Leftwich and Jake Berry between 1/16/06 – 2/06/06)


LEFTWICH: i like handwritten elements in visual works, particularly
when those visual works take their final form as computer
images.handwriting is a trace of the human, very personal and
vulnerable. i see it - and feel it - vanishing, being
supplanted, not only all around me but inside as well.
thanks for sending these.


BERRY: I'm gravitating more toward handwritten work - definitely a trace of the human, the organic. I still tend to write all my poetry by hand first then type it.

Of course computers are an aspect of nature as well since they
are created by natural creatures - but it does get so abstract at
times that I have to take a long walk among trees and other animals
just to remember where it all started.


LEFTWICH: sure, our technologies are as natural as anthills and beaver dams, no argument there - but the relationship of human being to human hand is very different from the relationship of human being to keyboard. sometimes changes occur as cumulative processes, the new not only extends but also incorporates the old. other times changes occur as exclusions of what has come before, as if the new and the old should (or even could) be mutually exclusive. the idea that the new supplants what precedes it risks discarding some very valuable aspects of human experience. handwriting seems to be vanishing.
i'm not sure that's a good thing.


BERRY: being human is a very questionable condition. we
can be human in so many ways and there is so much
overlap between being human or being any other
animal that when we talk about being human, or take
into concepts like body, soul, dasein, and so forth
we already pretend to distance ourselves from
ourselves far enough to make an assertion about
our condition. In these situations what we are doing
is imagining ourselves in particular ways. I think
computers are the by-product of one these ways
of imagining. certainly for you and I our hands are
more a part of being human than our computers, but
what about Stephen Hawking and others who rely
on computers that respond to the slightest gesture?
they might feel almost as connected to their computers as
to the parts of the body with which they were born.

we are indeed losing handwriting, and a multitude
of other disciplines we were taught in school. we are
allowing ourselves to become so fascinated by
technology that we are crippled without it. Perhaps
Hawking's illness has presented us with what we
may become in the future, with computers hardwired
to our brains to perform all the functions we now perform
with our bodies. It would be tragic I think because
computers should be an addition to our capabilities
not a replacement. It isn't a matter or either/or its
both/and. I always want to do things, create works
that are dependent on nothing more than imagination
and something to make a mark with, or better yet,
voice alone is an infinite instrument.


LEFTWICH: i also want to create works that are dependent on
nothing - maybe not even imagination, just process
and engagement, clarity in the moment, making
marks or sounds.


BERRY: great idea. maybe set a sheet of manuscript
paper outside in the weather for a few days and
whatever marks result are the score. Or just as
it begins to rain let the first few drops hit the page
and where they hit are the notes. Or just making
marks on the page while distracted by something
else, or more to your point, while distracted by nothing,
not even the work you are doing, invisible clarity.

LEFTWICH: yes, let the weather write the score.
maybe this spring i'll go outside in a big rainstorm
with some manuscript paper, sit in the yard in
the rain, moving the paper around, as a kind
of collaboration with the weather.

any thoughts, from you or from hank, of musicality in
visual poetry (in collage poetry, for example)?


BERRY: musicality in visual poetry? that's one to think about.

I suppose the question would be: do you hear visual
poetry when you see/read it?

also I think of synesthesia, hearing images, tasting letters,
seeing sound, etc. I think most of us in the so called
"experimental" end of things are probably synesthetic to
some extent.


LEFTWICH: all the senses are varieties of touch. mostly what
touches us is one wave pattern or another. i think
synaesthesia is primary, and the categories are
secondary. as for musicality specifically - visual
syntax equates to visual rhythm, like a pulse,
or breathing - clear wave forms, and i think we
hear them if we want to - in the body, proprioceptive,
experimental, through the full sensorium. to my
way of thinking it's easier to get from visual poetry
to music than it is to get from conventional lineated
verse to music - but the music may be closer to
something by steve reich (or to a spaceweather song)
than it is to traditional delineations of melody and
harmony.

some so-called word salads seem to me very similar
sonically to contemporary music, with little or no
trace remaining of melody (or measure) or harmony
(or vowel and consonant correspondence).

the musicality of pulsing aggregates, perhaps?


BERRY: reading through several of the space sounds sites, in
particular one at the University of Iowa I believe, one
can see visual representations of the sounds as well
as listen to them. all of the sounds are the results of
the collision of forces - solar waves with electrons in
the jovian magnetosphere for instance. so it is the
touching of forces, which are simultaneously wave
and particle depending on the question you ask. and
the results of these contacts can be represented in
ways that can be experienced by all our senses - its
just a matter of transferring the data from one set
of equations to another.

I think, yes, visual forms, whether by the name of
visual poetry or painting or whatever are easily
"heard", or for that matter transferred to any sense
once we recognize that it is not only possible, but
probably already happening. It’s a matter of
conditioning.

Word salads, or long works like your Doubt or
Argüelles' Pantograph and others must be read
as a kind of ebb and flow, as clusters of sound,
vision and meaning. You can lift individual phrases
and try to infer something about the whole from
them but that would be like trying to explain the
entire ecosystem with only a tree branch. In the
face of those kinds of work one can only immerse
oneself and let the experience happen to you
in whatever way your senses are capable. Again,
it's a matter of forces colliding and the result of
their collision.


LEFTWICH: i bought some manuscript paper a couple of weeks
ago and used it to print some visual works. the
visual pieces become scores, whether useful or
interesting as scores is another matter, but they
are certainly scores. i sent them to jukka, just to
see what his response would be. he easily could
have come back with something like, this is not
how it is done. but he didn't do that, he responded
more positively than i could have imagined, and
he started generating notation from the visuals
which he then printed over my work, so my
visuals and his notations appear on the same
sheet of manuscript paper. still, the question would
be, what is this? is it merely another kind of visual
poetry, one which incorporates musical notation?
jukka thinks these are actual scores, performable
not only by computer but also by musicians.

you mention immersing oneself and letting the
experience happen as a strategy for reading, and
i agree entirely - but now i am thinking about the
same attitude and process as a strategy for writing.


BERRY: These sound fascinating. I'd love to see them complete
with Jukka's notation, and of course I'd love to hear
them! Jukka knows the people who could probably perform
them and now with Complex Lemon he has a label.

I think notated manuscript is always visual as well as
a charted music. I have often studied scores for their
visual beauty and I think Jukka had a revelation while
examining a score, though he should tell you the story
because I would leave out important details.

And I agree that immersion as a path to writing is
a wonderful approach. There comes with it the
notion of sacrifice, of baptism, symbolic death,
loss of self in the burial. The opening poems of
Brambu Drezi book one are all about that loss
of self, burial and what rises from that ground. Not
that I was thinking it through that clearly when I
wrote. it was more a matter of letting the old
structures pass by way of loss in the depths
of various musics, and the collective mind
generally.


LEFTWICH: i'm guessing you've seen the scores improvisations texts
blog, so now have a picture of what we're thinking about.
it seems like something you would be very attuned to, and
i hope you'll want to contribute to the blog.

i agree that scores are often a kind of visual art, and even
at times a kind of visual poetry. these distinctions get a little
blurry after a while. i was looking at a book about modern
dance the other day, specifically at a dance score by lucinda
childs, very delicate and geometrical, seems to me it could be
used in many contexts, to produce sounds or events or both.
this makes me think of the fluxus event scores, which are
all texts, instructions, though they function as scores in
that anyone can perform them, not only their author.

the early pages of brambu are certainly involved with
immersion - maybe even with a kind of annihilation, a kind
of psychic sparagmos, a tearing-apart of the self in all of
its constructed solidity in preparation for a kind of rebirth,
transformation in the body. i don't think many of us actively
seek that experience in full knowledge of what it is and how
it works. once we know it, it is even difficult to advocate it.
best to let others find it as they will, or be as it were overtaken
and given the experience - against their will, always against
the will, since it is the self, primary site of will, which is to
be utterly annihilated. early on, i thought i knew what i was
seeking, but i didn't know - and if i had known, i probably would
have stopped. now i really don't - can't - advocate such a search.
i'll try to help make the territory. i don't have any choice in
that. but that's it, at least for now. some will come upon it and
find nothing, or less than nothing. that's fine with me. others
will come and find what's there. i will not have had anything
to do with preparing them. we work in very strange territory.
there may be a sense of fulfillment, by which i mean only the
sense of being alive and in the world, but i don't often find any
sense of contentment, of being comfortable in all of this.
everything we do is a kind of failure, a necessary kind of opening.


BERRY: yes, I think I've seen most, if not all of what you have posted of the scores. extraordinarily provocative work! Jukka suggested I might actually try to perform some of these, so I'm looking at it both ways - as visual art that sounds, and as something I might interpret as sound in some way. What I am trying to do is sort through all these things and see which I'd like to try. Some of them are probably beyond my grasp - that is the notes are structured in such a way that I could not play them on guitar or piano because I'm not fast enough and I read music very slowly at best. So I might use pages or sections of pages as starting points and references for improvisation. That is, I might play or interpret the page and that would set the tonal range from which I could improvise. The point is that if I perform a piece I'd like it to sound similar, though by no means identical, each time I performed it. And I need to show these to the guys in the band I'm playing in right now, The Ascension Brothers, to see if we might perform some of them together.

Curious you should mention fluxus event scores, earlier this evening while I was cleaning up my desktop (the computer desktop) I ran across some fluxus scores I had downloaded as .pdf file a while back and had forgotten about them. wonderful stuff. and Jukka has several compositions that work in the same way. They are written texts that almost anyone could perform. The distinctions do vanish, the categories are only provisional anyway - it's just that the categories get taught in schools generation after generation until we come to believe they that can be understood in only one way. I don't think that the artists, or even the first teachers, intend for this to happen. It's followers, people who need a basis from which to live that solidify the contexts and make an orthodoxy of them. Perhaps this is a biological inevitability, and equally inevitable that someone comes along to shatter the categories.

oh yes, the opening pages of Brambu are definitely what I would call immersion in the light of our recent discussions, though I probably would have called it something else at the time. I remember that I was so overwhelmed by certain experiences, and levels of experience that writing poetry in that mode seemed to be the only valid approach. looking back, and I was aware of this somewhat, I think the poem begins in chaos or hell - "legion swollen faces" - the seizures of hypnogogic anxiety at age ten. I was waking up to the origin myths at that age without the words to describe such a thing - it was a kind of primitive condition. And I agree, it is something you'd hesitate to advocate, especially to a kid, because just as you are developing an idea of your self as unique suddenly it is being destroyed by the full immediate presence of all these others. Nonetheless, it may be necessary. In a culture that is notoriously negligent of initiation rituals, we might invent our own, or more likely the initiation happens to us just as we are arriving at the threshold of identity. It is as if something inside is saying, "Not so fast, if you believe that you are so unique, if you are going to start creating an ego, you'd better consider the fact that you'll be living a lie."

In a culture where value is wealth and wealth can only be obtained and maintained with enormous self-confidence and ambition you'll tend to develop a fairly strong ego anyway. But there is always that doubt, all those others that make themselves present despite your best attempts to deny them. Eventually you have to make a choice, to believe the materialist paradigm or remain open to all possibilities. If you choose the former you might succeed, even on a grand scale, in the paradigm - but you will lose your own soul(s), so to speak. If you chose the later you will almost certainly be a failure in the society, but you will live a much more vivid life, and possibly even become aware of reality in some fundamental way.

I was reading the opening pages of the introduction to Hölderlin's Hyperion and Selected Poems, the German Library edition. The intro is by Eric L. Santer, who edited the volume. He quotes Walter Benjamin extensively, who arrives, by way of discussing Baudelaire and the beginnings of modernity at a term: traumatic shock - which he (Benjamin) stole from Freud for his own purposes. It's defined as a condition that results from a set of experiences, chief among them is the individual confronted with the urban mass in which no one returns his gaze. Without this immediate confirmation the individual becomes something very different, and may perhaps be annihilated altogether. And while we hear all about us the roar of the new information age, post-industrialism, post-modernism, I think the reality may be a bit more mundane. What we have is modernism plus. The increasing ubiquity of computer and internet technology around the world is similar to the spread of the printing press. The ideas don't change so much as the accessibility to ideas, modernism is perpetuated on a large scale. In this case it's a spread of the virus of modernity in the form of Americanism, which means commodification of everything. Anything that denies this orthodoxy, that is unsalable, is dismissed by the general mass so infatuated with the latest toys. It's a difficult position to be in because the only way to recover from "traumatic shock" is to surrender to the disease, the glory in possession, especially self-possession. However this is not actual recovery, but acceptance of an addiction. If you struggle against that addiction, and to the degree in which you struggle against it, you only intensify the shock and invite repeated daily blows.

Is detachment an answer? Probably not, because if you remove yourself from the world in the old sense of the hermit or monastic you carry the seeds of the disease with you into the wilderness where you can inflate the ego to god-like proportions. You can neither accept the disease nor run from it. Instead you take the blows but develop a means to react from the multiple perspectives that are probably closer to the reality of the human species is when it isn't playing these mind games of mass hallucination.

Ironically, clawing our way out of the jungle, we have recreated the jungle in abstract, resulting in a more physically comfortable jungle, but a more psychically dangerous one - in which it is impossible to discern reality from illusion. The beast that is out to devour us appears as a great consolation, a new hero, a new solution to our problems, only to reveal itself, once we are in its maw as the ravenous beast that we have recreated out of the old conditioning where we were always prey and had to defend ourselves to save our own lives and that of our kin and clan. Now the lives we are fighting for are the lives of our minds, constantly set upon by new beasts - the modern culture, which is itself just the intensification of civilization as city state: abstracted, specialized society.

The first thing to do is annihilate the self. This removes the delusion and provides the beast with a more difficult target. If there is no single you to market to, the market either becomes more multiple and complex or it dies. However, it is anti-intuitive for the market to do this. What the market wants to do is reduce to the lowest common denominator. One commodity with many names. One political party with many faces. Mergers. Acquisitions. The heroes and villains are simplified to caricatures that are easy to digest. There is no longer any need for imagination since that work is being done for us in exchange for a portion of the abstracted product that we obtain by full participation in the delusion. If the individual is annihilated, however, and the control mechanism is annihilated (i.e. words and images are torn from their roots in abstract culture and returned to sound and image floating freely in the active imagination) then freedom becomes a real possibility.


LEFTWICH: i think this is a good approach to these scores. you could
start anywhere and find something to serve as a kind of
theme for improvisational variations, probably not a melody
as that is conventionally understood, but maybe an aggregate
of notes with some consistently defined routes connecting
them. an aggregate of notes could be read or played as a
spiral in two directions, for example, or the notes in the
aggregate could be connected with diagonals, and the diagonals
could be connected to form a kind of constellation. all of these
could be used as routes, sequencing devices, for determining
the order of the notes. other markings on the page could be
used to determine other qualities - relationships to time
signatures, keys, etc. all you really need to determine how
you would like to read the page. then read it the same way
every time you play the "song".

4 or 5 years ago i wrote a series of event scores using a book
on ballet in french as source text and translating it homeophonically.
searching for similar sounds in english produced a kind of disjunct,
surreal text, most of which couldn't possibly be performed, but i
wrote it all as a set of instructions. perhaps not exactly what the
fluxus folks had in mind, but i suspect it isn't too far astray. however
that may be, it was fun to write. i published the whole series in a
magazine called bananafish. i think i sent you a copy.

i think you're right that the categories are a pedagogical convention,
not even necessary in that context, but useful for professionals in
the field. how things are done is not always even related to how those
same things are taught. it may be more of a cultural than a biological
inevitability, though humans generally do seem prone to it.

i think these initiation rituals you mention are absolutely necessary if
we are concerned to find out who we are and what we are living in,
but we really shouldn't expect much assistance with this from the
dominant culture. a society as complex as ours requires a extreme
homogenization of experience, and the immersion experience is
paradoxically an annihilation of the self and a radically subjective
experience. too much of this kind of thing would absolutely destroy
the society's ability to function as it is currently configured. while you
and i might see that a very desirable, we can’t expect the ruling elites
to share out point of view. thus the general lack of significant rites
of initiation into what should still be called the mysteries (the study
and application of which would be the alchemical great work).

i never was able to buy the materialist paradigm. i'm not entirely sure
why that has been the case, but it's been true since very early on. the
veil slipped just enough, it seems like even earlier than adolescence, and
the whole mythic master narrative has simply never made sense to me.
i didn't choose to go to war against it, as it must often seem to some of
the people i know. i just never could find myself at home in it, that's all.
i get the feeling, have since i first encountered brambu, that something
similar to this is also true for you.

your idea about modernism seems accurate. we have a kind of turbo-modernism,
modernity on meth. and modernism is increasingly americanism, the triumph of
commodification, the cycle of life reduced to the cycle of production and consumption.

i understand the idea that to struggle against traumatic shock is to participate in and
perpetuate it. the old remedy, the one i bought into in the 70s, was to get out of the
way, to cultivate a strategy of non-participation, specifically non-participation in the
normative economic formula. this has worked and made sense for most of the past
30 years, not all but most, but i'm afraid it has run its course as a practical or even
a reasonable strategy - much less as an ethical one, which was its original allure. now
there is no getting out of the way. the idea itself seems slightly obscene - absurd and
delusional. dangerously anachronistic, perhaps. it is something of a crisis currently for
me, figuring out how to navigate the near future, how to find a place for myself for
the next 20 years or so.

your idea of the annihilated self reminds me of the nomadological war machine, the
rhizome internalized. we might steal the military slogan, be an army of one, and
reimagine it through whitman as a one which contains multitudes. i think you're
absolutely right - the market will have no answer for this. the plural self will not
fit snugly into a demographic model of consumers.

i'm not at all certain what we are witnessing culturally these days. on the political
front, things are more transparently horrible than ever in my lifetime, worse even
than nixon and reagan. at the same time, and possibly because of the transparent
arrogance and cynicism of the current administration, people all of the world, even
in america, seem to be awakening to the underlying causes and supports of these
current abuses of power. things look ugly, quite often very ugly, but we may be
on the verge of a radical opening.


BERRY: I remember the homeophonic translations of the ballet book in bananafish. It's still here among the piles of books and papers. (Sometimes I honestly wish I had a find command for the contents of my office/studio.) I remember being fascinated that that were set up as instructions and thought that you were pushing the instructional composition to its radical limit - a performance that could not be performed. And since the text was matching sounds instead of meaning, it was, from the usual perspective (what Tim Gaze calls the particle aspect of writing, the semantic aspect) also impossible to mean. In a sense it came from a semantic nowhere, but had its full meaning in sound, yet there it was printed. A nice tension there. So perhaps it could just be performed as vocalization or sung. I think its very important that people understand how the piece was created - as much so as the way, say, Cage's mesostics were created.

Regarding categories, Bob Grumman and I used to argue about this. I don't want to try and repeat his argument because I know I'll get it wrong, but I was very much opposed to categorization and he thought it was necessary, and yes, perhaps biological (I think, forgive me Bob if I'm putting words in your mouth). I suspect we'd have a similar argument today. Categories are useful as a way of breaking things down to make them easier to assimilate. For instance, you learn all the parts of the body, all the systems, then how they all work together. Unfortunately it seems like we get stuck somewhere along the way. You go to the doctor with a cough and he gives you medicine for your lungs, but the medicine has horrible side effects that wreck your stomach. Knowledge by way of category alone at some point forgets that reality is not made of categories, that it's just something we do as a means of analysis and intellectual understanding. No single thing exists of itself - which is another reason why there can be no singular self. That concept ignores reality. How often have you stepped outside to discover that everything had vanished except one tree? Everything else was gone, all the houses, grass, bushes, whatever. It won't happen. The world is either there or it isn't and it can only be disassembled in the laboratory or the laboratory of the abstracting mind.

Which beings us back to the initiation rituals. One thing an initiation does is simultaneously affirm the reality of the individual (the rite of passage into adulthood) and by the same means integrates the individual into the community, one is an individual because he or she is part of the community. But this only works on a very small scale. In a global culture dominated by an obsession with material wealth there will be rites of passage but they are so poorly articulated and subconsciously driven that it manifests as mutual antagonism. Even though almost every adolescent will rebel against adults as a means to becoming an adult everyone involved becomes disturbed. When they seek guidance they are either handed an old script, a dictatorial creed, or a bottle of pills. These remedies invariably fail so we struggle through until it runs its course. The same applies to middle age, old age, death. The rites are there, we actually live them, but we stumble through them blindly. We grasp for the fix, the remedy that will return us to the previous state of relative comfort instead of accepting the changes. Perhaps this is always the case with mass culture. I don't know if its feasible to study past mass cultures, their sociology, because our information is going to be too limited, but it would be interesting to know if the citizens of the Roman empire, or the Chinese dynasties had similar problems; if, at the height of their power and wealth, they abandoned what amounts to tribal rituals.

So there is Benjamin's appropriation of Freud's "traumatic shock" - the self as confronting the others who refuse to return his gaze - the isolation of modernity. There is a passage in the first book of Brambu about listening to AM radio late at night, a station in some distant location, and knowing that all over the country people were listening to the same station at the same time. We are alone, we cannot see one another or speak to one another, but we form a "community of isolation." We are together - a tribe in the darkness, sitting silent and listening to the same sounds - but we are also alone. These days I often listen to a small short wave radio, so I am part of a planetary community in my aloneness. As I write this I am listening to a radio station over the internet that originates in Venezuela. It's like you say, a turbo-modernism, hyper-modernism. Yet we are not really so distant from the tribe. One could make the case that as we sit alone in the dark and type our e-mails and listen to some distant radio station we are participating in an initiation ritual that requires us to behave as if we are individuals but which opens that individual to all possible others. By over reaching the individual collapses into the others, and more fundamentally, the individual is driven to participate in this ritual because there are, in reality, no individuals at all, just an enabling mechanism that allows all the selves and possible selves to rise, to appear. (Ah, here he is, Mr. Heidegger!)

The first time this struck me I had been reading William Barrett's Irrational Man, the Heidegger chapter, and had been sitting there for a while trying to make sense of it when suddenly I noticed the room around me. I fell out of my thoughts, out of that kind of thought blindness, and there was the cat, and the rug, and the furniture and bookcase - it was all rising into being before me. So I got a dose of what Heidegger was talking about. And although Heidegger is dealing with "being there", (dasein), there is another sensibility that comes with it. Time becomes irrelevant. Materiality is real, but it is not the material that matters, it is the presence of a thing. The way it takes life, opens up and the divisions vanish. It isn't as if you disregard names, categories, they are quite useful, but they are not the presence of the world.

Materialism seems to depend upon this sense of the world, as a group of so many things, of so many atoms, quarks, whatever, assembled to create reality. This seems awfully simplistic - and a very singular way of looking at the world. It is as if we have decided to read the world the way you read a book, by combining the letters to make syllables and words and then agreeing that these words have particular definitions - and this is called meaning. Again, very useful if you want to build a model, but it seems to do more to distance us from the world, to isolate us than to bring us into the world.

You mention the Great Work. I think this "bringing us into the world" is not different from the prima materia that is said to everywhere available and so on. But I'd like to take this discussion further by asking you how we might image, imagine, the Great Work today, without resorting to those wonderful old drawings and paintings and arcane manuscripts? I have an idea that we'll both answer this in the same way, but I think it might be important to state it explicitly to clear the air.

I was discussing the possibility of metaphysics with Gregory Vincent Saint Thomasino a couple of weeks ago - actually I said we were far too metaphysical for our own good relative to current philosophy and science. He agreed and proposed setting up a blog for a public discussion, which is what initiated the Conversari blog. So at some point I want to get Gregory into this because I admire the intensity and detail of his thinking. But for now, let's play with the Great Work a bit. Let me know what you think?


LEFTWICH: there are some big cats in this bag. i suppose
now is as good a time as any to let them out.

one thing at a time, very slowly. as slow as i
know how to go.

here is robert kelly on homeophonic translation:

“The point of the homeophonic: to hear the other as own.

“As to the homeophonic (not homophonic, not same sound, but like sound,
like enough, just like enough to get something started).

“Here there is no hegemony, no appropriation of the humiliated original text,
no bluster of meaning, no flag-waving of accuracy, no fascism of ‘what it
really means’. Instead, the substantial energy of one poem, in all the lucidity
of its sound and form, generates a resultant structure in your hearing,
another poem, and you hear.

“Language is a prison, writing is a door.

“The point is: to hear a poem that means, a poem that is as serious as
the causal poem. Causal and resultant poems — that’s a better way
than ‘original’ and ‘translation’.

“The great moment comes when you begin to read and study the
resultant poem that has come to expression through your ardent
listening. You are studying a text that no one wrote. It is pure Revelation,
a true and urgent Niemandrose of the mind. Here, more than anywhere
I know in all of literature, is the embodiment of what we can learn by
the act of writing.”

i think he's got it.
i think everyone should try this at home.
repeatedly.
for years and years.
think of it as a kind of yoga.
english-to-english translation works as well as anything else.

for the arts, categories are essential as pedagogical tools
and for curatorial purposes. for the artists, for the during
of the making, these same categories are irrelevant at
best. it's barely a point worth arguing, unless we are
discussing the classroom, the museum, the library or the
archives.

traditional functions of initiation rituals are now performed by
mass consumer culture - on a global scale. there has been a
gradual, recently accelerating, progression - degradation - of
initiation rituals, from the archaic, as you describe (small scale),
through the socialization process (on a larger scale, enacted as
rites of passage through insitutional systems - eg., the public
schools, the military), and now to a homogenization of experience
accomplished primarily via the corporate media, but also in the
form of the omnipresence of cultural icons such as wal-mart,
macdonalds, starbucks - and also, very powerfully, the forms of
popular culture - pop music, the movies, television. consensus
reality is being very carefully constructed - packaged, marketed,
and sold to the global population. this process has supplanted
the archaic initiation ritual - and its function, from the collective
perspective, is very much the same. what has been diminished
to the level of insignificance is the unique, subjective quality
of the archaic initiation experience - individuation, the sense
imparted of substantial empowerment - all of that kind of thing
is simply too dangerous, it threatens the hierarchical structure,
so it must be weakened, diluted, or eliminated altogether (thus
the packaging of rebellion and defiance marketed to youth
culture as an authentic experiential rite of passage).

any way out of this will be extreme. the extremes of the arts,
as in the practice described by kelly - psychic extremes, let's
say - blake as a precursor, along with many others, of course
- it will by definition seem a form of madness to deviate in the
extreme from the consensus reality of one's culture, even if
what one deviates into is a more complete and accurate - a
full - experience of reality. anyone who expects to be rewarded
by the dominant culture for refusing to participate in it, for
determining that one's time and energies are better spent in
the pursuit of something like self-transformation, is simply
delusional - and is probably not very far along on the path to
this transformation. even the archaic shaman was ostracized
and exiled, brought into the community for ceremonial purposes,
then returned to his hut at the edge of the forest. the great
work of the alchemists is the transformation of consciousness -
which means, by definition, the transformation of the world, of
reality (consciousness is a causal reality). the spiritual disciplines
historically are practices designed to produce transformations
of consciousness. in this sense, the writing of poetry is a
spiritual discipline. the threat of the poets to the state is that
of setting a bad example - too much freedom, insufficient
subservience, extreme deviations from the homogenized norms
of consensus reality. elimination or exclusion is unnecessary, it
suffices to simply discredit the poet in the minds of the majority.
it is very helpful if the traditional masters of the practice are
generally thought to have been insane. blake, for example -
dare we suggest that he was simply successful? i'll state it as
a fact, discredit myself in the process, and carry on laughing at
the consequences.

life is short. it's not a game and it's not a popularity contest. i
don't give a damn about william blake. i'm interested in what
poetry will accomplish during the time it is written tomorrow.
the ego doesn't believe in detachment. a part of me - what part? -
feels the need to teach it. writing helps. some kinds of writing
help. does this kind of writing help? i doubt it.


writing for the blog - for the public, let's say -
is so different from writing email to a friend.
i don't like it much, but i do think it's part of
my job, so to speak. what i just wrote has
the form of an email to you, but it is much
closer to an essay than it is to a letter. one
of the first things i encountered when i got
to the library at OSU a few years back, when
i was there for the symposium, was an email
i had written to you. it was in a vitrine. seeing
it in that context was not a pleasant experience,
but i learned a little from it. we have built an
inhuman world for ourselves, all of us. it moves
faster than we do. it eats us alive. i don't think
we need to pretend to feel comfortable with
this. poetry is a dangerous vehicle. it always
has been. there have always been some who
have known this, but most of those who claim
to know and love poetry don't even know what
i'm talking about here. you know. i know that.
i've traveled in some strange dimensions, riding
on the poem. so have you. we've been to the
same places. i'm sure of it. when i tell my
closest friends the truth even they treat it as
a kind of madness. do we really want to write
this, all the details of this, in clear declarative
sentences, and send it out into the world? i
think the answer is obvious. i haven't written
it yet. have you? the closest i have come is
the essay i published in xtant 2 - a few
thoughts on a few notes. i may never get any
closer than that in print. i leave clues and
hints, scraps of maps, in visual poems and
fractured texts. they function as opportunities
for remembering - that's all.


BERRY: I'm going to reply to last e-mail first and work my way back.

True, writing for the public, for publication, on blogs, in magazines, books, CDs or whatever is different. In some cases it requires some amount of preparation - performing a poem or song for a recording for instance, or publishing a book - the awareness of the public is forced into the process because of the mechanism of the process. In other cases you only become aware of it afterward. Pretty much all the poetry, songs, visual art I do is created initially without much thought of what a public will think, even the people that I am sure will take the time to read or listen to it. That would only check the process and prevent it from taking its own course.

What I am trying to do with the Conversari blog is break down that division between creation and preparation for presentation to the public. What gets posted there isn't art in the usual sense, but it is a revisitation to the art of conversation and letter writing that has been lost in the usual quick response of an e-mail. People used to place more value of personal communication. There was a sense of care in the words, not because they were composed for public consumption, but because the writer of the letter really wished to connect with, correspond with, the reader of the letter. I don't think that sense of care has ever been lost between people, but the awareness and appreciation of it has been drowned in the spectacle of the media onslaught. Letters have been replaced as well by phone calls from anywhere to anywhere at any time. Still, that sense of personal connection remains.

What happens when this is exposed to the public? We can't refer to the published letters of famous poets or other artists because by the time the letters are published they have already crossed the line into the public domain because they were written by people that are now public figures, even if they are long dead. The letters get framed as something unique because they came from the pen of someone famous and therefore, according to the rules of the society, are worthy of our attention. And they are usually well edited for publication to remove the dross, so we get a skewed perspective anyway. So there is no answer there.

I want to retain as much of the exchange as possible because 1.) it is spontaneous and captures us thinking "out loud" and 2.) it is substantive - at least for the people involved. We're discussing general subjects in a way that is unique to each writer.

You ask, "Do we really want to this in clear declarative sentences, all the details, and send it out into the world?" My response is that I'm not sure we can, and if we can we already have done so in our works. Someone once asked the film director Akira Kurasawa what the message of one of his films was. He answered that if he could answer that question he would write it on a placard. We say things, or rather, allow things to be said in our poetry that cannot be said in ordinary, conventional prose. What we can do is think about the work after the fact. Kandinsky said that theory follows practice. That has always been my experience. You can't plan a discovery or a revelation. All you can do is make yourself available to it. For example, homeophonic writing places you in a position to discover something by way of the process that you would never experience otherwise. Your comparison to yoga is accurate I think, and I think of the transmutation process of Abulafia and the other ecstatic kabbalists. The rational response is to dismiss this as meaningless play - but it is the element of play - the free play of sounds with different meanings in conjunction. In some sense you break the laws of literacy in this process. You release words from their singular modes of meaning. It is very liberating for you and for the reader. As you say, this is a spiritual practice. I agree and accept that and dismiss all the other things people project into that word.

Does this have any value in popular culture or even so-called literary culture? No, probably not, and given the state of that culture I hope it doesn't. You may have read Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" In the initial version, written I think almost two decades ago now, he was concerned that poetry was vanishing from public appreciation and being swallowed by a kind of hollow academic mannerism. He revised the essay a few years ago and noted several areas that offered him hope - more public poetry readings, poetry slams, the appreciation of some sector of the public for spoken word events and so forth. I readily concede that these things and the others he mentions are a means in which something by the name of poetry is garnering more public attention. And I think the work of hip hop artists, songwriters and so forth is poetry. As with any other poetry, especially poetry eager for the spotlight, most of it is utter crap. It is designed from the beginning to be product. It has all the substance of a stick of gum. But all the ways in which poetry has re-appeared in the society hasn't altered my original, immediate response to Gioia's question - which is: Does it matter if poetry matters? Perhaps he has more confidence in society than I do. While I find many redeeming characteristics in contemporary society - qualities that might appear under certain circumstances in individuals or in the collective - I don't find much in the day to day that will be effected in any meaningful way by poetry, even the good work that somehow manages to break the surface. In the longer view philosophy, poetry, the arts and sciences - makes discoveries that gradually filter out into society and might nudge it, over a period of generations, in interesting directions. I'm thinking of the Theory of Relativity, visionary work like Blake, Rimbaud, Dickinson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stein, the whole long list in all the disciplines and their overlapping. But you can't plan to change society any more than you can plan to have a revelation or visionary experience. Not unless you're egomanical or part of a group led by an egomaniac or a mass delusion. It seems terribly presumptuous to suggest that anything we might do would have much of an impact, for good or ill. We will indeed be met with indifference and be marginalized. This is not a loss as far as I'm concerned. In fact, it's probably a blessing. As you know, the process of preparing a work for publication can be very distracting and then promoting it even more so. I'm willing to put up with it enough to make the work as available as possible to anyone that wants it, but usually the first thing I want to do as soon as I finally get a book in print or get a CD out is go to work on the next one.

The reason for this is, I think, is that the work we are doing is, I agree, about transformation. The Great Work. Not great as in exceptionally good, but great in the sense of being totally overwhelming, losing one's self. The alchemists and similar workers/playmeisters, mystics and so on, the ones that matter, were doing the same thing. When I read your work, in whatever form, I approach it with that knowledge - knowing that I am witnessing a process of transformation and often, if I pay attention, I will be caught in that process and experience the transformation as well. Obviously some of the alchemists, maybe most of them, were charlatans, and it is one of those words, like shaman, zen, or whatever that has become a catch, a marketing hook. The ads say, in essence, if you read this book, if you follow these steps, you will be happy and your problems will be solved. There are few things more repulsive. I'd rather read Hart Crane or Sylvia Plath at their most depressed and suicidal than read any of this self-help mysticism crap. And there's another level of it in academia - if you take the right courses from the right teachers you will be able to join the elite. This is an old trick. I am reminded of the poet Ikkiyu, who was a Buddhist priest, but after sampling life in the monasteries of his day decided to spend his time in the brothels and bars instead. You don't find redemption or happiness or transformation by looking for it, you just try to place yourself in its path and hope it runs you down, and so powerfully, that it transforms you before you can screw it up and start writing a book about it.

Work that invites or generates transformation cannot be contained in explanatory volumes. And critics, even sympathetic ones, can only hope to provide some kind of opening into the work. Jack Foley said recently that the work that he usually finds more interesting is the work of the failures, not the successes. To me, this is because the failures remain an open story and they always will because they failed - that is, they never measured up to what society expects of its "great people." We could go into a discussion about how to define success and failure, but it is neither the heroic individual nor collective opinion that finally matters, it is whatever compels us beyond what we believe to be the case. Truly, there is madness from the point of view of the collective, and the very real possibility of genuine mental illness, especially if you take yourself so seriously that you believe that you created the work instead of the other way around. Ultimately all that matters is the practice of the art itself. There's no final reward or great justification. It's just animal behavior, angelic behavior - the universe exercising its imagination and destroying and creating worlds every nanosecond in the process. We all disappear in that process every day. Why not celebrate it?

GENIUS AND THE INDIVIDUAL



(The conversation below between Jack Foley and Jake Berry took place via e-mail from 1/20 to 1/25/06.)

FOLEY:

This passage is from Robert Pinsky’s “Essay on Psychiatrists,” published in his book, Sadness and Happiness (Princeton, 1975). It is a tribute to his teacher, Yvor Winters.

The Old Man, addressing his class
On the first day: “I know why you are here.

You are here to laugh. You have heard of a crazy
Old man who believes that Robert Bridges
Was a good poet; who believes that Fulke

Greville was a great poet, greater than Philip
Sidney; who believes that Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Are not all that they are cracked up to be….Well,

I will tell you something: I will tell you
What this course is about. Sometime in the middle
Of the Eighteenth Century, along with the rise

Of capitalism and scientific method, the logical
Foundations of Western thought decayed and fell apart.
When they fell apart, poets were left

With emotions and experiences, and with no way
To examine them. At this time, poets and men
Of genius began to go mad. Gray went mad. Collins

Went mad. Kit Smart was mad. William Blake surely
Was a madman. Coleridge was a drug addict, with severe
Depression. My friend Hart Crane died mad. My friend

Ezra Pound is mad. But you will not go mad; you will grow up
To become happy, sentimental old college professors,
Because they were men of genius, and you

Are not; and the ideas which were vital
To them are mere amusement to you. I will not
Go mad, because I have understood those ideas….”

He drank wine and smoked his pipe more than he should;
In the end his doctors in order to prolong life
Were forced to cut away most of his tongue.

That was their business. As far as he was concerned
Suffering was life’s penalty; wisdom armed one
Against madness; speech was temporary; poetry was truth.


BERRY: Wonderful poem from Pinsky, which is a bit of a surprise considering that the three times I've seen/heard him read two of them were awful and one was pretty good. And the other poems I've read by him weren't anything to get excited about. But let me ask you this: What if the ideas that were vital to Gray and Coleridge and Crane are vital to us as well? Does that make us mad? Especially since the foundations of western thought are now mere rubble. Winters was right - it’s greed and materialism that has done us in. But should we abandon hope? I mean we are still here right? Or did we die somewhere and miss it? Or were we ever born? Are we merely a nightmare buried deep in thebrain of a robber baron? If so, I hope we're giving that son of a bitch sheer hell all night long. THE SEED alone may push him over the brink.


FOLEY: Don't worry about having to change your opinion of Pinsky. The passage I sent--which is indeed wonderful--is from a longish poem called "Essay on Psychiatrists." It's in Pinsky's first book, Sadness and Happiness--published thirty years ago. It's extraordinary to read the rest of the poem after first reading the passage I sent: it's pretty boring. The Yvor Winters passage is the only good thing in the whole poem, but it's very good and it does save the poem finally. His old teacher to the rescue!

I think Winters is absolutely right about something happening to consciousness around that time--a crisis of consciousness. Questions about the uses of art and about how we arrive at what we are, what we know. The Romantics are at the center of this problem. Poetry turns inward and begins to question everything. "Madness" becomes an issue which concerns everyone--the poet as outsider, nut. And some poets do indeed go mad. But that doesn't mean that everybody goes crazy. Wordsworth isn't crazy, Keats isn't crazy--even if Coleridge and Blake may be. (Winters doesn't even mention John Clare.) It's here, I think, that Winters is genuinely neurotic. Though he has an extremely good mind, his fear of going mad leads him into a narrowly-defined rationalism which affects his understanding of what is valuable in poetry. Interesting that the passage begins with his assertion that the students are there to see a "crazy" old man. Still, neurotic or not, he's sharp sharp sharp: I think what he says about Shakespeare's sonnets is perfectly true. I also think that the notion of "genius"—which he simply asserts in an unquestioning way—needs to be re-examined. I think that notion is part of the problem, not part of the solution. He locked horns with James Broughton. From my time line book:

James Broughton, who took Winters’ poetry course in the early thirties, disagreed with his teacher strongly. Broughton writes in his memoir, Coming Unbuttoned (City Lights, 1993),

I even concocted a spoof manifesto parodying Winters’ rigid diction in which I insisted that the only form of poetry appropriate to the present age was the Anglo-Saxon; therefore poets should write in alliteration and litotes about heroic couplings.

Winters asked Broughton to leave the class and told him, "You could not even rise to the level of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Edgar Guest."


BERRY: I’ve excerpted bits of your last e-mail and responded:


"I think Winters is absolutely right about something happening to consciousness around that time--a crisis of consciousness. Questions about the uses of art and about how we arrive at what we are, what we know."

The industrial revolution, the migration from agricultural life to city life. When Jefferson was ambassador in Paris even while enjoying the high life, the erudition of some of his colleagues there, he despised the cities where he said people were piled upon one another. He hoped this would not happen in America. He tried to prevent it. He fought Hamilton tooth and nail over monetary policy, the national bank, centralized government - in short, Federalism. But Washington was very fond of Hamilton, who had been a brilliant soldier and appeared to be brilliant at any subject to which he turned his mind. Jefferson, on the other hand, was eccentric, had "exotic" tastes, and though obviously brilliant, was often unreliable and even contradictory in his views. Washington sided with Hamilton. By the time Jefferson became president he tried to de-federalize, but it was too late, the changes disrupted the economy so severely that he had to reinstitute the national bank. He still hoped, by way of the (unconstitutional) Louisiana purchase, to open the west for an expanding population which would establish small farms and villages - not cities. It was too late. After the Civil War the robber barons rose and unrestrained, corrupt capitalism established itself. So yeah, Winters is right. After the mid to late 19th century EVERYTHING is judged in terms of its value as capital. This lead to a depression in the 1890s and several of the wealthiest capitalists bailed the country out by purchasing bonds, financing the debt, then selling the bonds at a profit. (These days about half of the debt financing goes to overseas investors - which means that for the next 50 years or so we owe people like the Saudis, the Chinese government, etc - so the situation continues to worsen).

The whole shift from agricultural to urban economy altered the pace and content of information. The notion of the contemplative romantic poet was replaced by the hustler, advertisements, and the quick sell. Money, abstract wealth, became more important than real wealth (land, gold, etc.). Equally, arts in the abstract became more important. Painters produced an obvious product, an immediate rarity, which, value judged by the critic, could attract large sums of money. How was poetry to compete with this? Poets wrote words that could be printed or copied en mass. And if the poet performed his or her work it was even less valuable because it was immediate and gone. A resolution to this was/is audio recordings, which were also mass produced, and thereby of minimal value except to the producers of the recordings. Under these circumstances why would anyone want to be a poet. In a culture where time is money poets would literally be wasting their time, and the wasting of time is strictly forbidden in a culture driven by the work ethic. This made Whitman all the more revolutionary, and in this context, crazy.

"The Romantics are at the center of this problem. Poetry turns inward and begins to question everything. "Madness" becomes an issue which concerns everyone--the poet as outsider, nut. And some poets do indeed go mad. But that doesn't mean that everybody goes crazy. Wordsworth isn't crazy, Keats isn't crazy--even if Coleridge and Blake may be."


No, Wordsworth wasn't crazy, but he was cruel. And yes, questioning everything, Blake as prime example. I don't think Blake was crazy. He was a visionary, he was eccentric, irascible, hostile to his critics and sometimes his friends, but I think his suffering resulted from living at odds with the cultural elite. He dared be original. I suppose that this is what Winters might mean by crazy - that the poets were considered crazy because they were eccentrics. I don't think Pound was crazy until the end of his life and was driven crazy by his situation, one exacerbated by his own arrogance. Winters also doesn't mention Whitman or Dickinson.

"(Winters doesn't even mention John Clare.) It's here, I think, that Winters is genuinely neurotic."

You get that sense from this poem certainly. Paranoia, closure, rigidity. The last of these can be an asset in a teacher if you understand how to use it, as a sounding board that will almost always disapprove. It would force a young poet into a choice between either abandoning the art, trying to conform, or becoming original against a wall of criticism that he or she would probably internalize and use for the rest of their lives.

"Though he has an extremely good mind, his fear of going mad leads him into a narrowly-defined rationalism which affects his understanding of what is valuable in poetry."

That fear is all over him. He must assert that he will not go mad because he understands. I don't think that will save him from his fear, but it will allow him some confidence against it. And yes, obviously a very fine mind - unflinching and penetrating.


"Interesting that the passage begins with his assertion that the students are there to see a "crazy" old man. Still, neurotic or not, he's sharp sharp sharp: I think what he says about Shakespeare's sonnets is perfectly true. I also think that the notion of "genius"—which he simply asserts in an unquestioning way—needs to be re-examined. I think that notion is part of the problem, not part of the solution."

I think that might be part of the difficulty he is having with his contemporary world (now more so than then). He accepts conventional and broad ideas of genius. These poets were geniuses, but now that is no longer possible. It all depends on what you mean by genius. If by genius we mean individuals of incredibly high IQ who by force of intellect alone broke the world open then I think it would be difficult to apply the word to any of the people he mentions. Einstein would fit that definition, Leonardo, Newton as well. Neither of them would be restrained by capitalism or scientific method - in fact they were smart enough to exploit them, most of the time.

On the other hand, I think we have to consider genius from the Romantic/Classical perspective as an inhabiting force, an in-spirit, inspiration. In this case genius is not a condition of intellectual brilliance, though it certainly doesn't exclude it. There are many kinds of intelligence and many kinds of inspiration. A poet may be inspired, inspirited, from something outside himself, and create poems under the spell of that inspiration - and, too, the result may make him more intelligent generally since it engages his or her mind deeply. However, when confronted with the poem after the fact the poet may be no more capable of finding its meaning than any one else, and since the "spirit" came from elsewhere there is no absolute meaning. This would make the poet appear simultaneously brilliant and crazy when in fact neither could be said to be the case. The art, the poem, is brilliant, is a work of genius, and it required a particularly well attuned individual to create, or co-create, it, but the poet is not the issue, the poem is. In this sense we may say that a particular poet was possessed of genius, some poets more often than others.

To make a flat statement that a particular poet is a genius is equivalent to saying Beethoven was the greatest composer that ever lived. That may be true sometimes, under certain conditions, from a particular perspective, but it cannot be said to be absolutely true.

"James Broughton, who took Winters’ poetry course in the early thirties, disagreed with his teacher strongly."

I can only imagine what Broughton did with him. He may have indeed driven Winters crazy. I can't imagine Broughton conforming to anything, even himself. He was always shedding his skin and laughing while he did it, and inviting your laughter. Big joy! Pretty far from Winter's chill.

"Broughton, from my time line book:
'I even concocted a spoof manifesto parodying Winters’ rigid diction in which I insisted that the only form of poetry appropriate to the present age was the Anglo-Saxon; therefore poets should write in alliteration and litotes about heroic couplings.'"


I'd love to read that manifesto if I haven't already, and forgotten it along with so much else. Yes, though, of course, Anglo-Saxon, and course Anglo-Saxon at that (is there any other kind?). Indeed, heroic couplings! Rhyme beaten out on granite - that is the only possible poetry. Poetry has been thrown to the dogs so we shall produce - doggerel!

"Winters asked Broughton to leave the class and told him, 'You could not even rise to the level of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Edgar Guest.'"

Thank god for that. I doubt he ever desired to "rise" to that level. Here again is that neurosis you speak of, "rise to the level of", that's gradation, hierarchal thinking. Perfectly suited for the structure of urban civilization. Caste and class. And again he is focusing on generalizations, on poets entire, instead of the individual works - some of which may rise quite high, others not. Shakespeare did write some crappy poetry - perhaps well decorated crap, but…


FOLEY: A word about the notion of "genius." As you know, I think that the ideology of "the individual" has been an extremely damaging one—damaging in a number of ways. I wrote at the beginning of my "Greatest Hits" volume, "I can’t get it out of my head that, though I may be ‘unique,’ I am not an ‘individual.’ The word ‘individual’ comes from the Latin individuus—indivisible, something which can no longer be ‘divided.’ If I think of myself as a political entity, then I am happy to be individuus: the rights of the individual are everywhere to be respected. If I think of myself as a thinking/feeling entity, however, I am something very different from that: I am not at all individuus; I am as divided as I can be." There are a number of alternatives to thinking of people as "individuals": one of them is Heidegger’s notion of people as "Dasein," "Being There." The notion of the "genius" as the supremely gifted individual goes back to the 18th Century, and particularly to certain notions current in German philosophy and poetry of the time. (The O.E.D. will tell you that the distinction between genius and talent—the latter another problematical term!—comes from that period.) "Genius" earlier referred to a guardian spirit received at birth (the etymological root, gen, is connected to notions of coming into birth, "genital," etc.) or to the particular spirit of a place (genius loci). How it came, via the Germans, via the English Romantics, to mean what it means today is a fascinating history which I can’t go into here. (The figure of William Shakespeare looms large in this history.) I think at this point the word has outlived its usefulness. The word has been taken over by the bourgeoisie (Heidegger’s "das Mann") as a way of referring to certain people of great "accomplishment." These people—these "geniuses"—are usually impossible in their behavior, hugely egocentric, and immensely self-destructive: they represent the artist as entertaining suicide—a spectacle the bourgeois public loves to contemplate. Bourgeois spectators will find geniuses "fascinating" in their out-of-bounds behavior (Jackson Pollack, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Gully Jimson, the list goes on) but they will also be delighted to discover that they are not like them: they don’t tear their lives to pieces, they are not self-destructive. The message here is: Don’t try for too much. Don’t be a "genius." Look how awful their lives are! But there is more to it than that. I think the notion of the genius functions primarily to strengthen the ideology of the individual. The genius is the individual taken to the max: the "individual" intensified. In effect, a "genius" is an "individual" who is really individual! There is much more to say about this subject—the Western God is also the individual taken to the max—but, in brief: If you reject the notion of the individual, as I do, you also reject the notion of the genius. (Not to mention the "Great Man" theory of history—history as a string of "geniuses"—and various other things.) The "genius" is just that old bugaboo the ego in one more of its guises.


BERRY: You cover vast territory quickly. As call and response, what you write summons several questions and comments. You might want to answer them, but I intend them to be rhetorical as much as to you personally.

I'll excerpt the bit that summons the question/response and go from there.

"'Genius' earlier referred to a guardian spirit received at birth (the etymological root, gen, is connected to notions of coming into birth, "genital," etc.) or to the particular spirit of a place (genius loci)."

This is where my thinking about it begins - these two origins of the word - with the idea of coming into birth being anything that comes into birth, from a person to an object to an idea - and I think fundamentally, coming into presence, which I take from Heidegger, but to be more specific, the reality of a thing as opposed to a meaning projected upon it by a culture. In this we recognize it as if we'd never experienced it before. Perhaps this is a case of generative and genius loci coinciding as a single experience. The problem arises when I claim this as my experience - assert the primacy of the 'I'.

Don't the origins of this ego go back even further than monotheism to the idea of the hero? I am thinking about Gilgamesh as one of our earliest hero stories within the context of civilization. Isn't that context the ground upon which a hero, a god, a king or lord, a genius might appear? We are taught that civilization begins with city states (Sumer, Egypt, the Indus River valley and so on). In order to have a city state you have to establish some kind of hierarchy and a distribution of tasks. By contrast, in small nomadic settlements or agricultural villages, there might be individuals in the sense that one person is better at one task than another, but generally all people apply themselves to whatever task is at hand depending on the circumstances. There is no need for the heroic personality because all apply themselves to a plurality of purposes. I should also say that performing tasks, doing work, is only one set of multiples since there is also emphasis on play, and perhaps ritual as play and vice versa. In this play everyone participates. Again, there is usually some distinction made, between sexes, between initiated and uninitiated, between elders and younger people – but most of these these categories are very fluid and applied only as the need arises and might shift from one season to the next. The point being, that great forces (weather, animals) and great deeds are recognized, but they do not generate a singular heroic personality who does nothing other than be a hero or a king or anything else specific.

Doesn't the problem arise when we begin to distance ourselves from the primary obligations? By these I mean, food, clothing and shelter. In a city state these tasks are broken down into people who build, people who farm and herd, and people who make clothes. Once a person is identified with a single task he or she becomes known by that task, play becomes secondary, and also the tasks and specialists multiply. Someone needs to organize all these tasks and that becomes his or her (usually his) task. In order to affirm this organization we will need stories that promote the dedication to a single task so that even story telling becomes an individual's task and that task is to promote the individual in extreme. We need an example of the great builder, the great hunter and so forth, and these become god-forms, prototypes to which individuals must conform. Isn't this where we took a "wrong" turn, into individualized behaviors in all seasons and circumstances rather than adaptive behaviors depending on changing circumstances?

"I think the notion of the genius functions primarily to strengthen the ideology of the individual. The genius is the individual taken to the max: the 'individual' intensified."

I particularly like that phrase "the ideology of the individual." It is a kind of diagnoses of this neurotic condition that permeates civilization, particularly late western civilization from the 18th century forward. (In the east the emphasis was on community - the great man, the hero as submissive to the natural process of society - Taoism, but Confucianism as well. This creates its own set of problems, its neurosis of exclusion of the individual.) But it is important to understand this ideology for what it is: an illness. Further, it is the collective deification of that illness. We end up with a "jealous God" and a merciful savior who is at the same time the judge of our eternal fates; and now the rot of these exaggerated personalities and the extended disease of the adoration of the personality over what they did that might be useful to us, their work, which, at its best, utilizes autobiography as only one stream.

FOLEY: My "response" to all this is simply to say I agree: What you write seems to me to be accurate and eloquently put. One thing: we don't need to "get back" to something; it isn't a question of nostalgia. We can't make all that history disappear. We need to redefine, find new ways of dealing with our problems: we need to make new myths, arrive at new forms. The past is a guide, but it is only a guide. Everything remains in crisis--which seems to be the form of my lifetime.


BERRY: Right. I didn't mean to imply a return to some mythic paradise. Neither do I put much faith in progressivism. Things change, but not toward some ultimate goal, or toward anything. It’s more about adapting to circumstances.

What I think might be possible eventually is a kind of renaissance, though instead of recovering classical antiquity, rediscovering what was lost at the beginning of civilization. For instance, the Renaissance revered the ancients, but they did not reject the printing press. Perhaps we are in a similar situation. We have been forced into a state of crisis by industrialization/modernity, the rise of the "great man" idea in arts, politics, science, and we would like to recover from that affliction. However, that doesn't mean we trash our computers. Just as the printing press helped distribute the ideas of the Renaissance, the internet helps distribute the ideas of our time, including those that would retain the beneficial aspects of science and art, etc. while at the same time rediscovering what was needlessly sacrificed.

CATSCAN



A few days ago the manuscript for Jack Foley's selected poems The Seed arrived. I unwrapped it and set it on our kitchen table. Almost immediately our cat, Thelonious, lay down on it and began to ponder it. He dictated a poem for me to send to Jack as a response to the book.
Jake Berry

The Seed as Enchanted Couch

by Thelonious M. Berry
(translated from the feline)

Who is this Foley that made The Seed
where I lean and loaf and often read?
His charmes and choruses leave me enchanted
and give me pause where my feet are planted.
The aspect I think I most approve
are the words that sing and dance and move.
And among them what I find the choicest
and the poems that speak with many voices.
They are like the flocks of birds I see
in the yard outside and would love to eat.
They chirp and flutter and taken sudden flight
just at the moment I'm poised to strike.
But when I dream they come back to me
to sing again and give me wings.
So tell me who is this Foley creature?
Singer, dancer, poet and teacher
whose words make books where I take my ease
and prove my cool where his muses breathe.

(Translator's note: the rhythm and rhyme
are human inventions because, as
everyone knows, cats compose in a variable foot.)



To which Mr. Foley replied:

Please give my heartfelt thanks to your wonderfully perceptive feline companion, Thelonious. I wrote the following doggerel (forgive the pun!) in response to his masterly cat strokes (his CATches).

TO THELONIOUS, MASTER CAT

Who is this cat who’ll sit and crouch
Upon my book as upon a couch?
Why, he’s Thelonious, cat so rare
He disdains both pillow and chair
To place on my verses his graceful end.
Ah, Thelonious, feline friend!
I hear them saying, Goodness, that’s
Clearly the Northrop Frye of cats
Cats can be choosy (some say acidic)
But Theolonious is a genuine critic!
When on my verses he puts his furs,
I understand he smiles and purrs.
How wonderful (may there be no removal)
To receive a critical cat’s approval.

(To be translated into variable paw)

MUSICALITY IN POETRY

(The following is from an e-mail conversation between Jake Berry and Hank Lazer. Lazer sent a first draft of an essay on musicality in poetry asking for Berry's response and advice. Berry extracted sections of the essay and e-mailed the responses back to Lazer.)

LAZER: By following the lead of the sounds of words, the poems take me to unexpected places. Thus the poem does not set out to be about something, but is the emergence and actualizing of something – with its own specific music – an experience in sound.

BERRY: Poems begin with sounds. You might hear the sounds in the world around you or you might hear them in your head, but they begin as pre-linguistic sounds. Not necessarily pre-lingual because you may, as I often am when writing both poems and songs, physically make the sounds - and they are often not words, or any words we have listed in our languages. They are like glossolalia or speaking in tongues. But as St. Paul points out in his first letter to the Corinthians, where there are tongues there must be an interpreter. In this case the interpretation is not a translation of sound into absolute meaning, but of sounds into words whose meaning is subjective. Let me give you an example from the words that are lying next to me on the desk from a song I was recording last night.

Look out over the valley
into the fields of fire below,
like the sea they roll.
Tell Mama Loa
Her lost tribes are coming home,
like the sea they come

All of these words came out of my mouth as a melody as I playing a chord progression. In this case they came out as fully formed words. I changed one line to make it more obviously general. Where you read "Her lost tribes" - the word that came to me was Israelites. And while we may be willing to think of Israelites in terms of any captive people coming home, I wanted to suggest that people thought forever lost are coming home. And two tribes did return and became the Israelites from then on. So the thinking always comes after the sound and that one line is all I've really thought much about - the rest of it is as much a mystery to me as to you. Why Mama Loa? and who are her lost tribes, etc.? The same questions can be asked all over the place in either DAYS or THE NEW SPIRIT. The answer of course resides in the mystery, and in allowing that mystery to live without explanation. Sounds rose from the depths of your chest or your head or both and they made the poem all by themselves. Yet the poet is defined by his or her poetry, so by inhabiting you the poem makes you who you are, which is finally, always, a mystery.

LAZER: To my ear and eye, Robert Creeley’s poetry (particularly in its cadence, in it brilliant use of hesitation and shift in direction) and Larry Eigner’s poetry (particularly in its deployment on the page) constitute two of the more noteworthy adventurings into music that respects and partners silence. To take the term music more literally, it would be difficult to consider the resources of silence without careful attention to the music of Thelonious Monk (an important influence on Creeley, who tells us repeatedly that his attention to jazz, not to poetic models, gave him his fundamental sense of rhythmic and aural possibilities for poetry).

BERRY: Eigner especially and silence. He used silence as well as any poet I've ever read and he makes it completely obvious on the page. Creeley, too, absolutely. And Duncan gave credit to Eigner's influence on his own work which is so musical. I loved how he kept time with his hand as he read. It helped him, but it also informs us - this is music. And Duncan isn't so much a dance in silence like Monk or Creely, but is a dense tongue saturated with silence.

LAZER: Let me turn, then, to a couple of very specific instances of what I’ve come to call (in a passage in The New Spirit) “thinking / singing.” The two poems, #3 and #5, are from Days. My first suggestion is that “meaning” and “musicality” are inseparable, coincidental, and simultaneous. It’s not that a poet “has something in mind” and “tries to express it.” The poem is the thinking, is an embodiment, a highly specific incarnation and manifestation of an interval of consciousness. While I don’t mean to suggest that poems do not have meaning, I do think that viewing a poem as an object to be re-stated in terms of a theme or an underlying idea amounts to a kind of linguistic strip-mining – a process that extracts an element at the expense of the overall verbal terrain. Instead, I’d ask a reader/listener to hear and see the poem (as clearly and attentively as possible, perhaps in the state of mind that Shunryu Suzuki [revise: give some info on SS/cite book] calls “beginner’s mind,” or in a state that Keats called “negative capability”). That is, read for appreciation and read without preconception – as much as possible.

BERRY: The meaning is derived from the music - the music tells you what the words are and where they are placed on the page. I like your phrase "interval of consciousness" - as in musical intervals. To look further and deeper into this I recently ran across, in a collaborative collage with Jim Leftwich, musical notation of a pulsar's tones/intervals. I haven't set down and actually played it yet, but pulsars (and probably everything else) generate sounds that can be musically notated. Messien, as well as the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, charted bird song and made it the basis of some of their compositions. Music, or patterned sound, seems to be a natural phenomenon - as is mathematics most likely (at least numerable cycles). Language appears to be an off-shoot of music - probably a secondary form that became useful for utilitarian purposes and eventually overwhelmed it's parent. One thinks of the Titans and Olympians and similar mythic revolutions. And Babel of course, as you make clear, where language breaks apart and divides us from one another. Written language is yet another remove from music - for a theory about the destructive influence of the written word see Leonard Shlain's THE ALPHABET VS. THE GODDESS. It is only with beginner's mind and negative capability that we can recover from the neuroses of language as purely utilitarian - poetry, as I said in Silence and the Hammer (in collaboration with Wayne Sides' photographs), is the only language that doesn't kill. It breaks language at the root of its utilitarian branch and restores its musical possibilities and thereby frees it to mean in the deep imagination of the species. Which is what you seem to be saying in the two excerpts below:

LAZER: The entire poem itself took a matter of a few minutes to write. I would suggest that it only could have been written through a giving over of my immediate attention to the pathway of sounds, to the music of the quickly shifting phrases and directions of the poem – not through a preconception having to do with meaning or message.

Perhaps a careful listening to the music of the poetry (as a kind of first intensity, an initial lyricism of reading) will eventually allow for different concepts of meaning to emerge.


Poems don’t have to be about something; the poem itself is a primary thing in the world. I think of poems – as in the best of Creeley – as intervals of consciousness. And the musicality of the poem – including shifts in direction, shifts in tempo, playing off of similar sounds – is intrinsic to the embodiment of a particular interval of consciousness.

BERRY: They are an awakening to the Real - to nature before the imposition of abstract meaning - which is often not actually abstracted from the poem anyway, but projected onto the poem out of the insecurity of the reader/listener - the need to know definitely what a poem means.

LAZER: Think, then, of #5 as a kind of brief performance – a mind in motion, a thinking-in-process, a move that has some kinship with a flock of birds shifting direction mid-flight or a school of fish in clear water suddenly turning in another direction. It is the grace and humor and uniqueness of these intervals of verbal engagement that intrigue me, and the unpredictable directions that arise when poems begin with the musicality of an initiating phrase that takes on a life of its own.

BERRY: Its really observing something or someone else isn't it? You are writing the poem, but that's the conventional afterthought, the poem is something else that is happening. It is neither of the 'I' not separate from it. Part of the humor arises from the way it displays the fallacy of singularity on the personal level. 'I' try to read it, make it mean, but it defies me, forces me to open up and then it tells me things that I later call meaning. And when I return to it, the whole process happens again, only now it means more, or something entirely different. Who has changed, me or the poem? If I trust nature, I would say both have changed.

LAZER: Spiritual experience as something that occurs in large part through a summoning to hear.

BERRY: Right. But who summons who? Does the poem come when I want it or does it come of its own accord? I must be available to it in order to write it, but I can't force it. Perhaps its a kind of deal. I will be here waiting for you, and listening in a particular, if you want to come, if you want to speak/sing.

LAZER: That breath, that barely enunciated gust, a whisper or a breath on the border of becoming a word, may be as close to the forbidden name of the divine as is permitted.

BERRY: Your at the heart of it now. Breath. Song, as humans can know it, and probably everything that breathes to live, begins with the aspirations, the exhale and inhale, the beat and silences of the heart, the flow of blood in the veins, etc. These things allow us to tune ourselves in various ways and be instruments of the song - whether we are writing/singing or reading/hearing a poem. Its the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruach - the in-spire-ation.

LAZER: The “serious” suggestion is that charm and play and an unforeseen language exploration constitutes a form of realism, a mode of representation that includes the enigmatic and the irreducible quality of the real (as opposed to a more tidy thematized reduction of the real), that recognizes the playful as a constitutive (and perhaps less predictable) element of the real.

BERRY: And it may be the industrialized mind that forces this distinction between work and play. That is where the split becomes painfully obvious, where work becomes something we do because we must, to survive in an urban environment. There is definitely work in pre-industrialized culture, but the distinction between work and play is blurred and the results of one's work are evident in the food on the table, the dwelling you build, or the song you sing (often while you work). Post-industrial society, in some cases, offer us an alternative. But we are just beginning to recognize the implications.

LAZER: As Heidegger understood, “Our own manner of thinking still feeds on the traditional nature of thinking, the forming of representational ideas”, and thus “we moderns can learn only if we always unlearn at the same time. Applied to the matter before us: we can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally”.

BERRY: Thinking, or how we define and do it, is increasingly problematical. We don't want to abandon the utilitarian functions of consciousness, but we no longer wish to be enslaved by it either. So we are going through a period of expansion in what thinking is and how it may be applied. We'll fail utterly if we don't allow imagination to be the primary source of thought. We can't afford to dismiss imagination as something we are allowed to do in our leisure time (if then, often we sit on our couches and let others imagine for us or, at the very least, direct and shape our imagination.) We can't afford, as naturally free creatures, to relinquish the responsibility to allow our imaginations to operate without predefined limits. Poetry, the kind you are talking about, the kind we practice, offers an infinite area of play and compels the willing reader/listener, or more accurately, the co-participant, to run out into those open spaces. Duncan again, The Opening of the Field.

LAZER: A kind of lateral move in language that trusts the resources of language (and the accidents and heuristics of improvisation) enough to adventure into an uncharted acoustical space.

What is insisted upon is not hearing as some transcendental and ahistorical event, but hearing as precisely rooted in immediate historical circumstance, in the particulars that at any given moment (in the listener’s or reader’s or writer’s given moment) allow some musics to be heard and others not.

The musical space entered into in the composition of The New Spirit is “not a known condition,” just as “toward the/ middle trane played ahead of any sense he already understood”. Thus Coltrane provides a model, but not a constraining model precisely because he chose to play “just ahead of any sense he already understood”.

BERRY: It is so vital that people understand this - "just ahead of any sense he already understood." I always feel that I am writing over my head. The poem is not some thing or event I am trying to relate. I don't know what it is, or what is happening. Often when listening to Coltrane or Ayler or Coleman or whoever, you feel like you are being pulled from your body. This is because these artists were "disembodied" by the very sounds they were making. Yet it is the body that makes it possible. It is said that the angels sometimes envy us, or as Elvis Costello sang, "the angels want to wear my red shoes."

LAZER: A particular and idiosyncratic sounding that takes its part in a larger and often unapparent choral offering, a collective that we participate in by virtue of our peculiar human residency in and determination by language. The sounding by means of poetry is perhaps our best and most serious play, our playing with the instrument and exploring the possibilities of and in language.

BERRY: Our play is our work, and it is the most grueling kind of work because it demands both mental and physical vitality. Nothing in my experience is more totally demanding on my entire being than intimate contact with a strong work of art. Whether I am its creator or its observer (which is to say its re-creator), it drives me beyond all other demands and out of what I thought was possible. To put it in seriously playful rhyme - it kills, heals and reveals all at once.