post moot statements

[statements prepared for and read at the post_moot gathering friday afternoon panel last weekend]

Is There a New Academy?

Is there a new academy? Yes. A new world-wide pseudo-academy of semi-moot poetry is with us and is having its heyday. It is a great, highly organized, and heart-stirring celebration of the half-mind and half-reason in poetry. It has a big market, and poetry apprentices, students, and young talents are extremely enthusiastic about it.

For two or three decades in America, a "semi-" or "near-" moot poetry, which was easily communicable and exploitable, and which made our poetry critics, teachers, editors and publishers very happy, was institutionalized, standardized, prized, and sold very well.

Today, a large variety of hyphenated post-moot schools, such as post-avant, post-language, post-new synthesis, post-new spiritualist, post-new sinceretist, post-new flarfist, etc., have also been incorporated and officialized, and give much pleasure to great masses of people.

Most pseudo-post moot poetry academicians claim that "all poetry is post-moot" or that "there is no post-moot poetry," and reach their paraphrasable, teachable poems by simplifying, distorting, or pilfering details and motifs from older modern schools, or by "adjusting" or "diluting" and "popularizing" post-moot poetry. Poetry that uses "post-moot" poetry, or that "returns" it to something or other, has been constantly before our eyes, and now comes out of everyone's ears.

Post-moot poetry was never a "moment" or "school" or "ism," like symbolism, imagism, objectivism, projectivism, etc., however important and interesting these may have been, and it was not another variation of all the ways and manners of post-romantic and modern poetry. On the contrary, it was a new idea and beginning, with limitless possibilities.

Post-moot poetry is always non-mimetic, non-subjective, non-symbolic, and non-imagistic. There are no easy keys, bridges, or translations, either, no matter how easily the mass media, mass market anthologies and educational industries make them available.

Without a true academy, high ideals, rational standards, and a formal, hieratic, grand manner, we have only our overcrowded, ignoble profession.

We are, with Jack Paar, "for anything that catches on," and though some scoff, some of us, with Liberace, "laugh all the way to the bank," and with Lawrence Welk and his champagne music, "We hope you like our show, folks."


On Poetry and Morality

Ethics and morality come up now more and more frequently in poets' discussions. The only way to handle an ethical or moral problem in poetry is in terms of a poet as a poet, and not in terms of a poet as a human or a sub- or superhuman being or as anything else. Perhaps what's new historically in our time is the awareness of the poet as a poet. But maybe it was always the poet as the poet all the time.

In the thirties, it was wrong for poets to think that a good social idea would correct bad poetry or that a good social conscience would fix up a bad poetic conscience. It was wrong for poets to claim that their work could educate the public politically or that their work would beautify public discourse. The problem is always the poets' problem, not that of poetry institutions, critics, publishers, etc. Poets have to be held responsible for everything they do.

It was wrong for poets to give the impression that their poems were a valuable document of World War II, or that they were helping defense or symbolizing victory in the Pepsi-Cola forties. It was wrong for poets to pass themselves off as visionaries of cosmic orders or seismographs of universal disorder.

It's wrong for poets to overprofessionalize of overamateurize their profession in the practice and teaching of it. Poets can't organize themselves as poets. Poetry does not teach anything. Everyone cannot be a poet.

A writer in a recent issue of Harper's critiquing Jonathan Franzen "waxed" enthusiastic about the non-normative syntax of Gertrude Stein and her followers. He said they were involved in the cult of the unreasoned, the principle of the unformed, the irrational and the uncontrolled, and that moldy, broken, corroded, ragged, drifting surfaces and sloppy, brutalized sentences represented displaced persons and a romantic point of view, romantic not only in outer ruins but also in inner ruins.

Well, there's no question I've been taking an anti-romantic point of view. I can't imagine disjunctive syntax not being a primitve, decadent or obvious quality today. It's isolated in curricula in all creative writing programs now and is made something that anybody can do or make, especially the most accidental and irrational, or something that happens of its own accord. This is enough to exclude it from serious poetic activity. How many photographers take pictures of demolished houses, peeled-off walls, and marked-up sidewalks?


[These statements have been transcribed from eponymous essays by Ad Reinhardt, in his Art As Art: Selected Writings, edited by Barbara Rose (Cal Press 1991), except I have substituted poetry-related terms for Reinhardt's art-related terms and made some slight omissions.]

post moot pictures

...from lorraine. full set here, selected annotated pix below.


bill and lisa howe (and a blurry kirsten lavers) on cris cheek's back porch


justin katko at bachelor hall


before dinner, chez howe kitchen (mike baskinski, me, cris cheek, rachel chase, bill in white chef's outfit and a portion of kirsten)


mark wallace, 4th floor peabody hall


mel nichols, leonard theater, peabody hall


camille pb, leonard theater, peabody hall


rodrigo toscano and i performing "eco-strato-static," leonard theater, peabody hall


symphony for prepared shoes (bill howe, rachel smith, lisa howe, lorraine graham

post moot report (part two)

for dinner friday night bill and lisa cooked up mounds of pasta and various kinds of carnivore- and herbivore-friendly sauces, caesar salad and fresh bread. we were still running a bit late even though we ate comfortably and without dawdling, but eventually we all carpooled through the rain over to justin katko's apartment called "critical documents" (it's an MU thing, students name their residences) which was described to me in advance (by bill i think) as part of a chicken barn but i thought resembled more of the butt-end of an econolodge. folks were piled in and i got a chance to talk at some length with keith before the release of plantarchy #1 kicked off with justin's performance, a video he made featuring hands written on and obscuring found language of ordinary street mundanities he had filmed. justin also did a realtime improvised "reading" of this video, jumping to and fro between the projector and the wall as he read and commented on what was being shown. the shadow he cast on the projection and the way the projection was cast on him reminded me of the magritte painting "le decalcomania," which i read about on the drive down the day before in foucault's little book this is not a pipe.

then there was a great merzbow-esque caterwaul of sound from cassette-jockey jason zeh and a reading of poems by kevin hollo with his own altered garage band sound file accompaniment and video by joshua strauss. rodrigo toscano and linda russo then did a collaborated performance of rodrigo's brechtian-beckettian morality play that's in the new plantarchy (will have to go back for title), a great piece in which a man and woman struggle to find and determine the language for revolutionary action. (reminded me in some ways of godard's film le gai savoir.) finally, joshua did an ad hoc perfomance piece on framing, by which point it was getting late and a bunch of us went back to the climer guest house, a lovely little 10-room motel on campus.

saturday's events were to begin with a breakfast launch of two new slack buddha chapbooks and a howe-student publication at the slack buddha printshop (a.k.a. bill and lisa's garage: yes, when they moved to oxford ohio from somerville massachusetts they brought not one but two letterpress printers with them along with god knows how many cases of type, flat steel drawers, etc. fortunately, the house they rent from MU at a ridiculously low rate contains a garage that now serves as a printshop.) however a phonecall placed to chez howe met with no response. unbeknownst to us, lisa was off picking up students while bill was in the print shop and could not hear the phone ring.) besides i for one was content to go "off the grid" for a bit and have some down time at the guest house: me rod mel linda mark lorraine and rodrigo esentially took advantage of the fully stocked kitchenette (bagels, cream cheeses, breads, jams, pastries, cereal, juice, coffee) and had leisurely breakfasts and conversation on the patio before the next event. rodrigo also asked if i wanted to read a part in another one of his play-poems, so i of course agreed and we went over the text a bit together, this one like the previous night's but perhaps less brechtian and more beckettian. then linda and i took a quick walk to the MU bookstore in an attempt to purchase a minidisc for her recorder but the place was closed. when we arrived right around 11:30 for the next event, supposed to begin at 11:30, no one else was there -- a sign that things might run slow all day. eventually justin and camille and jason and others arrived at the peabody building (where MU's western college is housed, a former separate college bought by MU and now acting as an internal small liberal arts college) and we began setting up the fourth floor loft/room for the afternoon's events.

first was an event billed as the bookateria: various rare books and book object publications from cris' private collection were strewn liberally around the room's tables while rod made several boxes of books he'd brought all the way from bridge street in DC available for sale. the viewing and purchasing was intermingled first with another wonderful lunch buffet and then spilled into a roundtable conversation on books, archiving and the like, with mike basinski speaking as an archivist, rod as a publisher and seller. mike suggested a trend that physical books will increasingly be housed in archives and special collections while digital versions of books proliferate. the drawbacks and potentials of these phenomena, both for print and sound media, were discussed, along with rod's dialogue between "art" and "politics" that he'd prepared for his georgetown lannan seminar with amiri baraka back in the fall.

we were quite behind by this point so after a brief break we returned to the fourth floor peabody for a string of readings. rod began with an off-the-cuff assortment of snips and ghost brains and love poems, along with a rendition of "ted's head" that featured an a capella rendition of the mary tyler moore theme song. MU student nicole proctor was up next, she read some great "found" texts (unclear tho to me as a listneer how "found" or "prepared" they were) about asshole boyfriends and ex-boyfriends. very funny stuff tho i had to step out for some of it. mark then gave his most irony-soaked reading i'd ever seen: seated calmly masterpiece theatre style at a table adorned with a bouquet of flowers, mark proceeded to alternate poems (some from MSS i know a bit like party in my body and nothing happened) with commentaries that extolled the noble voice of poetry as the contemplation of the solitary genius in a deadpan that was so immersed in sarcasm that you could swim through it.

we plowed right into the next set with linda, whose recent exploits in oklahoma forced her to summon and channel the ghost of ted berrigan in ways that are well-suited to the mayer-notley inflections i often find already present in her work. technical difficulties prevented MU student peter castaldo from doing his perfomance, so joshua strauss took the stage. he read text while video shots of people and cars on a subway platform and other mundanities played. after maybe 3-5 minutes of reading his text devolved into the nonverbal, at the conclusion of which he started undressing while the video continued. by the time he was completely naked, a toilet filled with a lot of disgusting stuff (think trainspotting) was being shown on the video, and joshua ran over to the screen and started urinating onto the screen where the toliet was being projected. a not-quite-fast-enough-acting justin managed to collect some of the urine into a plastic cup, which joshua promptly took and drank before falling down to the floor and crawling around under the tables and rubbing himself against table legs and people legs. soon he had found a botle of water lying on the floor and, still crawling, started to hop along the floor while carrying the bottle of water and repeatedly crying out "i am a rabbit, water me with this hose!" someone, i think in hindsight it was stephen paul lansky, obeyed and doused joshua with the bottle of water as he dashed out of the room on all fours. a few people followed the show out, and after a few moments came back into the room assuring us that we had to go outside and see how the performance had turned out. some refused to go out and look at all, tho i did after the initial rush. it was quite something: joshua had run off down the hall into a door that opened onto an attic, literally two by fours and fiberglass insulation, no flooring of any kind. and there, lying in the bare white insulation, joshua was curled up in a fetal position. from my vantagepoint he was like a hunk or ball of undifferentiated torsos and limbs in a bed of pure tho clearly toxic whiteness.

it befell lorraine to follow this up, and she read a nice set of poems with great sass and aplomb i thought: a few things from terminal humming and also from a new work, see it everywhere, which i think i've seen not everywhere but in mipoesias. (coincidentally to rod in all likelihood, lorraine sang too.) we continued to try to make up for lost time by rolling straight into what was billed as "panel performance [subtext: power] & discussion," rodrigo and cris along with tyrone williams who had driven up from cincinnati with dana ward for the afternoon. unfortunately i had to skip out on this, not just to stretch my legs and get some air but also to retrieve my sound equipment from the guest house and test it in the theater space where i'd be in the next set of performances. it was a short but nice walk behind the art museum to the guest house, and by the time i'd returned tyrone was finishing up, apparently having discussed his move from wayne state to xavier, from a certain amount of activism and community to a different kind of specifically academic and poetic community. (i hope i'm not mischaracterizing.) rodrigo told me the previous night that he was going to read a version of the talk on constraint vs restraint in poetic practice that he gave at the noulipo conference in california this past fall.) cris agreed that in the interest of time he would skip his own talk altogether, and discussion ensued around the idea of community, whether it has been overly celebrated these days with nostalgia for some by-gone eras, exclusively or cynically with respect to non-members, naively relative to virtual communities, etc. since i missed the talks i did not feel right adding to the discussion, my main thought being however that community has to be something more than a collection of individuals each doing their own thing (something i'd read recently in chomsky or berkman or mills or somewhere).

then it was back to the leonard theater in peabody where we were almost caught up for time and i was first up in the set. cris gave me a generous introduction and i started off with a few sections of tethering and then turned to what i was calling "seedsource with conic section," readings from the serial poem seedsource interspersed with excerpts from a solo soprano saxophone recording by british improvisationalist evan parker entitled "conic sections." i wanted clean cuts back and forth between the music (playing from a discman through a pair of amplified computer speakers i was able to manually mute at will) and text (which i would cut by turning my mic on and off). what actually happened turned out somewhat different but, i think, not without its own interests. the music cut in and out quite cleanly, but the text was still audible after i turned the mic off, presumably being picked up by the mic that was amplifying the computer speakers. so i had to edit the text literally by altering my own reading volume levels. what resulted, folks in the audience told me afterward, was that i could still be heard at times and that my lips were visibly moving even though i was not fully audible or intelligible. so even though it's not what i wanted i think it still generated an interesting effect.

claire keys went next, an MU student who was in the basinski troupe from the previous night who also has work in hundreds which she read among other things, all of which i liked, interesting and edgy tho honestly i was still in a bit of my own post-performance self-absorption. then went mel, who did a nice straight-up reading from recent work including her terrific ongoing day poems project. camille PB went next, reading from a found/altered text of paris hilton jury testimony (amazing for how the vanity and stupidity piled and piled upon itself) and another piece with animated jpeg files projected on a screen behind her (tho i forget the nature of the text as well as the relation between text and projected image). aaren yandrich wound up this set, i think his piece was called "have yourself a star," which consisted of projected text into which aaren intevened with a smaller hand-held screen that isolated certain words and phrases from the larger projected text that he also then read in a very deliberated manner.

one last set awaited already long oversaturated viewer/listeners and frankly i can't even remember if the last set started out with rachel smith or rodrigo. in any case, rachel is an MU student who read about three, very different and interesting poems involving found language and autobiography before inviting nicole martin back up to the stage to read a poem (rachel's own it turns out) to her own accompanying russian counter/mistranslation. very cool stereophony. rodrigo then went up for two more play-poems, the first for four voices deftly executed by himself, mark, lorraine and mel, this one to me attempting to make any good political sense of a post-internet world (in the same way the previous night's with linda was more of a battle of the sexes for a language of political efficacy). the timing of the four performers was so spot-on it was tought to imagine it had been barely rehearsed. then i joined rodrigo for a second play-poem in which two interlocutors who never see each other seek assistance from anyone who will stop and help in overcoming barriers to finding meaning. in advance rodrigo had told me that my character was really the pace-setter in the dialogue so i really made his character (and the audience) wait to see if ANYthing would happen. great fun.

stephen paul lansky and leigh waltz then made a few remarks by way of setting up their film, inspired in part by a trip through the bratwurst district of cincinnati but also the new MU student literary journal (also to be launched during the conference), megaphone piggy. essentially the filmtext was comprised 1) visually of fairly primitive pen-and-ink drawing that had been scanned as jpeg and run in succession, everything from images of pigs and sausage making to businessmen with cricket heads, completely illogical syllogisms and sloganeering, and the infamous abu ghraib torture photos; and 2) in terms of soundtrack a recording of the filmmakers discussing art, politics and sausagemaking with jazz and blues music playing in the background. again it might not sound like much but it was quite brilliant i thought, a kind of elegance-in-simplicity of both image and statement. i'll be in touch with these guys about a copy of the film, the means of its production and also a 500-word essay on bratwurst they invited us to write them and which i accepted. (i can come up with 500 words on bratwurst in my sleep!)

the capstone to a long day was the fourth-ever performance of the symphony for prepared shoes by william r. howe. for those unfamiliar, bill buys cheap sneakers, removes their rubber soles and makes new ones containing words and letters carved in them in relief and reverse. for the performance, large sheets of paper are taped down to the floor into a huge square and four large inkpads placed on each side of the square. up to five performers put on their prepared shoes, ink them up and proceed to walk around the paper, stopping to bend down and read the words and letters they have printed. i was in the second performance (depicted below) at the spring 2003 "societies of american poetry" conference; this time the performers were bill, lisa, cris, lorraine and rachel (whose russian added a nice new sound texture to the mix).

of course this was not the end of the night. a few of us went back to the guest house to regroup before heading to keith tuma's house for a dinner party that featured videos by aaren on keith's big-ass TV, plus food and drink prepared by keith and his wife. general good times and conversations had on the patio while keith's ipod scrolled through a variety of tuneage. talked at some length with lisa about dissertations and other professional blues, justin about poets and poetry from wisconsin anarchist communes to fascist italian radio broadcasts, and rachel about her experiences with poetry at MU and beyond. rodrigo and i promised to get her in touch with some contemporary experimental russian work. rod mel and i were among the last to leave, taking a jug o wine with us and retiring to the climer guest house porch for nightcap analyses of our own works and others till shortly after 3am.

sunday sunday sunday. breakfast again at the guesthouse kitchenette. mark and lorraine already long gone on their early flight from cincinnati, linda not scheduled to leave until tomorrow after the rest of us older kids had all left and while the young-uns were still reading and launching pubs. coffee. goodbyes till next time. rod and mel and i drive linda to the peabody and not knowing what to expect besides the next event, a launch for some assembly required (a collab from bill's class in the joe brainard "i remember..." vein). instead we find cris, kirsten, keith, joshua, rachel et al having a little picnic in the grass outside peabody, the ubiquitous ham roast beef salmon cream cheese baguettes chips pistachios fresh fruit in tow, even the vase of flowers from mark's reading the day before. how ever could we dash off to the highway without dallying in a bit of such sumptuousness? more eating and talking, keith and i in our different orono conference t-shirts, dan brown bukka white and opal whitely. alas tho, after 45 minutes or so we had to get on: into oxford town and to... starbucks! coffee, yogurts, muffins, etc. indeed, we did manage to get on the road by three or so, i think we were actually on the interstate by 3pm cuz i did make it to the door of my apartment in DC by 1am this morning.

post moot report (part one)

got off to a late-ish start yesterday, got on the road at around 11:30am and arrived in oxford ohio at around 10pm. we (me rod smith and mel nichols) stopped fairly frequently, if only to stretch legs, admire the 1950s military-industrial-complex nature of ohio's interstate rest areas, buy junkfood and psychotic frog keychains and other toys that make noise. stopped just outside columbus for dinner and found a half price books where i purchased the second volume of the library of america gertrude stein for 7 bucks (list price $40).

bill howe came and found us as we drove aimlessly around the miami university campus and led us to cris cheek's place, where a practice reading gathering with food and sangria was just finishing up. saw mark wallace, lorraine graham, cris, mike basinski and keith tuma there along with a host of new student faces, a few drinks and porchside chats before heading off to chez howe where mark lorraine and mike and i would be crashing. we all stayed up for a little while acquainting ourselves with the digs, talking and looking at the various publication in various states of completedness while having a nightcap.

oxford ohio might as well change its name to college, USA. the town is miami university and vice versa. something like 20,000 students and 3,000 townies i think bill said. has the feel of a lovely, manicured rich kid party school, the last place in the world you'd expect to find the very important innovative poetry work that's being done there thanks to keith, cris, bill, et al.

this morning greeted us with bagels, croissants, strong coffee and students coming by professors howe's to finish working on publications, reminding me very much of when i first met bill some eight years ago the weekend of the zukofsky conference in buffalo when there were multiple skin-of-teeth fellow-gradstudent publcations being assembled only hours before their scheduled launches.

the first scheduled event of the afternoon was a lunch buffet in the english department conference room in bachelor hall. (note: food was plentiful and available at every step along the course of the weekend.) very nice formal yet comfortable room with one wall-shelf devoted to multi-volume editions of all the great english litterati from chaucer to the 20th century in chronological order. would've made a great group perforance piece: everyone present take a place along the wall and pick a random text to find language to read from, document, edit/assemble results randomly. lunch was followed by and continued into the launch of hundreds, an inspiring assemblege mag. contributors send a couple hundred copies of their single-page (double-sided) submission and the editors collate and staple, thus saving on labor or at least spreading it around in good communitarian fashion. cris invited any of the contributors present to read and or talk about their work, and there was a terrific variety of it, from varied collage-based stuff and found work to straight up poems. very generative, wanted to rush right home and make an assemblege of my own that corresponded to each page in hundreds.

then bill gave a talk on concrete poetry that argued that the major anthologies from the 1960s (edited by mary ellen solt, emmett williams and the like) presented a specifically "clean" argentine-germanic take on the work (gomringer, the de campos brothers) at the expense of the "dirtier" british variety (cobbing et al.). bill implied that there was a kind of fascistic impulse latent in "clean" concrete's desire for singularity of meaning and interpretive control, in spite of its explicit emancipatory rhetoric. this was followed by some conrete films by niko vasselonikas (CORRECTION: Nico Vassilakis) and miekal and.

the next session featured more papers of the academic/critical variety: alan golding on robert grenier's recent work and linda russo on hannah weiner's claivoyant journal. alan posed the issue of whether or not the recent online availability of grenier's one-of-a-kind handwritten poem objects reinforces or compromises their materiality, while linda insisted on weiner's clairaudience, or the aural quality of words heard as opposed to the clairvoyant of words seen. (weiner herself made claims to both but critics typically privilege the latter while linda wanted to emphasize the former.) between the two papers i read two short poetics statements that i had detourned from the writings of ad reinhardt so as to apply them to poetry rather than abstract art. (will post these at some point.)

the late start and extended post-paper discussion meant we were a bit delayed in getting to the next event, a performance by a michael basinksi ensemble and TNWK (cris cheek and and kirsten lavers). the troup of miami students performed the fluxus-esque works of basinski quite competently and hilariously (and with occasional viola accompaniment). again great variety in the work: from multivoiced pieces celebrating the copulation of snails, to "translations" of the 39 inuit words for "snow" into the buffalonian idiom, to an affect-filled "awww" "eeeeew" "ahhhh" piece making such non-verbal expressions of cuteness, disgust and satiety quite silly through excess. mike followed this up with a few solo pieces, an instructional piece on the states of william r howe (literally all the places that bill was known, proven or thought to have lived in his lifetime) and an improvisation on a visual poem that teased out of it greek fire gods and arthritic frog fingers.

the TNWK piece, "a retrospective scree(n)d," was quite marvelous. (cris and kirsten perform together under this name, which stands for things not worth keeping.) cris and kirsten read softly from either side of the stage, creating an intimate setting in which between them projected images of them working behind some kind of transparent strips of curtaining in what appeared to be some kind of gallery installation, itself featuring the projection of text (presumably related somehow to what they were reading live). in fact, as cris told me later, the video was showing and installation that featured cris and kirsten weaving together strips of 8mm film (from a discarded collection of condensed made-for-home-viewing classics) with strips of shredded books that they had saved from a previous project two years prior. the text being read, and projected in the video, was found language from the shredded text combined with language from actual people who viewed the installation. this all sounds rather convoluted, but trust me, the overall effect was utterly warm, generous and inviting.

this led us all to carpool to bill and lisa's for a massive pasta feast for 20 orchestrated by our wonderful hosts, prior to which i type this. dinner is now served, more whenever i get a chance...

post moot

we be gettin all post_moot on yr bizness