At the Zinc bar launch for All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, Kenneth Goldsmith read "Lift Off" – a poem he also write about in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. The poem, which was originally published in Poetic Justice (Baltimore: Pod Books, 1979), is a transcription from the correction tape of an IBM Selectric typewriter.
Here is Kenny's script –– pdf & here is Kenny's reading: (7:20): MP3
This world is simply the curtain concealing the true mise-en-scène of the eternal spectacle
—Jean Arp
Slingshot of the Golden Loam in collaboration with Andrei Codrescu
Dear Mister Saucy Pants (aka. God)
you shine like honey and bed your lust between us & the blood of a thousand hungry sleep scrolls
where's your manners?
You let them fundamentaliss and comuniss run your business for You when Your children here we are in our midnight milkmen suits do your work kaleidoscope-like & animated by so much love it hurts
give us back our do-nothing prayers Your twisted sons
or a knife or a bottle or a club or a gun
just knowing You are hurtling somewhere on this dark night explodes bad comedies in my head
around the bend I see astrophysicists leaving the convention hall to murder You with particle accelerators
We give you political asylum, Lord and honey to rub on your ontological weariness and a bell to summon us when You are frightened
We come running innocent blobs of blood & faith too broken by years & thoughts You never told us We live a ruin on busted street corners
shoving songs in Your children's mouths where laughter seems out of place and the intention of the organism is to scream
but that coup de foudre look on their faces
is a wolf to our sheep we shed the fleece & go on eating the grass, nubby skulls
on hillsides, gypsies on beds of cana ready to march this mother father land
laid end to end quilt of lovebites crosshatched by scars we are the freckle hunters parachuted behind the enemy lines of the bean counters
we drag our parachutes in front of us through doors opening into misplaced paradises the head hangs the hands handcuffed to bedposts where sleep is perfect and more terrible than air
EFFUNDAM DE SPIRITU MEO SUPER OMNEM CARNEM
Glomming the Crwth1 in collaboration with Anselm Hollo
dear hombre in the treetop hat
hello
& how it goes
& should a dog read this at
some time in the future – c’est si bon
to hocus the animals of pursuers
twinkling upon these oaken shelves
as the goddess stands
in front of her cave
blood on the saddle!
tumbleweed to dream in
what goes where, here
now to say (in zomboid)
wee terrible human, a love supreme
Mr. & Mrs. Houdini’s Treacherous Voyage in collaboration with Bernadette Mayer
changing white wine to red wine shit-be-gone gift wrap that unworried-look on your face when I said "no brakes!" sorghum cooking frog(s) man-eating skunks inchworm Xings Lucky-Bo-Diddly balcony seats Humming Turtle Room dreamcasts beer-swapping foot massages on Algiers’ ferry dastardly thunderstorm candlelit porch-a-thons giant puppet show Virgin Mary sightings Cha Cha Malgooni’s (sic) lifetime achievement award resuscitation of peonies with hazmat suit [Daniel] donut volcano appreciation hour [Amy] jedi mind tricks on police [Max] many-headed pigeon vision quest [Sophia] strawberry rhubarb pie concierge [Marie] taoist egg collector & flamingo safari [Zack] Evil Knieval stunt double [Hector] auditory hallucinations speaking backward in Yodanese [Ted] earthworks & igloo sweat lodgings [Atticus] backyard dessert eating bear competition [Grace] pork death pot [Phil] Pot Pot Pot & The Lighthouse Philharmonic [John] high priestess of cephalopod [Sor Juana] one of three evils [Harris] mythical beast witness protection program [Michael] plymouth rock tosser & distinguished chair sitter [Simon] global poetry warmer [Brenda] Arthurian round tableists [Peter & Liz] Apple Dumpling Gang leader [Tom] deep water rescue team [Pierre, Nicole & Miles] flying lessons with Underwater Goosebill [Jamey] Ed Teach & Mary Read [Tony & Lee Ann] whatdya think the weather’s like in Buenas Aires? [Anonymous]
NOTE. In TheSecretBrain Dave Brinks continues his primary work as poet, following his brilliant emergence three years ago with the publication by Black Widow Press of CaveatOnus,TheCompletePoemCycle. A new strategy here, as seen in the preceding, is his exploration of the art of collaboration & with that an idea of poetry, for all its idiosyncrasies, as a collective work – for our time & beyond. With all of that he remains a primary voice for his native place – New Orleans – born & raised there & dedicated to keeping alive the idea of a great New Orleans avant-garde, both past & present, for which he serves as a passionate researcher & patron spirit. For this his principal new outlet is Entrepôt , a literary periodical whose principal aim, he writes, “[is] to explore New Orleans cultural history as well as its ongoing foothold in the world of art and letters; by presenting new documents, scholarship, and documentation to restore the importance of New Orleans’ storied past in contemporary poetics and art.” As such it stands beside his other work as editor-in-chief of YAWP:AJournalofPoetry&Art, publisher of Trembling Pillow Press, director of 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series, founder of The New Orleans School for the Imagination, & literary editor of ArtVoices magazine. These make a combination of good works that are well nigh indispensable – for him & all of us. (J.R.)
Previous postings on PoemsandPoetics appeared here & here.
Anne Waldman, Berlin 2002 -- Photo by John Tranter
[»»] Introduction: by Alan Gilbert and Daron Mueller From the Introduction: The essays included in this Anne Waldman feature were selected from presentations given at a symposium honoring the University of Michigan Special Collections Library’s acquisition of Anne Waldman’s archive. Entitled “Makeup on Empty Space: A Celebration of Anne Waldman,” the symposium was held at the University of Michigan from March 13–15, 2002. It included over twenty poets, scholars, publishers, and artists participating in both panels and poetry readings. Andrei Codrescu’s “Who’s Afraid of Anne Waldman?” served as the keynote speech for the symposium. [»»] Maria Damon: Making the World Safe for Poetry (or, How Is Anne Waldman Different from Woodrow Wilson?) [»»] Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Anne Waldman: Standing Corporeally in One’s Time [»»] Alan Gilbert: Anne Waldman Changing the Frequency
[»»] Lorenzo Thomas: Anne Waldman: Finding Poetry’s Public Voice [»»] Anselm Hollo: Anne’s School [»»] Akilah Oliver: Hold the Space: The Poetics of Anne Waldman [»»] Laura Bardwell: Anne Waldman’s Buddhist “Both Both” [»»] Kristin Prevallet: Navigating the New Chaos: Anne Waldman’s Collaborations with Visual Artists [»»] Jena Osman: Tracking a Poem in Time: The Shifting States of Anne Waldman’s ‘Makeup on Empty Space’ [»»] Andrei Codrescu: Who’s Afraid of Anne Waldman? [»»] Joanne Kyger: Anne Waldman: The Early Years... 1965—1970 [»»] Eleni Sikelianos: The Lefevre-Sikelianos-Waldman Tree and the Imaginative Utopian Attempt
John Tranter and Pam Brown, Berlin, 2001, Photo by Jane Zemiro
A bit further in Blanchot and his step outside time, I arrive at sentences that sound like the translator at work. At work, yes, inside the “I” or subjectivity of a writer who has already written in another language, a translator enters “in vain” that space where writing speaks to its interlocutor: “J'essaierai en vain de me le représenter, celui que je n'étais pas et qui, sans le vouloir, commençait d'écrire, écrivant (et alors le sachant) de telle manière que par là le pur produit de ne rien faire s'introduisait dans le monde et dans son monde.” (my emphasis, for the translator, to many, brings “nothing” into the world—the consequence of the common belief that the translated work is written by the original writer.
(Thus writers continue to write beyond the grave. And translators, alive, are thus always already dead to what they write. Zombie me!)
Here is Lycette Nelson in the published English : "I will try in vain to represent him to myself, he who I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write, writing (and knowing it then), in such a way that the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world."
Or as my mind wants to read it: “I’ll struggle to represent to myself this person who I was not and, and who, without wanting to, started writing, writing (and thus knew it then) in such a way that, through writing, the pure product of doing nothing introduced itself into the world, and into ‘my’ world.”
That interior world. Elefant.
A sentence or two later, Blanchot evokes further the two-step of the “I” and the subject writing, or the writing subject and the subject writing: “La certitude qu'en écrivant il mettait précisément entre parenthèses cette certitude, y compris la certitude de lui-même comme sujet d'écrire, le conduisit lentement, cependant aussitôt, dans un espace vide dont le vide (le zéro barré, héraldique) n'empêchait nullement les tours et les détours d'un cheminement très long.”
In my English, departing from Nelson and reading Blanchot’s “writing” as “translating”, and–why not–admitting myself as gendered: “The certainty that, in the act of translating, she put certainty between parentheses, including the certainty of herself as writing subject, drove her slowly, but directly, into a void whose emptiness (the zero barred, heraldic) did not foreshorten the turns and detours of a very long working process.”
Translating, writing, always suspend that "self"-certainty. It's an emptiness not really empty but already full of language's buzz and admixtures, just empty of the "I" that is the "I" so many wish to bar. It's not there, that one. No need to bar or disdain it, but to work in and through it: like a stitch.
Johanna Drucker
from Table of Contensts, Journal of Artists Books #23, 2008
Kenneth Goldsmith's script for "Lift Off"
At the Zinc bar launch for All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, Kenneth Goldsmith read "Lift Off" – a poem he also write about in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. The poem, which was originally published in Poetic Justice (Baltimore: Pod Books, 1979), is a transcription from the correction tape of an IBM Selectric typewriter.
Here is Kenny's script –– pdf
& here is Kenny's reading: (7:20): MP3
Launch and Signing of All the Whiskey in Heaven, Zinc Bar, NY, March 28, 2010
a reading of Charles Bernstein's poetry by friends and poets
Photos and full reading at this linked page
readings by Goldsmith, Bernstein and Tan Lin, Dottie Lasky, Thom Donovan, Elizabeth Willis, and Peter Gizzi.
Dave Brinks: From “A Pot of Lips” in THE SECRET BRAIN: Selected Poems 1995-2012, three collaborations
This world is simply the curtain
concealing the true mise-en-scène
of the eternal spectacle
—Jean Arp
Slingshot of the Golden Loam
in collaboration with Andrei Codrescu
Dear Mister Saucy Pants (aka. God)
you shine like honey
and bed your lust
between us & the blood
of a thousand hungry sleep scrolls
where's your manners?
You let them fundamentaliss
and comuniss
run your business for You
when Your children here we are
in our midnight milkmen suits
do your work kaleidoscope-like &
animated by so much love it hurts
give us back our do-nothing prayers
Your twisted sons
or a knife or a bottle or a club or a gun
just knowing You are hurtling
somewhere on this dark night
explodes
bad comedies in my head
around the bend I see astrophysicists
leaving the convention hall to murder You
with particle accelerators
We give you political asylum, Lord
and honey to rub on your ontological weariness
and a bell to summon us when You are frightened
We come running innocent blobs of blood & faith
too broken by years & thoughts You never told us
We live a ruin on busted street corners
shoving songs
in Your children's mouths
where laughter seems out of place
and the intention
of the organism is to scream
but that coup de foudre look on their faces
is a wolf to our sheep
we shed the fleece & go on eating the grass, nubby skulls
on hillsides, gypsies on beds of cana
ready to march this mother father land
laid end to end
quilt of lovebites crosshatched by scars
we are the freckle hunters parachuted
behind the enemy lines
of the bean counters
we drag our parachutes in front of us
through doors
opening
into misplaced paradises
the head hangs
the hands
handcuffed to bedposts
where sleep is perfect
and more terrible than air
EFFUNDAM DE SPIRITU MEO SUPER OMNEM CARNEM
Glomming the Crwth1
in collaboration with Anselm Hollo
dear hombre in the treetop hat
hello
& how it goes
& should a dog read this at
some time in the future – c’est si bon
to hocus the animals of pursuers
twinkling upon these oaken shelves
as the goddess stands
in front of her cave
blood on the saddle!
tumbleweed to dream in
what goes where, here
now to say (in zomboid)
wee terrible human, a love supreme
Mr. & Mrs. Houdini’s Treacherous Voyage
in collaboration with Bernadette Mayer
changing white wine to red wine
shit-be-gone gift wrap
that unworried-look on your face
when I said "no brakes!"
sorghum cooking frog(s)
man-eating skunks
inchworm Xings
Lucky-Bo-Diddly balcony seats
Humming Turtle Room dreamcasts
beer-swapping foot massages on Algiers’ ferry
dastardly thunderstorm candlelit porch-a-thons
giant puppet show Virgin Mary sightings
Cha Cha Malgooni’s (sic) lifetime achievement award
resuscitation of peonies with hazmat suit [Daniel]
donut volcano appreciation hour [Amy]
jedi mind tricks on police [Max]
many-headed pigeon vision quest [Sophia]
strawberry rhubarb pie concierge [Marie]
taoist egg collector & flamingo safari [Zack]
Evil Knieval stunt double [Hector]
auditory hallucinations speaking backward in Yodanese [Ted]
earthworks & igloo sweat lodgings [Atticus]
backyard dessert eating bear competition [Grace]
pork death pot [Phil]
Pot Pot Pot & The Lighthouse Philharmonic [John]
high priestess of cephalopod [Sor Juana]
one of three evils [Harris]
mythical beast witness protection program [Michael]
plymouth rock tosser & distinguished chair sitter [Simon]
global poetry warmer [Brenda]
Arthurian round tableists [Peter & Liz]
Apple Dumpling Gang leader [Tom]
deep water rescue team [Pierre, Nicole & Miles]
flying lessons with Underwater Goosebill [Jamey]
Ed Teach & Mary Read [Tony & Lee Ann]
whatdya think the weather’s like in Buenas Aires? [Anonymous]
NOTE. In The Secret Brain Dave Brinks continues his primary work as poet, following his brilliant emergence three years ago with the publication by Black Widow Press of Caveat Onus, The Complete Poem Cycle. A new strategy here, as seen in the preceding, is his exploration of the art of collaboration & with that an idea of poetry, for all its idiosyncrasies, as a collective work – for our time & beyond. With all of that he remains a primary voice for his native place – New Orleans – born & raised there & dedicated to keeping alive the idea of a great New Orleans avant-garde, both past & present, for which he serves as a passionate researcher & patron spirit. For this his principal new outlet is Entrepôt , a literary periodical whose principal aim, he writes, “[is] to explore New Orleans cultural history as well as its ongoing foothold in the world of art and letters; by presenting new documents, scholarship, and documentation to restore the importance of New Orleans’ storied past in contemporary poetics and art.” As such it stands beside his other work as editor-in-chief of YAWP: A Journal of Poetry & Art, publisher of Trembling Pillow Press, director of 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series, founder of The New Orleans School for the Imagination, & literary editor of ArtVoices magazine. These make a combination of good works that are well nigh indispensable – for him & all of us. (J.R.)
Previous postings on Poems and Poetics appeared here & here.
Jacket 27 Feature: Anne Waldman
Edited by Alan Gilbert and Daron Mueller
[»»] Introduction: by Alan Gilbert and Daron Mueller
From the Introduction:
The essays included in this Anne Waldman feature were selected from presentations given at a symposium honoring the University of Michigan Special Collections Library’s acquisition of Anne Waldman’s archive. Entitled “Makeup on Empty Space: A Celebration of Anne Waldman,” the symposium was held at the University of Michigan from March 13–15, 2002. It included over twenty poets, scholars, publishers, and artists participating in both panels and poetry readings. Andrei Codrescu’s “Who’s Afraid of Anne Waldman?” served as the keynote speech for the symposium.
[»»] Maria Damon: Making the World Safe for Poetry (or, How Is Anne Waldman Different from Woodrow Wilson?)
[»»] Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Anne Waldman: Standing Corporeally in One’s Time
[»»] Alan Gilbert: Anne Waldman Changing the Frequency
[»»] Lorenzo Thomas: Anne Waldman: Finding Poetry’s Public Voice
[»»] Anselm Hollo: Anne’s School
[»»] Akilah Oliver: Hold the Space: The Poetics of Anne Waldman
[»»] Laura Bardwell: Anne Waldman’s Buddhist “Both Both”
[»»] Kristin Prevallet: Navigating the New Chaos: Anne Waldman’s Collaborations with Visual Artists
[»»] Jena Osman: Tracking a Poem in Time: The Shifting States of Anne Waldman’s ‘Makeup on Empty Space’
[»»] Andrei Codrescu: Who’s Afraid of Anne Waldman?
[»»] Joanne Kyger: Anne Waldman: The Early Years... 1965—1970
[»»] Eleni Sikelianos: The Lefevre-Sikelianos-Waldman Tree and the Imaginative Utopian Attempt
John Tranter and Pam Brown, Berlin, 2001, Photo by Jane Zemiro
Translation as a 2-Step: Doing Nothing
A bit further in Blanchot and his step outside time, I arrive at sentences that sound like the translator at work. At work, yes, inside the “I” or subjectivity of a writer who has already written in another language, a translator enters “in vain” that space where writing speaks to its interlocutor: “J'essaierai en vain de me le représenter, celui que je n'étais pas et qui, sans le vouloir, commençait d'écrire, écrivant (et alors le sachant) de telle manière que par là le pur produit de ne rien faire s'introduisait dans le monde et dans son monde.” (my emphasis, for the translator, to many, brings “nothing” into the world—the consequence of the common belief that the translated work is written by the original writer.
(Thus writers continue to write beyond the grave. And translators, alive, are thus always already dead to what they write. Zombie me!)
Here is Lycette Nelson in the published English : "I will try in vain to represent him to myself, he who I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write, writing (and knowing it then), in such a way that the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world."
Or as my mind wants to read it: “I’ll struggle to represent to myself this person who I was not and, and who, without wanting to, started writing, writing (and thus knew it then) in such a way that, through writing, the pure product of doing nothing introduced itself into the world, and into ‘my’ world.”
That interior world. Elefant.
A sentence or two later, Blanchot evokes further the two-step of the “I” and the subject writing, or the writing subject and the subject writing: “La certitude qu'en écrivant il mettait précisément entre parenthèses cette certitude, y compris la certitude de lui-même comme sujet d'écrire, le conduisit lentement, cependant aussitôt, dans un espace vide dont le vide (le zéro barré, héraldique) n'empêchait nullement les tours et les détours d'un cheminement très long.”
In my English, departing from Nelson and reading Blanchot’s “writing” as “translating”, and–why not–admitting myself as gendered: “The certainty that, in the act of translating, she put certainty between parentheses, including the certainty of herself as writing subject, drove her slowly, but directly, into a void whose emptiness (the zero barred, heraldic) did not foreshorten the turns and detours of a very long working process.”
Translating, writing, always suspend that "self"-certainty. It's an emptiness not really empty but already full of language's buzz and admixtures, just empty of the "I" that is the "I" so many wish to bar. It's not there, that one. No need to bar or disdain it, but to work in and through it: like a stitch.