Anatomic is an attempt to think of writing in a more expanded way by incorporating the results of chemical and microbial testing on my body into poems that examine, through personal, biological, industrial, and cultural contexts, how the “outside” writes the “inside” in necessary and toxic ways. I offer my experiences working on this book as one perspective on some of the aesthetic, procedural, and formal concerns associated with this series of commentaries on metabolic poetics.
I got the idea to test myself for chemicals and microbes shortly after I had completed a book of poetry about plastics. While researching The Polymers,I became acquainted with endocrine disrupting chemicals (hormone mimics) and their relationship to plastic materials, cosmetics, and other common consumer products.
Anatomic is an attempt to think of writing in a more expanded way by incorporating the results of chemical and microbial testing on my body into poems that examine, through personal, biological, industrial, and cultural contexts, how the “outside” writes the “inside” in necessary and toxic ways. I offer my experiences working on this book as one perspective on some of the aesthetic, procedural, and formal concerns associated with this series of commentaries on metabolic poetics.
The following poems are the opening of a series of 140 “fragments” in a new book of mine, The Mystery of False Attachments, set for publication later this month by Word Palace Press in California.
Rachel Whiteread, “Ghost,” 1990, plaster on steel frame, 105 7/8 x 139 15/16 x 125" (269 x 355.5 x 317.5 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
A sure way to effectively limit the productive dynamism of potential is to cordon energy off into supposedly discrete, closed systems. Unfortunately, most readers (and some writers) view the poem as such a system. The reification of product ropes up and quantifies potential in the money shot of presence, ultimately limiting the surplus energy on tap: in other words, what you see is what there is. This is true of all finite, discontinuous objectivities, including the anthropomorphic-machine and its production of both pleasures and shame, including the production of ossified subject configurations of all types, the nature of which can only truly be defined after the subject has concretized into its own marketable ingress (that is, once the subject is stilled as superject).
A system is defined by its operational closure. A structure is defined by its functional parameters. A process is in touch with a great outside. It is defined by its openness to that great outside: by how it dips into and captures the tendential potentials stirring there. — Brian Massumi, The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field[1]
Reviews editor Orchid Tierney reviews three uncanny poetry titles: Scorpio by Katy Bohinc, Sheep Machine by Vi Khi Nao, and Motion Studies by Jena Osman.
Reviews editor Orchid Tierney reviews three uncanny poetry titles.
The following, reprinted from two previous postings on Poems and Poetics, is intended to serve as an early announcement of a symposium on the work of Anne Blonstein (1958–2011) to be held in Buffalo April 17–19, 2020 under the auspices of the SUNY Buffalo Poetry Collection and the Switzerland-based Anne Blonstein Association.
[The following, reprinted from two previous postings on Poems and Poetics, is intended to serve as an early announcement of a symposium on the work of Anne Blonstein (1958–2011) to be held in Buffalo April 17–19, 2020 under the auspices of the SUNY Buffalo Poetry Collection and the Switzerland-based Anne Blonstein Association.
Too much information
My chemical and microbial romance
Anatomic is an attempt to think of writing in a more expanded way by incorporating the results of chemical and microbial testing on my body into poems that examine, through personal, biological, industrial, and cultural contexts, how the “outside” writes the “inside” in necessary and toxic ways. I offer my experiences working on this book as one perspective on some of the aesthetic, procedural, and formal concerns associated with this series of commentaries on metabolic poetics.
I got the idea to test myself for chemicals and microbes shortly after I had completed a book of poetry about plastics. While researching The Polymers, I became acquainted with endocrine disrupting chemicals (hormone mimics) and their relationship to plastic materials, cosmetics, and other common consumer products.
Anatomic is an attempt to think of writing in a more expanded way by incorporating the results of chemical and microbial testing on my body into poems that examine, through personal, biological, industrial, and cultural contexts, how the “outside” writes the “inside” in necessary and toxic ways. I offer my experiences working on this book as one perspective on some of the aesthetic, procedural, and formal concerns associated with this series of commentaries on metabolic poetics.
'The Mystery of False Attachments'
Now available from Word Palace Press
The following poems are the opening of a series of 140 “fragments” in a new book of mine, The Mystery of False Attachments, set for publication later this month by Word Palace Press in California.
Potential
Pt. 5
A sure way to effectively limit the productive dynamism of potential is to cordon energy off into supposedly discrete, closed systems. Unfortunately, most readers (and some writers) view the poem as such a system. The reification of product ropes up and quantifies potential in the money shot of presence, ultimately limiting the surplus energy on tap: in other words, what you see is what there is. This is true of all finite, discontinuous objectivities, including the anthropomorphic-machine and its production of both pleasures and shame, including the production of ossified subject configurations of all types, the nature of which can only truly be defined after the subject has concretized into its own marketable ingress (that is, once the subject is stilled as superject).
A system is defined by its operational closure. A structure is defined by its functional parameters. A process is in touch with a great outside. It is defined by its openness to that great outside: by how it dips into and captures the tendential potentials stirring there.
— Brian Massumi, The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field[1]
Ghostly intimacies
Orchid Tierney
Reviews editor Orchid Tierney reviews three uncanny poetry titles: Scorpio by Katy Bohinc, Sheep Machine by Vi Khi Nao, and Motion Studies by Jena Osman.
Reviews editor Orchid Tierney reviews three uncanny poetry titles.
Anne Blonstein
Seven notarikon poems with a note on the process and an essay on the poet by Charles Lock
The following, reprinted from two previous postings on Poems and Poetics, is intended to serve as an early announcement of a symposium on the work of Anne Blonstein (1958–2011) to be held in Buffalo April 17–19, 2020 under the auspices of the SUNY Buffalo Poetry Collection and the Switzerland-based Anne Blonstein Association.
[The following, reprinted from two previous postings on Poems and Poetics, is intended to serve as an early announcement of a symposium on the work of Anne Blonstein (1958–2011) to be held in Buffalo April 17–19, 2020 under the auspices of the SUNY Buffalo Poetry Collection and the Switzerland-based Anne Blonstein Association.