“How It Works” is a column where I ask contemporaries for new ideas and terms to help us describe and analyze writing happening now. For my first guest I've invited Chris Alexander, my partner, the esteemed author of Panda, CEO of United Plastics, and co-editor, with me, of Truck Books, is a poet, professor, and graphic designer who reads a lot of German Media Theory, and also works on Robert Duncan. First, a little background on my assignment for him.
A few years ago, there was serious talk of creating an anthology of critical essays on conceptual writing. A number of people started essays, but then many aspects of the project were abandoned by different people for different reasons, and the anthology was not made. Then, last summer, Steve Zultanski was asking anyone who wanted to write collective manifestoes about contemporary poetry. These were both useful exercises for many of those who participated, but ultimately I think what emerged was the realization that few of us agreed on much, that people were coming from all manner of position on what was important, and that having emerged from different traditions gave us very different frameworks for imagining the situation. This difference is useful and good for learning and dialogue, not so good for group definitive statement-production.
Angela Genusa is someone I have only known from afar, via Facebook and email, but I’ve been excited about her work as it engages the relationship between computer programming and writing. This, as other pieces in this column will reveal, is an in-mixing of generic aptitudes I’m excited by. Genusa is one of many writers producing works that would otherwise be impossible without the computer. She’s also the author of a statement (as a facebook status) we like in my household, “from now on people will have to be more interesting than my iPhone,” or words to that effect. Her focus on, knowledge of, and artistic uses of technology have continued to interest me, and I think poets working in that direction are opening up all kinds of possibilities for writing, even for those of us who are less tech-savvy. Genusa’s latest project, which she describes below, is a bibliography of her spam box. I could have asked her about bibliography as a formal choice (and that’s a topic people like she and Tan Lin are interested in, so maybe one day I’ll stage a forum on the topic) but what is there to say about spam? So I asked her: Why spam? Here’s her answer:
Zultanski reading at "International Conceptualism 2" with Matvei Yankelevich, Diana Hamilton, Kristen Gallagher, Chris Alexander, and Rob Fitterman
Over the past three years, I’ve been listening to Steve Zultanski read the poems that now comprise his new book Agony. I’ve loved these poems since I first heard him read one in Summer 2010 at an event curated by Danny Snelson at the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. In addition to his work, I always like to hear what Steve is thinking, his analysis of what’s happening in poetry. He can be quite provocative on the subject, surly even. We don’t always agree but his ideas are important, especially since he has the ears of many younger writers working today. This column provided me an opportunity to sit down with him to discuss both—his new book and what he senses on the poetic horizon. On Monday, January 14, I met Steve at OST Café on 12th and Avenue A, where we recorded what follows.
Tan Lin; audience at Ludlow 38 for two of Lin's ppt films, April 12, 2012
Installment 2 of “WHY?” in which I ask certain people Why questions and they answer in 100-300 words. Beside Trisha Low, the other first person I had a Why question for was Tan Lin. I have been enthusiastic for years about his genre-diffusing, multi-platformed work under the auspices of poetry. For the last several years each new work from Lin operates like a "demo" that stages an exchange between various genres and platforms.
One segment for this Jacket2 column will be titled “WHY__________?” in which I will ask certain people Why questions. Participant responses must be between 100-300 words. One of the first people I had a Why question for was Trisha Low. Because it’s a thread running through all her writing and performance work (she reads their diaries, their feminist blog comments, their love letters; she dresses like one in performance then throws up fake blood on herself) I asked her: Why Teenage Girls? Here’s her answer.
After Tiqqun’s Theory of a Young Girl, I think Poetry thinks of teenage girls the way some magazine editor looks at a contact sheet, selecting the spectacle and then pulling it up on the screen for the airbrusher going “INFLATE HER HAIR SO WE CAN SEE THAT FRAGILE VACUITY. I WANT TO SEE THOSE CAPITALISTIC PROCESSES NOT THAT CELLULITE. HAVE THIS SHIT ON MY DESK BY 2.”
Gossip or history