“I have endeavored to exhaust the lexicon allowed by the constraints imposed and in this way respond to this issue’s themes of maximism, completeness, and exhaustion.” Image design by Alyson Del Pino.
“monoconsonance” is a response to/inversion of Christian Bök’s Griffin Poetry Prize–winning Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a collection of univocalics with a chapter dedicated to each vowel. In “monoconsonance” the constraint has been inverted, so that text requires twenty-one chapters, each written using words limited to a single consonant.
“For Antin, facts are not independent of their presentation; they exist as a part of discourse in ‘figures of fact.’ ... [F]igures of fact are not criteria by which to judge the truth or falsity of any fact: figures of fact can just as easily exist for false facts as true ones.” Image from ‘El Mundo físico: gravedad, gravitación, luz, calor, electricidad, magnetismo, etc.’ (1882) by A. Guillemin, via Flickr.
Several years ago I started to listen to the recordings of David Antin’s talk poems available at both the archives of Antin’s papers at the Getty Research Institute and his author page on PennSound. At first my interest was mostly casual.
Craig Dworkin’s collaboration with conceptual percussionist Jarrod Fowler, Rhythmic Fact, provides a striking limit-case of legibility. The work is comprised of a short piece of text printed on the label side of a blank Compact Disc-Recordable, or CD-R. As with other iterations in Dworkin’s “Fact” series, the text exhaustively details the chemical composition of the medium in which it is concretized:
“‘I don't do what I do willingly,’ she says. The bud is immediately torn out and trampled underfoot.” Image: adaptation of photo by Nick Kendrick, via Flickr.
Author’s note: I was reading Elfriede Jelinek while watching Johanna Went videos, and at the same time writing an article in response to Dominic Fox’s Cold World, an eloquent but boy-centered rave in praise of extreme adolescent male nihilism which, in severely criticizing Ulrike Meinhof, the only woman mentioned in the book, also subliminally, and without naming it, criticized Chris Kraus’s piece on her in Aliens and Anorexia, and I just thought, well fuck you, why aren’t women allowed to express their admiration for each other without being accused
Activists of the legal mass movement for national democracy with a socialist perspective, often redtagged by the state as members of the revolutionary New People’s Army, raise portraits of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong on Labor Day, underscoring their ideological adherence to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Photo courtesy of Yo Salazar and SAKA.
The bureaucrat capitalist Rodrigo Duterte is establishing his dictatorship in the Philippines. In an alarming throwback to the Marcos dictatorship, he has put the south under martial law, and the number of human rights violations is mounting; the rest of the country is aggressively being militarized. Arriving in the wake of former President Benigno Aquino III’s antipeasant and antiworker regime, the Duterte regime wasted no time establishing itself as the opposition to Aquino’s haciendero elitism.
