Transcreations from Russian by Jerome Rothenberg & Milos Sovak
Mikhail Lermontov - Selfportrait - 1837
[The appeal to me in the works that follow was in the harshness and fury of Lermontov’s romanticism, but it was just this note of contempt, as in his “iron verses / bursting with bitterness / & rage,” that marked him as a poet who displayed, as Nietzsche wrote of Heine, “that divine malice without which I cannot conceive perfection.” It was that spirit – not necessarily our own – that Milos Sovak & I tried to capture in a project to translate Lermontov anew, sadly terminated by Milos’s death in 2009. I’ll present the four poems we did accomplish in two installments. (J.R.)]
“A person should think before they call a place Slyvannia” [1]
This sentence from H.D.’s HERrmione stays with me. Her prose can twirl, as Her Gart, her “heroine” is lost in a landscape she desperately tries to discern. Her “Oread” is here before considering the sea. Her Gart twirls in search of herself. So what makes this a “poet’s novel” beyond the fact that it has been written by a poet?
Disfiguring Abstraction a performance at the Museum of Modern Art on April 3, 2013 at 12:30pm in the Inventing Abstraction show on the sixth floor of the museum, assembling under the Network Connections sign at the beginning of the exhibition.Part of the series Uncontested Spaces: Guerrilla Readings in Kenneth Goldsmith's "Poet Laureate" program. This reading is a supplement to "Disfiguring Abstraction," an essay on the Inventing Abstraction show forthcoming in the Spring 2013 issue of Critical Inquiry (which begins with these aphorisms and first paragraph):
You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both. ––Gertrude Stein to Alfred Barr
No painting is so figurative that under certain conditions it will not look abstract. ––after Oscar Wilde
What color is abstraction? It can’t just be white. Its invention in time (for example, 1910 or 1912) only means that it creates a holding space for abstractions from other times and places. To centrally locate one locus of abstraction would be to diminish the radicality of abstraction’s connections to its others – or its engendering of its others.
Flavio Rodrigues, proposal for Chicago Torture Justice Memorial, 2011
101. Forget to die. Repeat and live forever.
— Lucky Pierre, Actions for Chicago Torture Justice
Another potential use of the score which I’m increasingly interested in is in the realm of political activism. How might the performance writing form of ‘action’ expand beyond the recognizable activist performance model (scripts for street theater, etc.) and/or the much more militant and confrontational modes of direct action which are generally discussed in terms of efficacy (symbolic &/or material) rather than ‘as performance’ (as if the latter threatens to turn the political into the ‘merely’ aesthetic)?1
One recent example of new thinking along this continuum uses the instruction-art model to propose actions that range from the more conventionally confrontational political activism to ‘symbolic’ art-actions to the seemingly impossible/ ‘imaginational’2/ ‘unthinkable.’
"Surrender Flag Grid," from Jared Stanley and Megan Burner's excursion, "The Aeolian Marsh."
Then the poem growled. Woods escalated from a screen to a wall to a page where an invisible hand was drawing. A book backed off onto roadside stones. An island absorbed a microphone. The poem had a body. The body a lens big enough to swallow something. Its eyes scaled trees. The trees were not hollow but sunk with echoes.
The Lermontov translations (1): 'Untitled Poem' & 'The Dream'
Transcreations from Russian by Jerome Rothenberg & Milos Sovak
[The appeal to me in the works that follow was in the harshness and fury of Lermontov’s romanticism, but it was just this note of contempt, as in his “iron verses / bursting with bitterness / & rage,” that marked him as a poet who displayed, as Nietzsche wrote of Heine, “that divine malice without which I cannot conceive perfection.” It was that spirit – not necessarily our own – that Milos Sovak & I tried to capture in a project to translate Lermontov anew, sadly terminated by Milos’s death in 2009. I’ll present the four poems we did accomplish in two installments. (J.R.)]
H.D.'s 'HERmione'
The poet's novel
“A person should think before they call a place Slyvannia” [1]
This sentence from H.D.’s HERrmione stays with me. Her prose can twirl, as Her Gart, her “heroine” is lost in a landscape she desperately tries to discern. Her “Oread” is here before considering the sea. Her Gart twirls in search of herself. So what makes this a “poet’s novel” beyond the fact that it has been written by a poet?
Disfiguring Abstraction: a performance at MoMA on April 3
Disfiguring Abstraction
a performance at the Museum of Modern Art on April 3, 2013 at 12:30pm in the Inventing Abstraction show on the sixth floor of the museum, assembling under the Network Connections sign at the beginning of the exhibition. Part of the series Uncontested Spaces: Guerrilla Readings in Kenneth Goldsmith's "Poet Laureate" program. This reading is a supplement to "Disfiguring Abstraction," an essay on the Inventing Abstraction show forthcoming in the Spring 2013 issue of Critical Inquiry (which begins with these aphorisms and first paragraph):
You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.
––Gertrude Stein to Alfred Barr
No painting is so figurative that under certain conditions it will not look abstract.
––after Oscar Wilde
What color is abstraction? It can’t just be white. Its invention in time (for example, 1910 or 1912) only means that it creates a holding space for abstractions from other times and places. To centrally locate one locus of abstraction would be to diminish the radicality of abstraction’s connections to its others – or its engendering of its others.
Un/settling scores: Actions for Torture Justice
101. Forget to die. Repeat and live forever.
— Lucky Pierre, Actions for Chicago Torture Justice
Another potential use of the score which I’m increasingly interested in is in the realm of political activism. How might the performance writing form of ‘action’ expand beyond the recognizable activist performance model (scripts for street theater, etc.) and/or the much more militant and confrontational modes of direct action which are generally discussed in terms of efficacy (symbolic &/or material) rather than ‘as performance’ (as if the latter threatens to turn the political into the ‘merely’ aesthetic)?1
One recent example of new thinking along this continuum uses the instruction-art model to propose actions that range from the more conventionally confrontational political activism to ‘symbolic’ art-actions to the seemingly impossible/ ‘imaginational’2 / ‘unthinkable.’
Ecomergency: emergent forms
by Gillian Osborne
Then the poem growled. Woods escalated from a screen to a wall to a page where an invisible hand was drawing. A book backed off onto roadside stones. An island absorbed a microphone. The poem had a body. The body a lens big enough to swallow something. Its eyes scaled trees. The trees were not hollow but sunk with echoes.