LOTTY ROSENFELD. No +, 1983: Foto: Jorge Brantmayer
Halfway through the 60s, art in Chile had developed mainly on two fronts: one with a critical and international vocation that included the experiments of conceptual art, and another, more committed to the political context. When the military coup happened in 1973, political art was completely removed from the picture. Pinochet’s dictatorship began to impose a regime of censorship and persecution, which strongly affected the local cultural scene. With many artists and authors imprisoned, tortured, assassinated, and exiled, the national artistic production was practically paralyzed.
Poet, artist, composer and publisher Dick Higgins’ culminating work might be his 1987 study, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. The categories he draws up, and the drawing up of them, are as fascinating as the examples in this profusely illustrated book. Categories that replace received notions of prosody in visual terms call for new units of measure. Why replace? Because we equate poetry with verse, using the old would make the term “pattern poetry” redundant, short-circuiting its explanatory power.
[It is astonishing to me how Pierre Joris, whom I’ve known going back into his jeunesse (& almost into mine) has emerged as an exemplar of a total poetics, at the heart of which is that nomadic poetics which he’s been delivering to us over the last three or four decades with such singular force. As with many of us who have tried to define ourselves as poets & sentient beings, it is the poetry itself that precedes and determines what we later say about it.
From left to right: erica kaufman, Julia Bloch, Bernadette Mayer, and Philip Good — at the Kelly Writers House, October 21, 2014, on a day when Mayer participated in a live webcast conversation with participants in the free, open online course called ModPo, recorded a session of PoemTalk on “February” by James Schuyler, and gave a reading with Philip Good. The recording of the webcast discussion is available here. The recording of the Mayer/Good reading is available here. The events are fully described here.
VIVA CADA!
Halfway through the 60s, art in Chile had developed mainly on two fronts: one with a critical and international vocation that included the experiments of conceptual art, and another, more committed to the political context. When the military coup happened in 1973, political art was completely removed from the picture. Pinochet’s dictatorship began to impose a regime of censorship and persecution, which strongly affected the local cultural scene. With many artists and authors imprisoned, tortured, assassinated, and exiled, the national artistic production was practically paralyzed.
Witness Marcel Broodthaers
The docile aphorism
Poet, artist, composer and publisher Dick Higgins’ culminating work might be his 1987 study, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. The categories he draws up, and the drawing up of them, are as fascinating as the examples in this profusely illustrated book. Categories that replace received notions of prosody in visual terms call for new units of measure. Why replace? Because we equate poetry with verse, using the old would make the term “pattern poetry” redundant, short-circuiting its explanatory power.
Pierre Joris: From 'Barzakh' (Poems 2000–2012)
[It is astonishing to me how Pierre Joris, whom I’ve known going back into his jeunesse (& almost into mine) has emerged as an exemplar of a total poetics, at the heart of which is that nomadic poetics which he’s been delivering to us over the last three or four decades with such singular force. As with many of us who have tried to define ourselves as poets & sentient beings, it is the poetry itself that precedes and determines what we later say about it.
Mayer and Good
From left to right: erica kaufman, Julia Bloch, Bernadette Mayer, and Philip Good — at the Kelly Writers House, October 21, 2014, on a day when Mayer participated in a live webcast conversation with participants in the free, open online course called ModPo, recorded a session of PoemTalk on “February” by James Schuyler, and gave a reading with Philip Good. The recording of the webcast discussion is available here. The recording of the Mayer/Good reading is available here. The events are fully described here.
Jack & Kate: Jack Smith and Kate Manheim in a film by Dan Ochiva
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UurCyiAZ6f4&feature=youtu.be]