Here is a snippet from a Q&A session with Christian Bök, Charles Bernstein and others at U Penn, available here if you want to read the whole thing (which is pretty interesting)
Bök is asked by a student whether poetry is elitist, which isn't a question that concerns me, but here is some of what he says in response;
Christian Bök: If you’re asking me if poetry is elitist because it’s the expression of our best sentiments, requiring skill and ingenuity to be good at it, then yes, it’s probably an elite activity. It’s only the chosen few who are willing to dedicate their lives to this activity. (…) Very few people are actually willing to make the kind of commitment that’s often required to be immersed within this kind of literature, especially since there are very few material rewards for such dedication.
…this got me thinking some - not so much about "our best sentiments" - but just about the dedication. I remember years when I read poetry daily, thought about poetry incessantly, wrote a great deal or post-2001 improvised intensely on a weekly basis (often still writing a lot even then). But since I started grad school in 2006 all of that has diminished, it was a steady decline and now it's more sporadic. I still improvise and I still write but my time for thinking and reading poetry or about poetics has dwindled to nearly nothing. Something important has been lost, or so it feels to me - hence the tone of somewhat over the top section heading here. I'm not sure I had any "gifts" to "squander" really. Improvised poetry is not like riding a bike in my experience.
At the last APG meet [25.5.2011], because my new year's poetry resolution for 2011 was made under the sign of theft, rehash, regurgitation, etc - I did the first new emitter poem since I'd been doing them back in 2004-5 sometime (no recordings exist from that period).
Emitter Poem. [also “denial poetry”] A mode of improvisation originated by Lowther whose intent is impossible, involving uttering words in a sequence in which the following word does not associate with the previous word in any immediate way (sonically, conceptually, in register, etc.) and conceived as as a means of discovering and modifying “slurs.” Allison Rentz, once dubbed this method as “denial poetry.”
The new emitter I did last night, as I was aware and as Zac too had a sense of when we discussed it a bit after the fact, was rather weak or "slack". Mostly I think (hope) that this slackness was simply being out of practice. That is, while I tried to avoid sonic and semantic/conceptual linkages as much as I could, what emerged failed to be as rigorous as what I'd done in 2004. My time in psychoanalysis had something to do with the emitter poem and I notice that though I had not done an emitter since then and have not been in analysis since 2006 or so, that both experiences are often with me, on my mind for one reason or another.
The analytic session depends upon the analysand's adoption of free association. Of course free association is just as impossible as the method of the emitter, and part of what helps analysis to work is the failure of free association. Perhaps one could say that is that because association can never be "free" or undetermined by one's habits, past history and unconscious, that free association fails is what allows new associations to be forged and thereby links old wounds or passions to contemporary fantasies and sufferings. I worked very hard in analysis, though often without knowing where anything was leading or what goal there might be. Much of the sense of labor involved was produced by aspiring to the truly free association and assuming that what such a spoken practice would reveal had to be significant or linkable whether I could make that linkage or not.
At a very superficial level the emitter's method might be thought of as a reversal of analytic free association, as it refuses to immediately allow just whatever comes to mind, subjecting what that is to delimitation. But the apparent opposition is merely apparent in many ways. Firstly because free association is just as impossible as no association. Analysis doesn't rest with an association as "free" and tends rather to push the analysand toward chaining that apparent freedom down once more. Why did that come to mind? being the request to make the links which would unmask the "freedom" of the free association revealing its determinations. Secondly, though the emitter's method is likely not as productive analytically - certainly I cannot imagine an analyst suggesting that it be adopted in preference to free association - the labor of attempting to follow it evoked similar feelings of struggle, of being somehow stuck, of trying to get to something/open a channel/break through some resistance. Thirdly, I wonder if perhaps Allison's term "denial poetry" for these improvisations does get at something? Maybe I needed a counter-balance to my analysis back then, a similarly repeating period of time where, addressing a different other, I could deny that X is linked to Q. Surely I cannot discount this possibility, but at the same time it feels insufficient. Plus, now and then I "cheated" in analysis and applied the emitter method here or there and what I said in those moments seemed to integrate as easily as anything produced freely. Finally, what also mitigates any reading of the emitter as simple denial (psychoanalytic or otherwise) is that in doing those poems I often had a sense that I was working very clearly with associations, even narratives, but that the output protocols of the emitter made this something only I could really see. Reading a draft of some of these thoughts Jeff wrote;
With regard to making it a poem (not being attached to Bök's words but referencing them anyway) and that making poems is about "expressing our best sentiments" to others... I suddenly come to a halt. There is something to the fact that something happens when it's involved with another's experience. They too are on guard for associations. What does the practice do to your own brain's way of perceiving? the muscle you're building? what other situations would it prep one for with regard to poetry? and to go bigger, poetry as art and art as something thats about reacting to what the heck is going on in the world today outside of our selves…?
In a fashion typical of Jeff's interests and preoccupations, he is concerned as much with the response as the production. Back in 2004 I found it quite difficult to concern myself with this explicitly, certainly not in the process of doing an emitter - it was hard enough just to find the next word & that I often did these with my eyes closed is perhaps an index of my need to block the immediacy of the other in some way. But I also knew that the other was crucial and have known since soon after I began improvising that without an other that the work is nearly impossible, that the tension of improv-time (as I have called it elsewhere) is lost. & the big Other is always there as the silent third even when I am thinking to myself and not simply when I address an actual or hypothetical other.
Without leaning too hard on Bök's words either, perhaps there is more to say about "expressing our best sentiments" even if I've grave doubts about "expression" "sentiments" and most scales by which we would judge this or that one as "best." If the other is crucial for improv, and it is (for me at least), then it would seem to be transference that sustains an improvisation. The group often mentioned their sense of my struggling in those poems, and of moments where I said a word that they had thought of as well. Might these things have to do with the unparticularized something that Jeff mentions taking place between improviser and auditors? Bök's terms are, somewhat surprisingly, very traditional at this moment. I'll not redeploy my criticism of expression here, but note only that it seems to me that the something that Jeff evokes is less an "expression" in the everyday/banal sense of that word than a byproduct, as an endorphin rush is a byproduct of exercise (Lacan's notion of surplus jouissance has a similar dynamic, and I could probably use his discourse theory to think about the method emitter poem upon myself when doing such a poem). The transference between poet and auditors is not quite "expressed" and not unrelated to "sentiment." Jeff is quite right about the others; "They too are on guard for associations" - though perhaps they are only really "on guard" if they know of the method - would emitters work for an audience that didn't know anything of the method?
I was very much targeting "other situations" in my poetic life with this practice. Much of the point of them was to try to break habits, some "literary" in a rude sense and others more general and pertaining to the patterns that speech encodes in me. There is probably something very modernist in this, at least in Antin's sense of modernism, where it demands reduction to the bare minimums of one's medium. So, I imagined this practice, or the facility that it was intended to develop in me, as a discipline - not that far from a rational derangement of the senses (or however that goes exactly), perhaps a rational derangement of normative linguistic usage… But the emitter itself was never really a goal to begin with, I thought of it initially as analogous to playing scales (where the scales are unknown), doing finger exercises, limbering up - and all of this was meant to have an impact on my other modes of improv (and perhaps lead to new ones emerging). & when I was doing the emitters most often it very clearly did have effects on my Minotaur stuff, my improv sonnets and every other improv I was doing. What I was a bit surprised by was that the emitter turned out to be an end in itself as well.
"To learn is to eliminate." I forget who wrote that and I may've misquoted, but it gets at something, if we accept that what is learned is found slightly to the side of anything aimed at (by following the method). Let me state categorically; the times when I succeeded (measure that!) at any instant will be grossly outnumbered by the times I failed ("deliberately intended, haphazardly executed" is perhaps the unspoken motto of the emitter poem). All of the focus on the limits the method prescribes can have the unintended effect of suggesting that the poems produced are true to the method, or that I am at every moment consciously aware of all that I am doing when perhaps all that an emitter does is resituate the places where determination lurks outside of a certain, ever fuzzy, zone of immediacy. By trying to deny immediacy of association...
1. sonically [thus through all varieties of rhyme, assonance, consonance, etc]
2. conceptually [thus "grape" and "mustard" cannot appear next to each other because in spite of lack of sonic link they are both, loosely 'food words,' but this also implies semantic or grammatical linkages to be avoided that are in some sense normative]
2.a. as regards register, I listed it as I used to attend very intently to this and strove to leap across registers as much as I could, thus; "ibuprofen - orgasm - forewarning - torque - poop - hissy - cuneiform - neighborly - periodizing - tincture"]
… I'd like to get back in the swing of the emitter and thus get "comfortable" again (to the extent possible) with these sorts of limits and some potential extensions (primarily because of the sense of loss I mentioned in section one of this text, but also simply as a discipline, something I find is often useful). Then, to complicate the sonic - couldn't it also imply rhythm and preclude repeating words of the same syllabic count or similar rhythmic articulation (this may be beyond me, as I have tried to do improvisation using only words with an odd number of syllables, but that was a bust - but perhaps I just didn't try hard enough?) or it might at least force more attention to such things if not ruling upon them.
Regarding the conceptual level there have to be more things to watch out for… I am thinking specifically of crypt-words, as when, if I should say "incest" and follow it with "malediction" that the latter word, by virtue of rhyming with "prohibition" which collocates highly with "incest" should also be avoided. I often allowed these in the past, but they do lead me back to habit rather than away from it. There are other conceptual linkages that deserve more thought, but that one occurred to me in the night as I lay in bed last Wednesday thinking about the slackness of the poem I'd made hours before. Maybe there is some work to be done here with parts of speech, or stems -vs- compounds, whether affixes are involved or not and so forth.
The plan then, such as it is, is to start doing emitters at weekly meetings for the remainder of this year and to work out a way to do them when alone (here I am thinking that perhaps if I was making a video while doing so that this might make that (silent, third, big) Other feel a bit more present and thus invoke improv time effectively.
Back in the day (I think this was all in 2004-5) when I had been doing these for awhile, I began to allow the occasional phrase to break the monotony of each new term being like a bead on a string. But this is fraught with conflicts given the method sketched above and even if I consciously decide (as if) in the moment to allow a phrase "some restrictions apply" to appear in a chain of words that are otherwise treated as discrete objects, it risks being an escape hatch, an outlet for my laziness.
Would it then be possible, if we consider the definition above as pertaining to (monadic) emitter poems, to think about dyadic or traidic emitters as well? What about emitters whose smallest unit was a phrase or sentence. Perhaps "emitter" is no longer the best term for these latter suggestions and that the longer units would preclude applying too many of the limits that the emitter can impose in a monadic context, but with the dyad and triad it seems that many new options are possible (new limits can be imposed even as some monadic limits are precluded).
DYADS;
last & first chaining: "brushfire - firestation - stationmaster - masterkey - keystone - stonehinge - hingepoint" etc… (I'd probably bottom out now and then with such a method, reaching a word whose end I could not think of any word to follow it with, if for example I'd just said "mailman" and then I said "mandrake" where would I go next? Maybe there is a word beginning with drake that is completed as compound [at least hypothetically] by another stand-alone word, but if there is, I do not know it. As such I'd need a procedure when I bottomed out like that that would then allow me to restart the poem). & this might be more effective (using the example above) if it were spoken as "brush-fire-station-master-key-stone-hinge-point," though pauses in speech might cause some of the pairs not to be heard.
common dyads: "T intersection - corporate downsizing - please forward - upscale establishment - silver lining - turkey shoot - carpal tunnel - X factor - rim job - test subject - free lunch - drive safely - gender neutral - stroke victim - peanut butter" etc… But these are also sort of banal at times or unimpressive & may, as an end in themselves, not lead anywhere productive.
uncommon dyads: "manifold excessively - hump longitude - fractal cease - lasting up - shower albeit - wormhole butter - strategic malodorous"… Here the question might be what (if anything) distinguishes a series of uncommon dyads from an even numbered sequence of monads? Perhaps it could be a performative issue, that they must be said as a dyad.
alternating dyads: perchance, once I am producing decent monadic strings I might allow an alternation between pairs which follow the monadic emitter rules with ones which negate those rules? "cob meaningful - dean dare - usurp sequestered - stay weigh - marker quell - bread water" etc... every other pair exhibiting one of the associations ruled out in the monadic emitter.
…it is hard to see all the consequences of dyads for the method per monadic emitter, but just keeping track of the base-level sonic connections would be significantly more challenging and so those rules may have to soften somewhat. Testing required.
TRIADS;
common triads: "thesis antithesis synthesis - with malice aforethought - by all rights - some restrictions apply - control alt delete - please be seated" etc. I'm doubtful that I could carry on as improv with such for very long given the minute or two that it took to generate the few examples here, but experimentation seems worthwhile. Some study of idioms and so forth might also reveal patterns that could be deployed in this way.
Should I manage to get acceptably (which is to say, marginally) proficient at these, a larger frame for emitters might be possible where every 30 seconds or through some other sequencing or triggering procedure I might switch between monadic, dyadic and triadic methods (with all the varieties as potential variables).
A plan, an intention, an improv poetry fitness regime - call it whatever best fits. Whatever the case this is what I am thinking about. I am also curious as to whether - given that I am now doing these at a moment in APG history when we are pretty responsible with our recording and archiving - whether transcribing these I might use my very failures, the unavoidable sonic or conceptual echoes and associations as a means to map the poems in transcription. That last idea is pretty fuzzy but I can sort of visualize how that might be rendered on a page & perhaps it would be both revealing (of slurs among other things) as well as interesting to look at.
A final point about emitters. They did not generally allow for a great many neologisms or non-lexical sound poetry stuff. I would like to keep that boundary and strive to allow only known words to be used. [But I also hope to post about sound poetry soon and develop a plan of sorts for a soundpo fitness regime.]
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