Is that a real theory, or did you make that up?

I like reading Lacan.

Not always mind you.

Not with some desperate impulse barking at my neck, some super-Ego stand-in demanding that I finish a paper or rebut a critique or otherwise pronounce authoritatively upon (& cite of course!) to demonstrate my worth for the big(bloated)Other in some fashion.

But I find just how freakily bizarre Lacan can be, rather… awe-inspiring.

That so much of his work is spoken opens a particular door to it that I often stand in, looking, and wondering (through the haze of multiple English renderings with my non-French eyes) from the improvising poets' room (my room) into Lacan's (as I imagine it) and feeling as if I know something about how things must just have just started to come out - like a tap being turned on, the pipes creak, then you're talking - and it is not as if one is not thinking all the while (in fact it is challenging to think on one's feet, in one's mouth), but to say that one is magisterially directing with knowledge aforethought each utterance in accordance with some grander argument is perhaps even more absurd (noodle in a pincushion) than to suggest that no thought is being exercised in this process. 

O'Hara

Much more like Frank O'Hara than anyone will probably credit, Jacques is going on his nerve.

Or so it seems to me.

But Lacanians, or such has been my experience, are not comfortable focusing overmuch on his seminars or writings as embodying a poetics - as if to find in the language something not importantly content-relevant and connectable to one's real or imagined internal map of Lacanian thought consigns whatever it is to frivolity. 

I see no necessary contradiction with desiring to both make use of the generative charge of Lacan's poetics - a position which would start with him but go wherever, and another which thinks that attempting to tune him in as best as one is able (an endless and recursive process) is important regardless of whether one ultimately 'agrees' and this attempt is an aid to the very generativity of the poetics.

In correspondence recently with my sis, where I was thinking through some of this same stuff somewhat otherwise, I wrote this;

[Lacan's] poetics i do not talk about but simply use, a poetics that is generative (for me at least) and about which i do not have much of anything to say, though there is endlessly something more one can do with it - "doings" which could never have been predicted entirely from knowledge of Lacan, hence the 'generative'

were the generative poetics not present, then the "specific rigor" [of my approach to Lacan's work, her description] would never have taken hold, nor would giving 2 shits about Lacan in all likelihood

in a very similar way (abstracted from the specific contents); 

i hold you to a higher standard - because i love you

None of which should suggest that my reading and thinking and experience of Lacan is not conflicted and ambivalent in many ways. 

That is, in spite of having found ways to enjoy, I am not immune to the suggestion that something crucial is being said, that he is on the verge of giving us the key to grasping it all - and thus of the need (it could strike at any moment!) to be able to bring the lights up, stand, face the group and say "What Lacan means is…"

And this is surely required if one is to accord with the general demands of the University discourse,.. that flash of mastery "What Lacan means…" - as fleeting as a grimace - is quickly diffused with more and more knowledge, tied to the master's words with citation and exegesis, propped up further by pointing at other names who read him in a similar way.

But saying "What Lacan means…" is a rather secondary if not tertiary posture of mastery already, one that any 'Agent S2' in an actual university setting sneaks up on rather than blurting out in most cases, laying all the bricks of justification and citation before daring to pronounce. 

Obviously - in the tone if not the substance - there is something about this which is displeasing to me, constraining.

There is a poetics in that too I guess, but it isn't one that presses my buttons and - as JL himself argues in Seminar XVII apropos the University discourse. 

"…the difficulty endemic to translating me into academic language will also blight anyone who, for whatever reason, tries their hand at it…" 

"Blight" is an interesting choice - and of course that is Grigg, the translator's choice and I do not have the French original to ponder.

Rather we are to be agents of the S2, knowledge purveying a unique packaging (dare I say brand) of some concatenation of 'a stupid' of signifiers, made to appear to have a meaning and should the they be truly classic, the might simply seem to be their meaning (two echoes there might be worth thinking about sometime, not now).

This unique packaging should be reflected on the c.v.,.. naturally.

Brand Lowther (includes the award-wishing Lowther Method ®™)

Google > Image "brand lowther" gave me this pic and this caption;
"As you might expect, Lowther-based loudspeakers were much in evidence at the show. A pair of vintage Lowthers was spotted in the Lowther America room." Now I want a vintage Lowther loudspeaker!

Superego says: [sigh]

So, I like the idea of having a specific rigor, it sounds so butch but maybe we could spin it nicely if the license that the poetic provides is available as a consequence.

There is an ethics there and one not totally unlike that involved in staging a Return to… the text of someone or other.

Which is not to even pretend that the poetics that I find generative would have found favor with Lacan or that he'd even agree that it is there in his work, just that I feel pieces of it there.

"Poetics" here having less to do with words-language-discourse as such as with the ways of working with them, actual practices but also the stances towards the materials would seem to be important.

Since I am already risking an opposition between the poetic and the academic 'Lacans' let me also not forget the clinical one - arguably the one most crucial for Lacan himself from the beginning to the end of his career. 

My hope to tune Jacques in as best as I can as well as to find the points where more thinking is needed, extensions proposed, modification seems necessary, etc - This is where it shades over into the poetics (theory is then improvised and maybe not scrapped after) (this is very like poetry for me, a poem is written or spoken and later one decides… Not all of them can work. Plus if you aren't failing often then you can't be trying very hard. Sometimes they come in bunches, interrelated but distinct and they keep coming for as long as they keep coming and no longer.) to do perhaps with the way the concepts interact, how they fit together and don't, how they unsettle one another or create tensions, the sorts of narratives that emerge from them, a sense (ultimately my own, and not exactly anything I could argue for) of the propulsion or internal dynamics of this as poetics that makes it available for use.

But, just to make matters more impossible(?), it seems to me that whether some modification to the theory is to be justified as "psychoanalytic" in a meaningful sense of that term, then it would also need, at the bare minimum, to not be armful or contraindicated or somesuch thing in the clinic.

No analysands were harmed in the making of this post (so far).

But yes, that is a tough one as I am not an analyst and never even completed my own analysis - though I do admit that I often wonder about becoming an analyst, being an analyst, ( I hear your slips of the tongue, I do, but have learned mostly to pretend I didn't) etc. 

So those are the three styles or modes that I try to keep in mind, the poetic, the 'specific rigor' (scholarship) & the clinic - the first I feel but have some difficulties explaining and do not really desire to try to explain very much - the second I am always trying to adapt to the specifics of university protocols and whatnot but which my allegiance to scholarly pursuits is not framed by those things (MLA format, disciplinary boundaries, peer review) but by the specific texts that I am excited by - and thirdly by my hallucination of the subject as analysand or analyst, my memories of my analysis and others I read about, my never-ending snooping around in my own associations, slips, dreams.

The weak link is the third one.

Which is not to say that the others are über-robust or anything.

Creeley, natch.

My subject line is a riff on the line that poet Robert Creeley so often repeated.

Creeley was reading somewhere - the midwest I think - and after his reading a man came up and asked him, in all seriousness "Is that a real poem or did you make that up?"

If we put theory in for "poem"…?

The whole problematic of the university discourse as discussed above is evoked once more.

Other jokes are possible.

But speaking as a poet I just want to say, 

That's a real theory

because

I made it up.

You talkin' to me?

Quadripodal Musings

Displacer Beast!

I am still hoping to find some kind of generative poetic that will let me work with theory differently than I have largely had to up until now. I know that the dissertation will have to explain things and exemplify things - but I'm maybe reacting to the imposed telos of it all. Is there no way to demonstrate knowledge other than the University Discourse? What would any of these be like as the upper line of a quadripode of Lacan's discourse theory.

Yes, I said quadripode.

Aloud, while I was typing it.

 Here is the graph of the positions…

So then, here are the two other upper lines I alluded to before we stumbled over quadripode (quadripode oh quadripode…) I would like to nominate for consideration (meaning someone out there explain them to me!)…

a → S1

a → S2

In each the agent is object petit a.  Discourse issues from the cause or object of desire in each case. The first addresses an other as Master and the second addresses an other as Knowledge.   

object a as agent seems to me to always be the tough one to think on par with the others. It is easy as pie to imagine individual statements of arguments as being delivered in the discourses of the Hysteric, Master, University. But the Analysts does really say that much to begin with, and it is always as if what they say is coming back at you from things you've already said. anyway. 

That is to say, I can imagine - in a somewhat Marx Brothers fashion, ordering a meal in a restaurant in the mode of those other three discourses. ...But how would the analyst order anything if we understand their discourse as situated in the analytic session? 

Waiter: Do you want to start with drinks?

Star..? (the waiter had dropped the 't' at the end of "start", though it could have been a accent thing, after all, they've just met)

Waiter: I can take the food order then if you're ready.

…

Waiter: I'll give you a few minutes. (muttering 'nutcase' as he heads for the kitchen)

Whether any meal could in fact ever be ordered is unclear, perhaps the hopefulness of the waiter who is under pressure to sell tonight's special might leak out somehow, get repeated and appear to satisfy the wish i.e., be heard an order. Though the difficulty would repeat with the side dish and salad dressing.

But, it would seem to me (and I argued this with a literary example elsewhere) that what is different in the analyst's use of the discourse of the "analyst" discourse is a very restrained, even refused relationship to the sort of 'agency' that is exerted by the S1, S2 and $ in their respective turns in the agent's position. To point to one very easy difference…

If one attempts to intervene in discussions or to interpret, in the analytic sense of that term - echoes slips of the tongue and mis-speech of any sort, refusing to gratify questions with answers or attention, interrupting now and then with utterances that are annoyingly neither clearly questions or answers, etc etc what, in my experience happens is, people get angry or annoyed, or they just treat you like you're maybe on meds or something and give glassy smiles back your way. Now one could complain that I am grossly underestimating what analytic technique is all about etc - fair enough. I'd still argue that no counter argument is really allowed - analysis is purported to work whether I as analysand know doodley squat about the theory - ergo, first impressions are not something that could be shrugged off, rather they would be aspects of the interaction for the analyst to interpret. Just saying that if the above first impressions may be overly negative, there is enough there I think to nonetheless mark the trends in the analysts discourse that work at odds to most social styles of discussion and interaction that we are involved within. 

What none of the other discourses seem to have is an ethic. As such, if we think of the discourse formerly called the Analyst's as being without any ethic, then what might it better be called…? Maybe the Discourse of the Pervert? (I'm not the first to have noted that the top line of the discourse also resembles the formula for perversion a <> $ ).

There is much more to say but I'm just staring at these and spinning lines ...

a → S1

a → S2

{Speculative Poetics Series No.5}

The line between self-gratification and understanding, how thick is it? 

If you need to know if it's poetry, why are you here? 

Poetry that knows its bounds has succumbed to some local understanding… why end there, why go at all? 

Resist it. 

Nothing will be reduced to a point. 

Develop yet more strategies to forestall it while offering a note now and then to tune to. 

To refuse system, in favor of a poetry in its incitements? 

It's bodies and languages the terrain of searching, finding and ...

Bumpersticker my heart: I chase sparks.

Why, who do you run with?

"Tokyo rail network designed by Physarum plasmodium" A.K.A. The emergence of the We-Agent

I love it. Aren't slime moulds just the most awesome moulds around?

The cover for the forthcoming APG anthology will feature a picture of a slime mold growing on a glass window. We liked it as a metaphor for the group as collaborative entity and that it seemed to dove-tail with some of the things we were writing about that. Without getting into the details, we thought about the "I is an other" of Rimbaud and ended up with "We is an agent."

I'd like to think that when you watch this, you are seeing the various lone I-others all being slime molded together into the We-agent.

APG 4ever, yo!

Russian Poet German Lukomnikov

German Lukomnikov in Moscow in 2009

TEXT CORRECTED

the fabulous discomfort and humor of this video gets me. also the weird retro look of it in spite of the obvious technical aspects, projection, etc. but that low contrast in black and white which feels like pre-color television somehow.

but what i want to attend to is the sound of this piece/recording.

there seems to be a cut (@ 1:37). & there are surely "parts" with edges more or less discernible. what i don't know is what it is called (is it "only sound" or is it somehow "Azor's Paw only sound") … hard for me to guess.

what really zaps me about this recording is the first section of wordless (and not even word-suggestive) vocal sounds and then the end. the first section has all these small vocalizations which in large part i would think could be used with words and not stand out all that much - well, maybe that crooning whine at 1:18 or the last thing before the cut this sort of yes/no feeling thing that becomes like the squeak of a spring - but many of the other sounds are not that unusual in spoken discourse, though we tend to ignore them when recounting what was said (we might call that retrospective semanticism and think of it as a bias). "here is an idea i can steal" i said to myself and i did (but will anyone be able to see where or how - the evidence is already out there). so that would be section one of this piece as i hear/parse it.

but then after the cut - in section two - things are more word-based for some time and don't have quite the same impact on me, though they begin to drift in looser and looser, more pitch-arc'd ways toward section three. in this section tho his utterances seem to echo hesitancies, uncertainties… at one point around 3 minutes this sing-songy repetition emerges - which again, i think that i at least do and suspect others do too; taking a word or phrase and chanting it somehow with however much or little melody. anyway...

… by 3:40 or so the transition seems to have been clear to a third section (this edge is much blurrier, or maybe it is a gradual build and not an edge at all). everything gets further from anything like conventional "word-space" and Lukominikov works with particles and the sounds between those of language and "mouth noises" and…

i'm always unhappy, i feel interrupted and annoyed when it ends. and yet, perhaps, relieved as well, as it takes a certain attention which i am not using when just sitting here, or having a conversation with someone, etc. and such attention is not endless, though here i feel more than able to give it.

there is also the twinned terms i opened with - humor and discomfort. the "how would i introduce this to so&so" thought experiment, where so&so is your great aunt lou or your assistant manager boss guy or whomever you picture as a tough sell for anything this self-consciously engaged in not playing the communication game while being nonetheless ludic, or maybe ruminative, or maybe something else (where ludic gets calls narcissism, and ruminative labelled pretentious and the whole non-communicative is just something that can't be fit into their universe). imagining playing that game with this video and whoever it is that i imagine gets at the discomfort somewhat. Lukomnikov seems quite comfortable with silences without a need to fill all the space tightly or to demonstrate a physical skill with language making (that is a bad way of saying this, but I am thinking of Christian Bök as a contrast, Bök clearly has amazing mouth-based chops aka skills, etc - as here in this performance at the Whitney, but let's get back to Lukomnikov

the text below the video as found on youtube
Герман Лукомников на фестивале "Лапа Азора only sound" 
  seems to say
Herman Lukomnikov at the "Azor's Paw only sound" ..but the G-translation of his name seems more common, though i did see "Guerman" to make it a bit more complex.

I got curious. There is no wikipedia page for him. There are some other videos of him reading, which I'll come back to below, but I was hoping for more info. Some googling got me a few bits.

1st I looked at this report sent to poet Maria Damon and housed at the EPC, with just a short mention of Lukomnikov, but it struck me as amusing. The author of this is Masha Zavialova, in the midst of her longer report on The Russian Poetry Festival Oct. 17-19, 1998, St. Petersburg she mentions Lukominokov;

Bonifatsii (German Lukomnikov) - a charming person and performance artist read some of his short and extremely witty (for us who live here) poems. One of them: "Why don't I fly?" (several times with different modulations of voice but very romantically) And suddenly in a matter-of-fact and slightly offended tone "Why don't I fly? I fly."

This made me more curious… and next I read this;

Potty About Poetry

25 August 2000

By Anna Arutunyan The Moscow Times

How can one characterize the poetry of German Lukomnikov, who attributes much of his poetry to his alter ego, Boniface? Similarities exist between Lukomnikov’s work and the kind of absurd children’s rhyme established by writers like Daniil Kharms and Kornei Chukovsky —poets who play with short stanzas and diminutive puns in their verse — but Lukomnikov, who often uses obscenities, is by no means a writer of children’s poems.

Lukomnikov (or Boniface) — Lukomnikov insists they are two different people — writes with an innocence and honesty that is so regularly masked among his contemporaries by cynicism and irony. He makes fun of his background and plays with words, but maintains an air of a barely discovered underground poet writing among friends in his attic.

But is there a name for the work of the virtual pair of Lukomnikov and Boniface, who write and illustrate their own works? Dirty limericks, perhaps, or childish farce? Or maybe it is something like those art-scene hooligans with a cult following, the Mitki, who create humorous illustrations with companion rhymes.

Associated with beer and hippies and enjoying a large following, the Mitki have managed to seep into the mainstream, but the same cannot be said of Lukomnikov, whose poetry is not only still marginal, but too varied to be characterized. His paintings can be childlike, with inscriptions of meaningless puns like "Kitayets kita yest" — which can mean either "the Chinaman is a whale" or "the Chinaman eats a whale" — which appears under a painting of an Asian-looking boy eating a fish.

Other works are earnest communications with an evidently strong lyrical background that reveal the vulnerability of a poet interacting with the world around him: "If only someone knew how I fear people! /How strange that worldwide neighborhood seems to me/ Of glaring monsters. I am becoming childlike/ As if in a sea of ugly swans (O kto by znal, kak ya boyus’ lyudei! / Kak diko mne vsemirnoye sosedstvo / Glazastykh chudishch. Ya vpadayu v detstvo, / Kak budto v more gadkikh lebedei.)

In this way, Lukomnikov hovers somewhere between poet, comedian and artist. The man who has characterized himself as a "poet, a human being of the male sex, and an inhabitant of Earth and the solar system," Lukomnikov plays out an exchange with his persistent alias, Boniface, on stage. If determining to what extent their poetry (and personalities) differ is of any interest to you, don’t pass up the opportunity to see their odd duet this week. 

German Lukomnikov reads his Poetry of the Season at 8 p.m. on Thursday at the Project O.G.I club, located at 8/12 Potapovsky Pereulok, Building 2 (enter through the courtyard). Metro Chistye Prudy. Tel. 927-5609. For more information, write ogi@mail.ru

i don't know enough about contemporary Russian poetry to say squat about this, though i do have a book by Daniil Kharms. i also like hearing about this group the Mitki discussed here and would be interested to know more of them, but back to the thread….

this gives me lots to think about. i cannot tell from watching or listening when Boniface is involved and when he isn't - so sadly, that whole intrigue will remain opaque, but this article generally charges up my curiosity. and this poem is surely one that would work for me;

If only someone knew how I fear people! 

How strange that worldwide neighborhood seems to me

Of glaring monsters. I am becoming childlike

As if in a sea of ugly swans

… but i should mention that i also dropped the original language text given for this poem in the article above into google translator as well and, being set to "detect language" is did not mark this as russian but Slovak and it could translate less than half of it. so is Lukomnikov not Russian at all?

There are several more videos on youtube. I'll leave their viewing up to you…

German Lukomnikov shows a younger Lukomnikov (1998) and while i am lost with the language, this one holds my attention quite well. i'll not go through why and how and so forth, but there is much humor and sound stuff here. enjoyable. also nice that he "flies" away at the end.

German Lukomnikov  rather more annoying video with noisy camera and crowd noise. Lukomnikov is doing some emphatic sound stuff at the end with what i assume are words and fragments tho.

POET GUERMAN LUKOMNIKOV is a small group setting and he is doing more sentency or phrasal stuff with odd slanted repetitions. lots of folks laugh.

Герман Лукомников в Булгаковском this is in the same venue as the previous one, and is yet more chanted and looping though using (i assume) phrases and sentences. again, a good bit of laughing.

Lukomnikov.divx  this too sounds more playfully semantic, rather than pushing hard toward sound. i'd love to hear from anyone who knows the language.

Velikiy Poet Lukomnikov is yet another venue with a big crowd (poetry standards) he is a bit hard to hear in spite of the amplification at moments and there are crowd noises and responses. Luko seems busy with these tightening and loosening patterns imposed on long string of text. big cheers at the end.

it seems that i also found his livejournal account where i stole that picture with the finger puppets. but scanning through it a bit i found some paintings as well...

Illustration of a poem (by German Lukomnikov) by Dmitry Shirokov (painter)

anyway, i like what i've found and hope to hear more of German Lukomnikov

Preliminary thoughts on the Combine Poem

In some posts about my improv practice from earlier in 2011: one on the emitter and another on sound poetry, I made certain suggestions which in retrospect seem to have pointed forward to the Combine though I had yet to imagine it myself. Looking back at those postings now I also see additional ideas that I might bring into the Combine going forward. But, that said, what served as the catalyst for the Combine was a note I made in a file called "poem ideas" which lives semi-perpetually on the desktop of my computer (while now and then being discarded or emerging again, with a new name).

Anyway, that note read simply; "repetition based thing i did a week or so back" underneath which I placed a short list of words

• piles
• trails
• feathers
• plangent
• antipodal
• huff
• forbear
• asymptotic 

… the moment a week or so before was not an APG meeting. I was thinking back to playing with words, aloud, scatting to a degree while home alone. It stayed on my mind and so I wrote the note later with this list as a record of the words that I generated. The first recording of anything in this mode is from the November 9, 2011 APG meeting & listed as "Stalactite improv" - these things, shall I just call them repeaters?

But, in any event before doing any of them again as solitary exercises (as emitters were intended initially) the idea of the Combine Poem came to me. Nothing grandly conceptual about it. & yes, in light of the current year's Poetry Resolution, the name is stolen from Rauschenberg (and that works for me in other ways too). So then a Combine Poem is what?

It can contain emitters and repeaters, could also embed what I might otherwise have called an "improv sonnet", various modalities of sound poetry might be included etc, in short - whatever. I imagined it as operating under a number of regimes or modes or procedures or tints and that I would shift between them as needed. Thus my need to work back through those earlier posts that I linked to above as both contain elaborate listings of other potential avenues which might funnel into the Combine.

So far there have been three of them.

Combine Poem No. 1 - Black radishes are just as white on the inside

Combine Poem No. 2 - Dissociative

Combine Poem No. 3 - Rip it open and eat the flesh

…which is my first ever video poem.

I'm interested in both a drift in the Combine where transitions between sub-routines are gradual and a total lack of drift, where they are cuts, abrupt, startling. But in either case I am still missing something with 1-3, as much as they are pointing generally in the direction I want to go for awhile. I think what they are missing is a lattice (as metadata) - which dims the improv aspect to a small degree, though I do not expect it will squash it totally.

Stay tuned to see if that last idea takes wings.

{Speculative Poetics Series No.4}

If it comes,... 
                                       the spark flies between the sticky of language and the slippy of focal points caught on the fly [relay-able in] and inadequately indexed by "voice," "subject," "image," "event," "performance," "surface," "sound," "vibe" & etcetera.

Trying not to let my shadow stain the action when the spark is behind me, marginally guiding just as where you decide to stand on a three legged table is not entirely up to you.

Flying and falling are perspectival with regard to the spark. Mostly I do not 'see' it. I'm imagining things.

The poem has a list which it is delightful to toss across where delight means crossing the list, if I can just factor the toss somehow, but one cannot feel the lattice implied until after and then mostly in invisible ink.

The toss is situated. It risks being presituated ['takes language for granted' - Zac Denton] which is akin to being occluded if (maybe) not an identical twin.

If the where, in where it comes from, is always, if also only immanent, in the toss (only the lonely) -- where toss both evokes Mallarmé and is a word double [body double, stand-in] for utterance, sentence, line, sound, mark -- do we reach back into the dark before tossing into light, or, can we track only output [the toss] while the input comes from the other side of the list ["list" here as "edge"]

The list of meaning [not sense] across which we find the sense of nonsense [lack of meaning]

The spark flies

The spark falls

use the of the f-words is perspectival

To fly and to fall is the spark [like a door that only can open the wall it implies around itself - it has only a hinge, compare the way spiderwebs make space]. But to fly and to fall is not to have beginning and ending points

{Speculative Poetics Series No.3}

I in It & I vs It
Purpose or cause might be posed as query but the crudity of presupposition involved in such questions will find answers elusive, fickle and as clumsy as logic - such answers will be fictions, things caught on the fly, fixed, falsified, objectified elements which hide as much as they make visible.

The best poetics are falsified by the poems whose poetics they are. That most knowing I that's all about it in its imaginings and honest about all intents and knows its objects through time and speaks well must be false somewhere.

Poetics turns right back and bites. It didn't mean it like that, rather I. When 'poets' here, I means me, but not all poets. I.is.speaking.these.words.as.it.writes. Subject of this, agent of that. Gestures. Poets are subjects of the poem but agents of the spark. When I write 'dear' it means myself (poets) and strangers.

*

{Speculative Poetics Series No.2}

Spark in process, in object 

Poetry as process (contingent, incessant, stretchy, permeable), evades the arrangement, the schema, the singular, the interpretation. These points of evasion, aporia, etc are where the spark might be.

Poetry, seen as object held together by this excess is what persists in getting wet no matter that the non-poetic would shelter it under the umbrella of a concept. The spark is mistaken if taken as a concept (& that cannot be helped).

Even the poem that aims at the concept or object and is deemed to have attained that goal is misrecognized if it is equated with that end (read, heard, experienced as the embodiment of that end rather than the spark - like a lightning flash that reveals the shadow of a poem looming - but which is gone again when one looks for what cast the shadow).

It is not that the poem cannot be an object, it can and at times must, if the shadow cast by the spark can be taken as object (it can) - not the recognized "form" or the other detritus of pre-fabricated expectation. The Low Ghost that haunts it rather than the logos haunted.

*

{Speculative Poetics Series No.1}

The Spark 
   is not one in itself - is plural in principle - encounters the poem, runs along under the impulses of its emergence, and flies off from it after, when the 'poem' as instance has been called over with.  A spark mostly not visible but emerging out of the lattice of potentials - potential suspects, avenues, passing frames. 

I am chasing it, it is chasing me, often enough I've very much lost sight of it, writing or speaking like hands extended in utter pitch when the page is black too, knowing that somewhere is something to touch if only fleetingly and thus a direction to follow. Or sitting waiting for the dictation - a sort of hearing and patience, floating in the sea and a warm or cold current envelops for however long it does.

*

Self-Discipline for [improv] Sound Poetry

We're them void guys

We're them pose guys

Lean each with each

With weed full head.  Alas!

At the close of my last post I mentioned wanting to concoct a similar plan for re-engaging my monophonic improv sound poetry. If the emitter plans I discussed are an attempt to get some discipline back into my improv practice for "proper" lexical words. What might I do in parallel to that for my improv sound poetry?

First a few limits which might be arbitrary from some POVs but that are important to me, or perhaps to my sense of what sort of sound poetry I have made and desire to make.

1. Echoing something Mark wrote in the SOUND node for the anthology, I do not want it to move over into "song" however loosely construed that might be. In that interview with Christian Bök mentioned in the last post, he has a lot of things to say about sound poetry and I'd like to post about some of that in time, but he references "vocal percussionists" and "beatboxers" such as Dokata and Rahzel… & both have impressive skills or so my web-hunting quickly revealed. Rahzel is clearly pursuing music and Dokata is as well, if in a rather different vein (unlike Rahzel he does not sing, but mimics the music itself). Yet both are also very beat-dependent in a way that I have no immediate interest in. Sound poetry for me is not music and it is not song either.
2. While I will often enough abandon the tenor of "everyday speech" I do not want that abandonment to be the sole focus or what ensures that I am in fact doing "sound poetry." My everyday voice and careful pronunciation will remain a default whenever possible (that is, at any time some other impulse does not directly negate these things). This is not to defend against a charge of doing the police in different voices, nor is it a valorization of my everyday ("natural") voice, just a starting point: the voice I have.
3. I'm not against electronic manipulation of the voice, but in terms of a disciplined practice I prefer to see how far I can go with voice alone before I use effects of any sort. As the local Atlanta scene already has ample evidence, simply using delay and so forth on one's voice while doing poetry is too easily a crutch for doing really bad poems. (If you do not get that reference, count yourself lucky.)

Next, I suppose that I need a distinction between the Hypothetically Lexical and the Generally Unlexical… even if the boundary will be blurred much of the time. What then will these two terms mean for me? Well, whatever they describe, that is all they will be - descriptions - they're not meant to carry conceptual weight (the range of noises that might come out of our mouths could be described in many other ways I'm sure).

Hypothetically Lexical [HL] - here I have in mind things like Joyce's "thunder words" and all that I mean by the 'lexical' here is that they are renderable as words no matter how aberrant. Thus I might say something like "frusstoiklej" - one can look at this and say something with a reasonable degree of phonetic loyalty to this rendering with basis English expectations regarding pronunciation. These sorts of words can be, like "frusstoiklej," completely neologistic and having no clear meaning-bearing particles, or they might have parts which are meaningful but break that in their unified form. As an example of that latter situation, consider "omnithrummage" - 'omni' and 'thrum' and the suffix '-age' all have meaning effects or are meaningful in and of themselves, but as a conjoined word they are not especially meaningful without a bit of wildly ungrounded interpretive work. This then is what I mean by Hypothetically Lexical.

Generally Nonlexical [GN] - here I am thinking of vocal sounds of all sorts, even if some might be potentially rendered as "words" the vast majority cannot be. Things which we would describe as growls or hums or squawks or… however one describes such things. Mimicry, of non-human sounds of whatever sort would be included here.

What might I then do with HL or GN that could be pursued in a disciplined fashion that might result in greater variety and impact in my monophonic improvised sound poetry? Much of what follows I have already been doing, but in a more haphazard, now & then, fashion which I'm trying here to make more deliberate (with the proviso that improv can only take so much deliberation and must always depend on the haphazard - upon chance and spontaneous impulse).

impressively complicated looking, isn't it?

Hypothetically Lexical

Morpheme or word stem study is one option & need not be limited to English & if it isn't obvious there is no need to know the meanings associated (it might even be counter productive in some respects). Much of what follow are 'practice modalities' for improv but not improv themselves.

Computer-based language processing using things like Travesty can produce some very un-English "words" and sometimes these have no unambiguous translation to utterance. But, not every such new word is un-utterable, and if one steps out of English-derived pronunciation rules, opting rather for Sanskrit/Nepali or German for example some will have a less ambiguous pronunciation.

Non-English pronunciation protocols can also be applied productively across language barriers, consider the German or Sanskrit way that one would attempt to utter words like "lynchpin", "motor", "eucalyptus" or "siphon."

Accent study would be another way to think about some of the above. There are a number of books like Paul Meier's Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen (includes 12 CDs) which covers "Afrikaans (South Africa), American Deep South (Mississippi/Georgia/Alabama), American Southern (Kentucky/Tennessee), Australian, Cockney, Downeast New England, French, General American, German, Hampshire, Indian, Irish, Italian, Liverpool, New York, Northern Ireland, Russian, Scottish, South Boston, Spanish (Castilian & Colonial), Standard British English (Received Pronunciation), Welsh, Yiddish, and Yorkshire." & thinking about what such a book offers one can then imagine working through different accents while dealing with the stems or morphemes mentioned above: Castilian to Russian to Deep Southern.

Mimicry of others, though risky and potentially prone to complaint on PC grounds is another option for HL, thus gay voice, gendered voice, possibly "racial" voice (to the extent that such things can be distinguished from accent). & certainly I have met many people whose distinctive way of speaking I can to some extent imitate.

probably for the best that you can't read this...  

call it a token of my systematic imaginary

Generally Nonlexical

One might start with a sort of "whole earth phonological survey" (another lovely impossibility). My study in German and Sanskrit/Nepali both had repeated drills on phonology, but were one able to practice such things for other additional languages, this might help provide a base of sounds to then work over more intensely (this notion is perhaps relevant to HL as well, but I'm trying to pull it into the GN territory).

Whatever might be adaptable from vocal percussionists or beatboxers which does not move toward song or music is certainly open for the taking (assuming I have the skills).

No nifty name for this but let's just call it vocal-storming for now (on the model of brain-storming),.. basically just trying to make unique and repeatable vocal sounds (fun if you're in the mood) and then to name them or record them or something for further use.

Cataloging and practice of non-lexicals that are common in everyday speech ("shhh" for 'be quiet' etc) is something I have done before to a small and not terribly systematic extent. Presumably this could be extended.

result of an image search with "non lexical" I think

Other Possibilities (applicable to either, depending and paralinguistic in each case)

Pitch; deep voice to high (trying perhaps to make this sound as 'natural' as possible).

Timber is surely imitable to a degree - rough, raspy, creaky, whispery, smooth, hard, whimpering, etc.

Pace or tempo is surely a possibility, though much constrained by my ability to control it. If I had all the words ready in my head (or in Tzara's hat) I could surely include pacing as a variable, but when they come from the fleshy aether of my head…

Tone leads toward acting perhaps, but cataloging the various emotional tones that can be applied provides more options (& some overlap with timber).

Breath manipulations (like speaking during an inhale, coughing words, panting words, etc).

Body manipulations (altering the 'normal' positioning and movement or flexibility of the tongue, face, lips, etc as a way of generating new vocal sounds)