There is ferment at the nexus between Symbolic & Imaginary

"The vocabulary describing us is lacking" 

                - Gloria (participant in the research of Beemyn & Rankin discussed briefly below)

In a previous post, I suggested that trans authors and activists, scholars and others trying to clarify their terminology and debating this or that term is effectively the process whereby the Symbolic itself grows. The Imaginary too expands and contracts by means of the many batteries of representations circulating in the culture. & dealing with words, terms, debating definitions, we argue over the edges where language meets its limits. 

That is to say, in case it is not clear - the Symbolic is not a singular monolithic "thing" THE Symbolic. I spent a bit of time in yet another pair of earlier posts working through the distinctions between Symbolic, Imaginary and Real (those are found here and here) and while this point is available there, it bears underlining. 

The Symbolic is a multiplicity. Much is undoubtedly shared between various regional manifestations and many aspects probably migrate from this or that to other regional locations. Likewise, if I can safely evoke the theorization of memes for a moment (without committing it that as a final answer to anything), I think that we might be able to use some of that thinking to discuss the ways that concepts and representations in their myriad ways, circulate and either become picked and used and ramified and invested with affect and desire, or they ultimately fail to do so and pass out of commonality until they live only in books.

"The" Symbolic then, as multiplicity, is chock full of holes, inconsistencies, paradoxes, failures, impasses and aporias and is limited in innumerable ways by the recalcitrance of the Real.  But, we - social agents and ultimately subjects of language ourselves - are committed to meaning, to a certain fixing of meaning which is what the Imaginary provides - an image or gestalt that freezes this or that view as the authoritative grid whereby I (as social subject) discern, by implicitly sorting fragments into the categories I've learned to inhabit what there word "means."


There is then a danger in the Imaginary's tendency to fix things, to "establish" meaning, and yet, without the luxury of now and then assuming that one knows what this or that term means, it becomes difficult to operate within one's Symbolic system without feeling the edges of all the paradoxes and aporias that our Imaginarizations of our social world's meanings attempt to fix for us. This fixing is also a means of excluding, for the simple reason "choosing" to understand this or that word in this or that way in a particular context is to exclude the other other possible meanings one knows and all of those meanings which one has not thought of.

Now some readers (I can think of two readily) will view these discussions about the multiplicity of the Symbolic and fixing effects of the Imaginary and so on and so forth and the term discourse will seem to them more readily applicable to what I am discussing, and they may substitute that term in understanding what I am saying here. I think this would be a mistake. There are certainly "entities" (if only notional) that one could identify in the Symbolic which correspond to some degree with "discourses" as commonly discussed (inevitably in a post-Foucaultian mode it seems). But there are a great many other sets of relations within the Symbolic that are not assimilable to "discourse." Here the example of the "Symbolic of the game of chess" from my earlier posting can help specify what I mean. 

But the intersection of Imaginary fixations (productive of "meaning" as well as a sense of "wholeness" but also allow for the sort of identification and projections that underpin both lust and aggression) and Symbolic relational determinations (from which derive the conceptual parts that will be flash frozen as "meaning" in this or that term or representation) is the cite where the turmoil and contestatory battles are taking place, and is also where new significations are taking shape.

That is, what, lacking a better phrase, I called the trans effect - the way that bringing the thought of the material reality of the trans body into conceptual adjacency with this or that body of established thought or practice acts, repeatedly, to unsettle that which had seemed to be established. And given that, as so much feminist work has shown over decades, the sex of assumptions and presuppositions which ground the sex/gender system are foundational not simply for issues of obvious connection to sex or gender but underpin scientific theories, legal positions, language systems, political assumptions, and economic practices (just to name a few areas in an offhand way). And what's more, the fundamental aspect has to be highlighted. Fundamental as in, 'having been assumed in advance, such that in most cases it never needs to be stated' and yet also fundamental in that challenges to the sex/gender regime commonly are resisted with a great deal of Imaginary involvement (that is, people take it personally whether they understand this fully or not, and unsettling their fundamental categories can easily be felt as a threat, even unconsciously, which I think accounts for much of the disproportionate vehemence that one finds in those who resist even considering that the sex/gender regime as is might be woefully inadequate to assessing the lived reality of a great many people).

At present I am reading Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin's book The Lives of Transgendered People. This book is noteworthy for many reasons, though here I will only refer to a few details that connect - in my sketchy thinking - with the issues under discussion here. In the first chapter of the book, "Demographics of the Survey Participants" the authors decided to include within this a discussion of the terminology they chose to use, how they developed it, and, of interest to me here, how they derived their terms in response to the terms that trans persons chose to describe their own identities. I'll leave aside the classifications that Beemyn and Rankin derive therefrom because what most interested me are some terms that they chose not to provide here. What are these terms?

Here is a passage from that book,

The participants who described their gender identity as "transgender" and "other" were asked to elaborate, and they referred to themselves using a wide variety of terms. The 1.211 individuals who identified specifically as "transgender" provided 502 additional descriptors of their gender identities, of which 479 were unique responses. The other 23 responses, each of which was given by at least two participants, are shown in table 1.2. (my emphasis)

I want to know what the 502 or 479 unique responses are! This is where new signifiers are being put forth in an attempt to establish significations that, I suspect, are otherwise unavailable. (I am not suggesting that the authors ought to have provided all those other terms, they are being quite scrupulous with regard to the research methods here - I regret that they were not included simply as I want to read them, to think about them, etc.) So, while I get why - using the methods they are using and obviously working hard to condense such an amazing amount of material (they had close to 3,500 participants in their research) into a readable and not crazy expensive format - there just wasn't room for everything. I remain curious nonetheless. 

btw, this was an image search for "disequilibrium" as I recall
I still find something about it disturbing somehow.

Trying on new terms can fuck with your equilibrium.  

That can be a good thing as well. 

A necessary thing.

Gender Diversity; Crosscultural Variations by Serena Nanda

I picked this up for the following reasons, i. it fits nicely with my current reading trajectory, ii. it was priced at $.01 + shipping on amazon, and iii. the author is also the author of the highly acclaimed  Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India  and so I thought it might be relatively solid.

& the book cover is so… 1970s or something. 

My copy has multiple university used book stickers on it and underlining from more than one previous owner. Usually I'd be a bit miffed about that, but somehow here it didn't seem that important. In spite of Nanda's credentials, this is sort of "academically breezy" and seemed to me to pick up the pace or move to the next section just at those moments when I wanted it to dig in a bit more.

Now, without looking back, what do I remember about it? Nanda looks at a select number of cultures and at gender diversity as presented by these. Now, what were they? Well, there is a south asian chapter discussing the Hijras of course, & there was another on Native Americans. The book discusses Brazil, but having already read Don Kulick's (fucking amazing) book Travesti, there was nothing new there for me. Then there was a chapter on Thailand, a chapter on Polynesia and… I am forgetting something. Grrr.

SUPEREGO says: Ha!

yeah yeah whatever

Ok, (book in hand) the Thailand chapter also covers the Philippines, and the other content chapter was on "Sex/Gender Diversity in Euro-American Cultures." I kind of remember that now, it goes back in history to find some more "anthropological" looking stuff in the european context but ultimately is more about contemporary stuff. I'd read Meyerowitz's history just before this and so was primed to notice places where Nanda makes a controversial claim or two. Somewhere in there she replays the (increasingly suspect) transsexual/transgender "debate" and sides pretty clearly with the transgender construction she's made, and is critical of transsexuals that seek SRS. 

Oh, and there is a list of "Selected Films" which begins with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Really? It's a feel-good movie and sort of cute but as a supplemental for a college level class on gender diversity? But most of the others on the list look more useful for that purpose (I still have not seen Ma Vie en Rose). 

I suppose that the index of this book is as useful as the text though. If one had heard nothing about any of this stuff this might serve a useful purpose, but even where I knew nothing at all (the polynesian chapter) it never really went deep. 

My "Dissertation"? b/w How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz

In recent months I have been reading a lot books and articles and blogs and so on and so forth pertaining to trans(gender) broadly conceived. Meyerowitz's book had been given positive reviews in a few places and looked to be historically very rich with detail and so I got a copy and I'll say more about that below (though not much).

So, the scare quotes around "dissertation" (and that is what they are) what is that all about? could it be my inability to imagine such a thing in any but the most abstract of terms? maybe just the utter lack of a precise topic? yes, it could be that. it could very easily be that. 

I know of course that it'll have a fair amount of Sigmund and Jacques, and thus also undoubtedly a small boat load of lacanians and semi-sorta-lacanians that I find important. That much I know. Some degree of pull from all the reading in ideology (detailed on this blog last summer) and from Marx and certain marxists is also possible, but I am at the moment not really looking there (though I would be a delighted to find an ideological critique of the DSM generally or of the GID [gender identity disorder] diagnosis and other gender-connected diagnoses - someone direct me to that now please, thank you).

& I've been nibbling at a number of different scholarly zones pertaining, at their broadest, to the body… with an eye to what my sort of psychoanalytic thinking might find there or bring to those discussions or bring back from those discussions etc. So, neuro brain stuff (and the neuropsychoanalysis folks), and corporeal philosophy, a touch of phenomenology (don't tell on me), and much of the stuff about affect and emotion that got stirred up by the Laclau class back in 2010 and comes and goes as a specific site to focus on for me (affect is so hot topic right now! but i'm kinda meh on it myself, depending on the day)… body maybe also includes much of the stuff about voice that has been nagging at me as a place where maybe I have something to say. 

is voice a body thing or not?  either way, I have so many small notes and collected references to things about voice that surely voice could be a productive zone to work through. Aside from the interesting work on voice already from Dolar and that other Slovenian guy everybody reads (the one with all the nervous tics), I'd seen some abstract when I was taking classes in linguistics back in 2008 or so, it talked about subvocalizations taking place below the person's conscious awareness which were very very reduced versions of the same or initiating muscle motions involved in speaking aloud that which one was reading "silently". That got me to thinking about the automaton-like, machinic aspect of the unconscious in Lacan's understanding and as well to how here it seems that the Symbolic is actively reinscribing itself in the flesh (this subvocalization stuff I need to find out more about and also track down the article I saw again). Then there is a lot of stuff about gay voice that I researched back in that linguistics class. There are aspects of voice that seem interesting to think of wrt trans people as well in that voice is a somewhat unique 'behavioral set' (sorry, crappy term) to make alterations to, it being so heavily coded as the mark of authenticity, etc. It seems to me that the perilous fragility of the voice is not utterly unlike that of the subject per Lacan. There is in that last line a paper that could be written. 

& then most recently trans stuff has become interesting to me for a bunch of reasons, many of which have links back to the things discussed above. At the same time, articulating those linkages has largely not been done yet (by me that is), and I need to start making the links or at least trying to state where they might be.  

As with homosexuals, psychoanalysis, specifically the institutional psychoanalysis of North America and England (tied to psychiatry, medicine and state) has not got a very positive record in its interactions with trans people. The downside of this is predictable, Freud and Lacan and others who might have some useful things to say are all collected in the stink file with Charles Socarides and (judging from what scattered things I have read) Catherine Millot, possibly Saffouan as well. I'm likely to try and argue for the usefulness of lacanian thought to trans persons, of course to do that, I'll finally have to bite the bullet and try to get clear on what the fuck Lacan is really taking about when he refers to sexuation. That is, I confess that I have read much of this in a sort of surfacey way and tried to wrap my head around the distinctions being put forth. But all too often when I attempt this I feel like I am exerting more energy keeping sexual difference from slipping toward socio-cultural 'gender' or now and then (not as often) sliding back into a sort of bonehead anatomical marking, hm, looks like a penis, check the M box would you? and thus one is marked!  (though today I read something in Elliot's book [Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites] which gave a lacanian developmental narrative in which the ascription of a sexed position relates to the oedipus and lacan's symbolic 'castration' etc and I need to think through her understanding because she certainly is saying that Lacan's concept is neither of those annoying options of the binary. & I sort of see what she is saying, but I wonder whether, if I understand her reading of Lacan correctly, that perhaps one is making a conceptual error even speaking of sexual difference and gender at all, maybe these concepts operate at angles to one another such that while they intersect, reigning those points of intersection into one or the other's discursive plane distorts what they are for the other beyond much use. But I digress.

One thing that I find fascinating in a very general way about all things trans is that it is as if the trans person, however they identify themselves, however they relate to the contesting ways that they are conceptualized in the social realm etc, simply by existing, (… damn, I am stretching for a metaphor… nothing coming …)… 

… If we use lacanian terms it seems that in a great many realms of the Symbolic (there is no single Symbolic after all, but a whole bunch of them interpenetrating and so forth) the crispy clean M/F binary is mapped very tightly with other pairs of traits and that many of these symbolic structures are immediately problematized by the very existence of the trans person. It seems that one can, in a very real sense, pick a disciplinary discourse and then 'add trans' and sudden rifts open up, questions so long settled as to be reflexes, to be naturalized ideologemes, appear suddenly inadequate and as if under a spotlight. That is to say, the trans body has the potential to act as the Real for some given symbolic. I do not easily say The Symbolic here because it is not total,  there are folks striving to find ways of letting trans people inhabit the language itself more easily - of course here too there are splits and rifts and suggesting new pronouns be adopted meets with a resistance that seems to me to be beyond any intellectual objection and to be of a piece with the affective investment that we have even in the way that pronouns contribute to the "gendered" structure of our worlds. But to the extent that there are trans and non-trans people speaking about trans persons and attempting more and more to do so in socially sensitive, non-pathologizing, non-eroticizing, and non-objectifying ways - one can see these practices as generating new signifiers for a Symbolic in obvious need of refurbishing. I'll call, with some misgivings but no better idea, what I have been talking about here the trans effect.

I do not wish to be read as posing the trans subject as inherently radical or disruptive or as otherwise "exceptional." My position here would be better stated as; trans people are people just like red headed people are people, or cat people are people. Rad, huh? But, that said, it also seems that the Symbolic of late (over the past century and very much so now) is in a bit of Imaginary turmoil because the trans person, however conceptualized (Symbolic) or pictured (Imaginary) is also Real in a way that "doesn't stop being written" to use Lacan's line from somewhere, but here we might hear that tiny quote as referring directly to the way that this Real requires, compels more and more writing, more and more attempts to reign it back into existing categories or to expand those categories or to abolish those categories. Thinking about the Real in this sense shows the way that, in spite of the typical tropes of negativity that are used to designate it, that the Real is actually the condition of possibility for the Symbolic and the Imaginary, that it inspires and compels the subject, via the resources of the other orders, to attempt to keep up with it. So, if there is something apparently exceptional about the trans subject at this moment in history, I think that this is an effect which will, at some point, be viewable as a history and that a time will come when the Symbolic and Imaginary, in a broader way, will have become more livable places for trans people and the effect I am writing about here will have ceased to be so filled with seeming paradoxes. 

Joanne Meyerowitz

So, in finding trans people and many ways that they might be seen to contest the extant Symbolic and Imaginary resources, interesting and potentially pertinent to my dissertation required of me that I start soaking up information. The book I that chose in hopes that it would give me a sense of the history was How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz, Now, if you would prefer a better review of that text, I suggest reading Dallas Denny on it here. I do not have the depth of knowledge that Denny has, but the two thumbs up response to the book is the same as my own. It is chock full of all manner of fascinating details and I found it very hard to put down. There were also too many things in it that I felt compelled to underline for me to even consider giving it a more careful write up just yet, though surely I should do that stuff (superego would agree).

Tango by Justin Vivian Bond

Tango is a memoir by Mx Justin Vivian Bond. You might know Bond from Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006). Or maybe you know V's music, or performance? Or, maybe you are wondering about the V and Mx, have no idea who I am writing about at all, in that case - try, if you want, this video (V tells a few stories that are in the book so you get a feel perhaps for that) or if in a readerly mood you can have a look at this interview with V in the New Yorker to get clear on that pronoun and prefix stuff and get more about the book than I am going to tell you here (Bond suggests T for trans as a designation alongside M and F for official documents with the quip that for V to identify as man or woman would be a lie, a statement that might trouble some while being applauded by others. & Bond has no issue with using the "T word" either, though for those in doubt I suggest extrapolating from who is able and who isn't to use the "N word"). 

a n y w a y

I picked the book up in the local malevolent mega-chain book store and bought a coffee and started it - none of the links or any of that stuff above are needed to appreciate the book at all and you won't even have any pronoun stumbling. Sometime later it was a buy it or steal it moment and we left together, the book and I, only for me to finish reading it an hour or so later in a more congenial coffeeshop in Decatur (my train ride between filled by… readingreadingreading). The central relationship that the text is in a sense about - between Justin and this relatively evil neighbor kid - is pretty gripping, weirdly twisted and yet somehow emotionally comprehensible in Bond's telling, for me at least. Which might just be to say that it feels real, not in the lacanian sense of course, I capitalize then (and someone called me an idealist for doing that, go figure) ((though, there is something to think about with the Real in aesthetics) but that's not in the cards right now).  The book is in the other room on the shelf now, and I am unable to remember the name of the other kid 

[*export to self-analysis, parapraxis, forgetting of name]

but at the end there is a detail about how he was arrested as an adult and that links to the name Tango and back to the childhood storyline - Tango is a code name I think - and this provides an effective sort of partial closure for the narrative even if many questions remain about the other kid's thoughts and of course - what else happened? what does Justin do next? the book is so short and I wanted more. It was somehow exactly the right book for me to have picked up at that moment (and I'd looked at half a dozen before I opened it). I'd cheerfully read another of V's books when another just right moment arrives.

My Reading vs reading the encyclopedia

I sometimes fantasize about annotating everything I read - especially so when I am in a period where (as now) I am soaking up information at a pretty intense rate. About this fantasy for a moment…

What, you still haven't read me?
Get crackin'!

During my analysis, a story from my childhood, replete with paternal demand and thus Oedipal dynamics a'plenty, emerged at one point and it came back up now and then at moments that felt significant. Here is how it went. My dad knew these other folks, a family, he'd done some kind of work for them I think and my dad liked the other dad - they played tennis. The kids were boy and girl and both in high school, I was in late elementary. The parents of these teens talked to my dad and I about how amazingly smart their teens were, how well they did in school, etc. These parents - and the teens who were present at the time - attributed how smart they were and how well they did in school to each having very diligently read an entire set of Encyclopedia Britainica. Seemingly instantly, an entire set of the regular Britainica and the Britainica Junior arrived at our house. For the next few years I dreaded when my father would next ask me how many volumes of the Britainica Jr. I had read yet. Some years later, when I was a high school student myself, he began demanding that I read the regular "grown up" Encyclopedia Britainica, advising me on how much better all things related to school would be if I did, of course noting that I would have learned so much more already if I had read the Jr. when I was younger, but it was not too late, especially if I gave up reading those stupid science fiction books (I believe I was reading Delaney's Dhalgren at one of these moments with great secret glee and excitement). I am perhaps making this sound somewhat funny. It is in hindsight I guess. At the time this was often enough one aspect of a power dynamic utterly brutal in its hegemonic hold on the household, but whatever. I never could imagine back then that reading the entire Encyclopedia Britainica was even possible, much less that I myself would ever do so. Now I recognize that it is surely possible, though it looks amazingly dull to me and I have no illusions that it makes anyone smarter to read encyclopedias. But of course I really do! Otherwise I wouldn't have the fantasy at all, I wouldn't own The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (in 24 volumes!). &….

Google -> Image:
"The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud"
and this still from Rey Parla film came up.

I wouldn't dream of somehow processing, digesting, and writing about, everything that I read that I find fascinating. Another way of saying this is that the unspoken demand that the repressed master makes in the Discourse of the University (per Lacan in Seminar XVII), that everyone, endlessly, obsessively Keep On Knowing More and More, can, at times, given the background above (and other stuff I could include) make of that very impossible demand itself, a lure for my ego, an enticement, something desirable... 

This too came up with the same search that found the film still,
perhaps I could joke that google image searching performs
the same function as the fantasy that I am discussing? in that
searching for Freud's SE, I get a film still that appeals to me as art
and a photo of a beautiful young woman, this would be
the impossible demand presenting itself as desirable
through the mechanism, the automaton of language(s)
. . . or maybe it's just an excuse to post babe pics?

But whatever, I'm more self-aware than that aren't I? I can take up a different stance with regard to the incessant push of that desire.

Well, then - take that stupid fantasy! 

I will now begin making utterly cursory references to books that while I did read them, I haven't rewritten them with a third book of my commentary to prove to the Superego that I know, am and have all that they contain! 

Google -> Image: Superego (all kinds of fun stuff shows up)

SUPEREGO says: hmph. you have escaped nothing!

Inner Analyst Voice says:  "...prove..." (and it might have been a question but might not have been...)

{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?

Leakage from the Jelloverse

Clearly, at some point in the future, when there is either an ill-concieved re-union/re-vamping of The Johnny Minotaur Show, this Moog-in-your-face track will figure somehow...

...a bit less than 9 minutes of that. Might have to find it on vinyl for turntable action as well. It's sort of awful and sort of fabulous which makes it extra awful somehow which makes it - for me at least - busted.

& images of the Emperor (I speak of Fritz Mondale of course) also seem to have leaked and been reused for some other (suspect) ends, here...


... no word yet on what sort of SWAS-hack allowed this over out of the sinking city. & I know nothing about the provenance of the image. 

"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!

"a few books that were formative for" me...

These are the poetry shelves at my apartment.
They are only partially organized and at present
all the poetry criticism lives in another bookcase.

It is not that often than anyone asks me what books of poetry were particularly formative for me (for my development as a poet, I assume, rather than my fashion sense or whatever). Sometimes this question is a toss-off, but when it is sincere it seems to me that one should try to give a solid answer to it. And as it has been some years now since I heard that question, I thought, why not both answer it and get a blog post out of it at the same time?

One of the first complicated things is deciding what counts. That is, I was asked about "books that were formative" - but I have to wonder if my questioner meant books of poetry, or whether any and all books counted. & what to do about The Four Horsemen who have surely been formative in many ways but not as book-based experiences. Anyway, the list below will exclude audio stuff (though maybe a list of that stuff will be added later.)

Anyway, here my list - not everything on here is currently *crucial* to my thinking about poetry, but everything surely had an impact in its time.

David Antin
SELECTED POEMS, and all the talk poems and so TALKING, TALKING AT THE BOUNDARIES, TUNING, WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AVANT GARDE etc etc
…also worth finding are the pieces of David's from BOUNDARY2 as well as the book version of the magazine SOME/THING issues 1-3 and the 4th issue too if you can find them. I loaned my SELECTED POEMS to someone in the APG some years ago and never saw it again. Damn it. Also my various collections of talk poems are falling apart. I'd love to see some press do COLLECTED TALK POEMS someday. If it is not obvious, is was David's example - and my email exchange with him - that led me to improv (though don't let that be a black mark on his record). In the SELECTED the poem "definitions for mendy" has always been a huge favorite of mine.

Bruce Andrews
I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP (OR SOCIAL ROMANTICISM)
Bruce has many great books. Given how I have grown up within the APG it might make more sense *now* to cite his LOVE SONGS, as it would seem to have been influential. But that is a false positive as I discovered it only later when those things which would make it seem influential on the group were already well underway. Instead it is the book listed here which blew me away (and still does). Not an easy book to find these days, it needs a reprint.

John Ashbery
THREE POEMS, THE TENNIS COURT OATH
I understand why THE TENNIS COURT OATH has such a crucial place in literary history - at least if one is into language poetry. And it was important to me. But, though I had read SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR already, somehow it was THREE POEMS that really grabbed my attention and squeezed. Ashbery is probably always worth reading, but these two texts both suggest so many things beyond what they accomplish and yet what they accomplish is pretty amazing.

Steve Benson
BLUE BOOK
This is another great book that doesn't get talked about enough it seems to me. Benson's other books are worth a look too if you can find them. What I like about this one is the approach that SB takes to improvisation - so radically unlike what Antin does. It was helpful for me in many ways to think about where I might go, and though in my practice I tend more toward the unaided solo voice (thus more antinian) in my interest in disjunction and fragmentation and so forth much of what I produce is closer to Benson (or further toward the world of pound poetry than he).

Charles Bernstein
DARK CITY, THE SOPHIST, ROUGH TRADES
I read these three books in this order and all are fabulous. DARK CITY remains my favorite, especially for "Lives of the Toll Takers". But I have trouble separating these books from my reading of Charles' essays in CONTENT'S DREAM (and again, is there anything by Charles that is not worth reading and thinking about? I doubt it. I got ATTACK OF THE DIFFICULT POEMS for xmas). Probably a few ideas from CONTENT'S DREAM are still crucial aspects of my poetic thinking (re: Voice for instance).

Bertolt Brecht
POEMS 1913-1956
I just love this book. The "reader for those who live in cities" is incredible. The only poem that I have ever intended to memorize comes from this book

Once there was a child

That didn't like to wash.

They washed it and behold

It rubbed its face in ash.

The Kaiser came to call 

Up seven flights of stairs.

Mother looked for a towel 

To wipe its face and hair.

But the towel had been mislaid,

The whole visit was wrecked.

The Kaiser went away,

What could the child expect?

…Brecht's writings on theatre and some of his plays too have been important to me, for instance "Baal" which I read just after dropping out of high school.

John Cage
SILENCE
There are many books by Cage and a great variety of stuff to be found therein, but this one remains my favorite one. I bought it in German translation for someone as a gift but I don't know if she ever read it. (The 2 CD set "Indeterminacy" has also been a huge favorite for many years).

Clark Coolidge
SOUND AS THOUGHT, SOLUTION PASSAGE
Coolidge is often great. Maybe too consistently awesome, so much so that it's irritating for the rest of us. But these two collections form the base of my affection and inspiration for his work.

Ed Dorn
GUNSLINGER
Essential. Probably has an unrecognized role in my Johnny Minotaur  series.

Jessica Grim
LOCALE
I wonder how many readers will know this book. It was important to me as I encountered it early, just as I was beginning to get some sense of the poetic terrain and it gave me a view into a way of writing that I had not imagined. I still think its a solid read though I have not seen other book by Grim.

Lyn Hejinian
MY LIFE (any edition), WRTING AS AN AID TO MEMORY, THE CELL, THE COLD OF POETRY
Take you pick of these or anything. Lyn doesn't seem to write anything not worth dwelling within for however many hours it requires. MY LIFE was an inspiration for the decade in the making and still untitled APG Autobiography Project

Jackson Mac Low
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
Still my favorite. The drama involved in Mac Low's leaving chance procedures aside is fascinating and had an impact on me that is hard to quantify, but I still favor the work he produced before he abandoned constraints.

Frank O'Hara
COLLECTED POEMS
This is screamingly obvious, get it and his plays and that other collection of stuff that was found after the collected came together.

Maureen Owen
UNTAPPED MAPS
This is another one that, like Grim's book above, hit me at just the right time. I reread it last year and it still stands up I think.

Leslie Scalapino
WAY
Other titles could have been chosen, but this one works very well for me and is the 1st book of hers I read.

Jack Spicer
COLLECTED BOOKS
Again, obvious if you know me (I think). & though this is the book that made me love Spicer, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT made me love him all over again and really, you need to read everything and the bio POET, BE LIKE GOD. (Be a good host and the Martians will love you)

Ron Silliman
TONER, XING, DEMO TO INK
These are first three titles I read by Silliman, nowadays one can buy the entire Alphabet in a massive tome. I plan to but have not yet gotten around to getting it.

Gertrude Stein
TENDER BUTTONS, STANZAS IN MEDITATION, etc
It is impossible to narrow down what from Stein had an impact, but these two books are the 1st two I bought (both in beautiful Sun & Moon editions) and it was upon these rocks that I was broken and reformed. Or something like that. LIFTING BELLY is also great. There is nothing "bad." my copy of LECTURES IN AMERICA is heavily underlined.

Hannah Weiner
SPOKE
I need more books by Weiner, sadly this is the only one that I own. What I like most about it is the sense of voices contending within her. That might be to fetishize her somewhat, I hope not. But that aspect of her writing really does grab me and I have tried to allow my own work to open itself to such things too.

Philip Whalen
ON BEAR'S HEAD
There is a newer selected poems, and I have that too, but somehow this collection is still my favorite. I got this in the first month that I'd decided to turn to poetry (to help me write better song lyrics) and so it comes along just after Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in my personal idiosyncratic chronological development but unlike much else that I read in that 6 or 7 months when I was casting around in poetry, it has stuck with me.

Louis Zukofsky
"A", COMPLETE SHORT POETRY
Some of the later sections of "A" (especially where he is using Marx) and things like "80 Flowers" in the SHORT POETRY volume are all time favorites of mine. His essays have also been important to me in many ways.

… Ok, I have probably forgotten other crucial stuff, or maybe it was repressed (like, that in the 6-7 months of poetry reading I was pretty enthused with Charles Simic, then later lost almost all interest in him.) & what this list doesn't include really is the impact of a single essay by Harry Mathews on OULIPO, the book CONVERSATIONS WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP, the works of Arakawa and Gins in WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE: REVERSIBLE DESTINY (which Madeline sent me for free because I had loved "The Mechanism of Meaning" so much!), the plays and essays of Richard Foreman, the essays of Dick Higgins (which I often disagree with but nonetheless am influenced by), and what about anthologies? I should certainly mention the Douglas Messerli edited FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CENTURY (the poetry one not the drama one, though that is an interesting book as well) which served to introduce me to so many poets that I have learned since then to love. & what about books by Perloff or Altieri that shaped my thinking about matters poetic?



p.s. I couldn't fit all the labels I needed, dang it!

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