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Message Received: Oct 03 2005, 01:58 PM
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Subject: Wryting at e-Poetry

I am just back from fragments of the London e-Poetry conference & thought I’d mention some stuff relating to people on this list.

I missed a session which included a paper on Alan Sondheim. I had one or two second-hand accounts – diaspora, saturation, it all sounded hopeful – I wonder if Maria Damon or, a nearby node, could say if it’s on a publication trajectory?

Same question for Sandy Baldwin, who I know is on the list (*waves*); I think _his_ paper, if I’d’ve heard it, would have formed the matrix within which some of the discussion about “access/excess” (Saturday 11.45-12.30 am) would have been a tad less mystifying. While not going “Erk?” and “Mmnph?!”, I noticed Sandy bringing this discussion back into interesting sectors: whither chat poetry, & the need to reconceptualise the archive (Sandy, if that’s wrong, it’s because, what you thought was the microphone was actually one of Elizabeth-Jane’s roses. Nobody knows what you said).

Schopenhauer’s notorious formulation of new media as levitating po[u]rous beardings of the disjecta membra of established aesthetic categories – the doodle that couldn’t cut it against Picasso & the groan that would never run with jazz, in a wretched shuddering & rutting pseudo-gestalt after three hours of calculated drinking – let me restore the German orthography, “the Doodle that couldn’t cut it against Picasso & the Groan that would never run with Jazz, in a Wretchedshuddering&ruttingpseudo-gestalt after three Hours of calculated Drinking” – proved its force. The way aspects of successful works detached themselves, and reappeared as autonomous failed works, inculcated us with something, perhaps “poetry as a way of looking.”

Poems, anyway, seemed to be everywhere. Helen Bridwell maintained her widely overheard bitching about Patricia Lennox’s top was a poem. Keston Sutherland’s missing paper, The Overinteractive Imagination, drenched us all with methodology anxiety, mistaken or rationalised by most as a bird flu pandemic wobbling on the horizon. Its absence was a great poem. From what I know of Keston, & from a snippet of abstract which Elizabeth James quoted & misquoted (one of the best bits of his poem), I guess that he would have extended some familiar criticisms of Language poetics to speak against crucial assumptions of much of the work being showcased. Crudely, this might have had to do with the supply of aesthetic interactivity as a fetish object substituting for political activity – an overconceptualised reconciliation, which leaves the material contradictions untouched. But the outlines are no good without Keston colouring through them – where were you? I did actually see some things.

jUStin!katKO brought energy and commitment to take the audience’s sunken and musty aback and back. His two most significant pieces were films (“ornithoooneric,” a mesmeric, elegiac collaboration with Keith Tuma, Tom Raworth, and mIEKAL aND’s parrots; & something whose title I’ve forgotten. The latter was a flickering, massively manipulated urban intervention, owing as much to MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball as to Debord et al. It seems jUStin. may have set out to answer the question, may a man slap a city? It benefited from two showings, during the second of these, the film read jUStin.). But the piece that got the most (largely enthusiastic) press got it for its melodrama and rancid anecdotalism, an understanding which I came to regard as a bit of traducement of something quite tight and subtle. If I remember rightly, an image of a spooky rictus-lady scissoring through a credit card, above the slogan “I never felt so free as the day I consolidated my debt,” was strobed onto the huge screen, while pyschops-aesthetic distorto-tunes played, and jUStin spazzed around like a thing in dangerously hot batter (& a bit like Brad Pitt in _Fight Club_). The object exposed was “the moment”, and the propositional content, that it is neither temporal nor atemporal, but is precisely the continual movement between these two options at the “discretion” of capital. Or more crudely, part of the way that ideology works is by making us think that there are atomic moments at which we choose. jUStin.’s piece returns to the internal structure of these smears.

Lawrence Upton & John Cayley collaborated on a very accomplished total environment piece. A succession of melting, solar, neon and hyperhyper images appeared as Lawrence & John growled and snuffled from a perimeter of speakers. Much of the time the noises “read out” the images, an enforced scrutiny of the collaborations and continuities between language and everyday materiality. Because it encircled us, & because of its scheduling towards the end of the conference, it felt to me like a gifted critical space. This impression of a stability against which to think goes against the grain, & the granulity, of Lawrence’s introduction – which I think suggested the performance had at some point been thought of as a hundred or so very short pieces. The tribal trance was interrupted by a few error messages – if there’d been another discussion session, I would have plucked up the rose to ask something about the status of “bearing with” performers – the kerfuffle & palava of computer-dependent technology. (Piers Hugill of London Under Contruction mentioned to me that they’d’ve liked it if their chat room had been hacked into, & one item of John Sparrow’s set exploited a contrived progress bar (John, you also clicked on the wrong file. The file you clicked on was called sxcUMsho330b.mpeg. Nobody said anything. We thought it best).

But of the sessions I saw, the only really rigorous working-through of the found texts of playing up was Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s endless whispered preparations, the bedrock of the deferral-qua-loveliness of her piece “For the next 12 days I will be placing a rose somewhere in the city”. I gather Judd Morrissey & Lori Talley’s “error engine” & the associated paper might also have entered this territory?).

Anyway, I had a really nice time.

Best, Jow :: http://badpress.infinology.net/

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