H'm, yes, I've been browsing the volumes a little - I don't know - I'm
neither persuaded nor unconvinced, like a floating voter. I do 'get' the
'concept' behind this removal of concept but I can't help feeling that I am
in fact encountering yet another form of poetic diction, which is something
perhaps, beyond all the cat-calls, lurks behind Frederick's out of hand
rejection. Yet too there are lines and occasionally whole numbered 'pieces'
that lure my attention. I have, though, only read part of two of the
volumes, so this is a very provisional commentary, I do feel a certain lack
of dynamic, or edge, it seems as if the poems are too comfortable with their
aimless direction.

uncertainly

dave

2009/11/24 peter ganick <[log in to unmask]>

> *[VOLUMES 01 – 07 OF REMOVE A CONCEPT ARE AVAILABLE] *
>
> Remove A Concept was written by Peter Ganick in the late 1980s in a café in
> the South End of Hartford CT. It consists of 3350 sections running
> approximately 4500 pages.
>
> The covers feature colorful abstract art by the author, art that suits the
> abstract nature of the text.
>
> Commentary regarding each volume by Ivan Argüelles, Sheila E. Murphy, Jim
> Leftwich, John Crouse, Olchar Lindsann, Michael Peters, and Richard Deming
> can be read below.
>
> Each volume is approximately 300 pages, and is available as a printed copy,
> a PDF-download, and readability in full for free at each volume’s web-page.
>
> Remove A Concept is expected to fill 16 volumes before its completion
> sometime before Summer 2010. Stay tuned for further updates.
>
> Take a chance and read some of one of the volumes in the free-read version
> at each of the webpages. Just click on ‘Preview This Book’ near the bottom
> of each page.
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Remove A Concept vol 01 / blurb by Ivan Argüelles
>
> www.lulu.com/content/7642668
>
> Peter Ganick's REMOVE A CONCEPT written in the mid 1980's, comprising 3350
> sections and employing registers of language that range from the colloquial
> of jazz refrain to the enigmatic typlogies of the "seer". Between the
> convulsive high notes of Archie Shepp and the intricate silences of a
> himalayan Rishi this amazing text baffles stimulates irritates and
> gratifies
> the reader who has the patience and intellectual curiosity to plumb the
> depths and extents of this "ghost-ridden astrologic theater" , which can
> also be read as a continuous? segmented? alleatory composition in the
> manner
> of John Cage. It is as if Jackson Pollock had chosen to use words
> (syllables!) rather than pigments as his medium. Ganick says "the poem was
> exciting to write" and indeed its almost naive exuberance, fracturing
> syntax
> in every possible way, is a principle characteristic of this monumental
> Text. This is not to deny the underlying lyricism in the content of its
> intense fragmentation, as in "over full, read is anothered to morning in
> sky," ... The at times oneiric segmentation cannot help but remind one of
> Holderlin's "Fragments". The enormous and sometimes puzzling breadth of
> this
> Text can best be summed up in a single phrase: "Light & Maya".
>
>  -----------------------------------
>
> Remove A Concept vol 02 / blurb by Sheila E. Murphy
>
> www.lulu.com/content/7762352
>
> A principled uncertainly proposes hypotheses, examines each with a cool
> calculus infused with depth of feeling. One of the welcome ironies of this
> extended text is the centrality of a pressurized short segment that stands
> discernibly as a focal gem. Peter Ganick’s disciplined attention to the
> situational mystique reveals that single points of focus enrich the whole
> mental field with meaning. Here, a fine, musical ear sharpened by
> considerable and continual study and experience, trusts the occupation of a
> locus, finds a panoply of linkages embedded within situations to yield
> concise renderings of surfaces and their multiple under-layers as a
> recognition of infinity.
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Remove A Concept vol 03 / blurb by John Crouse
>
> www .lulu.com/content/7800085
>
> yr remove a concept, its endless/open as yr other writings. while it tells/
> says one thing, it can be other things @ other readings/looks. yr words
> dont
> seem harvested by program, i would say theyre not, theres alot more going
> on
> than random splice and splat & see what sticks. the kind of reading i
> experience, or what i experience while im reading yr work is a kind of
> terminal freedom, a velocity that glides unbiased like gold thread can keep
> stretching while retaining valence and value. terminal as endless as well
> as
> endless places to board and depart.
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Remove A Concept vol 04/ blurb by Jim Leftwich
>
> www.lulu.com/content/7841069
>
> thinking in this text, *what if *soon becomes *as if*, and if, one by one,
> concepts proposed are removed as other concepts emerge, then *as if*
> becomes
> *is*, concept yields to process, being yields to becoming, and one is no
> longer thinking, or at least not thinking of concepts, one is in the
> process, no longer reading for content, or at least not for concepts as
> content, nor is one engaged in a process of reading as writing, one is
> rather reading as a process of following poetry as it unfolds, as if a poem
> might be about the time spent writing or reading it, as is the case with
> this poem, and perhaps with all other poems, once the concepts are removed.
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Remove A Concept vol 05 / blurb by Olchar Lindsann
>
> www.lulu.com/content/7962709
>
> A poem to be read by the morning, when routes of possibility are to be
> discerned winding amongst the gaps between shifting particles of thought,
> of
> thoughts still porous, not utterly cohered: so that the removal of a
> concept
> is the opening of a trapdoor, an infra-verbal space in which one shuttles
> back and forth: so that the poem forms itself around spaces, in undulating
> and arrhythmic cascades of language, then waits: so that one thinks
> *between
> *the nascent concepts lunging in staccato or gushing languorously on either
> side (...) A space for movement, to form itself around.
>
> --------------------------------------
>
> Remove A Concept vol 06 / blurb by Michael Peters
>
> www.lulu.com/content/7962708
>
> This important historical work bears its age with increasing intrigue,
> simply because it would seem to suggest the inversion of time via its
> manipulation of absence—before and after you were born.  It is unlike some
> of the more known, smaller works comprising Peter Ganick's publishing
> history—and a must have, but good luck finding yourself within it. This
> massive body of words becomes porous, wildly poetic—a veritable sea of
> holes, a space machine, or a supervaast field of labias. Ganick's RAC,
> a.k.a. "Remove a Concept," stretches you way out, makes you cross vaast
> spaces where you are uncertain of removals and insertions, and this
> contemplation includes yourself.  Then if you realize it was undertaken in
> the late 1980s, the kinks in its thinking creates wild, definitive
> indefinitiveness where even the uncertainties are doubtful.
>
> -------------------------------------
>
> Remove A Concept vol 07 / blurb by Richard Deming
>
> www.lulu.com/content/7962853
>
> A “fond energy” surges through the veins of Peter Ganick’s herculean
> *Remove
> A Concept*, powering the poems forward at every turn and creating an
> inescapable gravitational that pulls together its far-flung parts.  Ganick,
> an unsung, underground master, has given his life to poetry and to music
> and
> it shows throughout this latest volume of his massive undertaking. To
> read *Remove
> A Concept* is to be reminded, that even at this late hour language can
> still
> surprise us and can yet reveal those moments when “to enfold envelops you
> out.”
>



-- 
David Bircumshaw
"A window./Big enough to hold screams/
You say are poems" - DMeltzer
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