From: IN%"[email-masked]" "UB Poetics discussion group" 1-FEB-1

994 01:03:37.43     
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   freedom

Date: Tue, 01 Feb 1994 01:00:05 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: freedom    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
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Organization: University at Buffalo

Tom, I'm happy to see your elaborations and further musings.  I  
think, finally, that our differences of opinion have little to do
with Jean-Luc Nancy per se, nor even, perhaps, on the meaning of 
freedom.  You seem to understand freedom as possibility.  To
think and to act freedom is at once to accept this possibility   
and to distend it.  Freedom is thus both given and beyond the    
given.  For myself, I would say that possibility is how we *know*
freedom.  This knowledge is what's "given"; given, strangely, as 
the possibility of *surpassing* knowledge, of going "beyond" the 
possible.  In practical terms the difference between our versions
may not be all that great.    

I don't, in any case, believe we can legitimately talk about
freedom without positing the possibility of a freedom beyond the 
bounds of knowledge.  Again I insist, to speak of a paradox of   
freedom, of a knowledge of something that surpassses knowledge,  
is not to fall prey to paradox.  We are attempting to take the   
measure of the abyss our thinking would leap.  You say, thinking 
*can't* accomplish that leap.  I say, we take the measure of an  
abyss only by falling.   

Well, I characterize your argument in many ways that you might   
not accept.  I do so in good faith, simply to note what I think  
is the principal difference of opinion between us:  whether or   
not it is useful to entertain a thought that begins or ends with 
the concept, with the positing of pure forms and essential states
of being.  Here two questions assert themselves:  

1)   Has the universal been exposed as untenable, as polluted by 
concerns more properly understood in terms of ideology?

2)   Is thinking now possible only when situational, when   
beginning and ending with the particular?    

I'm not going to sort these threads out here.  Let me say instead
that my own interests, as a poet and as a graduate student, lead 
me time and again to examine the contamination of discourses.  My
skill as a reader, if I have any, is my sensitivity to this 
contamination--intertextual knots fascinate me, places in texts  
(poetic, fictional, philosophical) where something foreign or    
anomalous has intruded.  The logic of this contamination has
everything to do with the persistence of conceptual categories.  
The refusal to think them, the avoidance of analyzing their 
workings, of learning their histories (on the grounds, for  
instance, of decrying universal or essentialist thought), does   
not free us from their hold.  

Ben Friedlander
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  1-FEB-1
994 09:26:34.80
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   freedom

Date: Tue, 01 Feb 1994 09:23:19 -0500   
From: Tom Mandel <[email-masked]> 
Subject: freedom    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
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Not possibility but the renunciation of possibility or the  
experience of that renunciation, but this may be a difference    
not of opinion but of situation in life/time/space.    

In its utter particularity the "thought" of poetry may be   
said to rejoin singularity as universality in philosophy or 
maybe better in theology, which despite Johanna's animadversion's
is more or less how I experience philosophy being dealt with
on this net. Note that I don't use the word pejoratively (act-   
ually, I know *you* know that of me, but other readers mightn't).

I have a sense from you that's not personal, i.e. not you personally, 
of lack of hope, as in we measure an abyss by falling. By leaping
I would have said. This is perhaps your moment in history, and   
your moment is more accurate than mine for sure; I was raised in 
a social order that not only dominated but actually comprised most    
of what was (US had 40% of world GNP in 1946). W/o knowing it, one    
felt that the world offered itself up. Ergo, I bought Miles Davis
a drink when I was 15; he was wearing a gorgeous pigskin overcoat
and his fingernails were as lustrous as pearls. When I was in    
Europe for the first time, I was a scruffy and (I thought) bohemian   
student. But a middle class restaurant dinner in Paris cost what 
a coke and fries had at home. The way it was.

How conceptual categories work does not equal the contamination of    
discourse, but both these matters need vigilant analysis, you are
right. "Places... where something foreign or anomalous has intruded"  
on the other hand, may be a fine way to characterize discourse,  
where we must see the "foreign or anomalous" as the source of that    
discourse's value. Yet we will never succeed to tribalize the    
language of the pure.    

By redemption we mean "to save," and so far from being irrelevant
or intrusive (except as defined in the paragraph above), this    
concern is at the heart of those acts we (e.g. Johanna, or you)  
call "commitment," "love."    

I like the way it was put by Resh Lakish:    

(b. Sanhedrin 119b) Whoever answers `Amen' with all his strength, for him the   
gates of paradise are opened. As it is said (Isa. 26:2): `Open ye the gates
that the righteous nation, who preserves faithfulness (shomer emunim) may  
enter.' Do not read shomer emunim (who preserves faithfulness) but rather  
she-'omerim amen (who say Amen).   

as ever,  

tom  

  **********************  T O M  M A N D E L  **********************  
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From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  1-FEB-1
994 15:21:08.53
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   *Imaginary Movie*

Date: Tue, 01 Feb 1994 15:18:22 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: *Imaginary Movie*    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
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This is a reply to a personal posting. I couldn't contact the person who   
sent it to me, so I've remove the name. 

I suppose this may be regarded as a patient articulation, my take on IM.   
What filling out of the poem this accomplishes I deny. This isn't my  
"goal." But my "goal" is to tend to some of the structures of imagination  
elicited of me by IM. I suppose by posting your note you had no idea I
would respond, or attempt to respond, so fully. But, as it so happens,
today is devoted to tomorrow's class and you've done me a great service. I 
hope it doesn't turn out to be a great maze for you.   

I too have to admit a dissatisfaction with the "pleasure of the text," that
its giving is to say the least opaque, its color often as delightful as the
package P&P put together. This grayness can be phonically supported by my  
take on her reading of the poem at the Ear in NYC; it too being modulated  
to the point of evaporation, read through with only occasional, slight
pauses at line breaks and with little audible support for the mental knots 
she ties. (However, she is very quiet and calm in personal conversation).  
This said, I still regard the text with a great pleasure, perhaps more with
the "jouissance" that Barthes intended. Another Barthes statement on  
pleasure: "...pleasure in pieces: language in pieces: culture in pieces.   
Such texts are perverse in that they are outside any imaginable  
finality--"even that of pleasure" (bliss does not constrain to pleasure; it
can even apparently inflict boredom)."  

What I'm getting at here is that the textual evidence of IM may not have to
partake in a paradigm of pleasure to emit, or engender a cultural artifact.
Granted, the cultural/poetic artifact of suspended modifiers,    
non-substantiated prepositions, oscillating predicates et al. has long
instigated a politics of text which by now is easily seen, or tolerated    
(that sometimes we critics/poets remain hostage to the tropes and the 
critical discourse that was intended as liberating). Granted the 
"freeze-frame" metaphor is only neat when tied to the title and then  
perhaps only tropic; and that the six line strophes (I say strophe instead 
of stanza because of the attendent personality in "strophe" which means,   
among other things "apartment" in Italian, whereas, stanza, among other    
things, means to "mental posture") only provide marginal support for the   
metaphor of movie, or for the internal poetic structure of each six line   
unit. This characterization of some the structures of the poem would in    
many critical circles be a pan, a thumbs down in siskel and eberteze. Yet, 
under my criteria and reading practice another, quite successful text 
surfaces. 

I don't "read" this text so much as allow it to sound out its own cultural 
relevance. This is not as passive as it may seem. This sounding invites a  
text which is an "imaginary form" which insists no matter how digruntled I 
may become with the way the text sits on the page. Its imaginary form 
becomes a discussion between my imagination and the culture's and the 
poem's, a discussion which often absent from the page entirely. This  
absence, or in effect ascribed culture, is what keeps me. Often this  
keeping is similar to the hostage taking as mentioned above, but it remains
political in the slippage between those participants in the discussion. It 
is this slippage which is the field of intervention for me. This is the    
level of engagement. This is personal, it is ideological, it is social. You
mention the social as a field of intervention. So often, even in O'Hara and
Reznikoff, I feel the poem is a description of something material, a  
personalization which elementizes some margin running the gamut from  
imprisonment (I as the disenfranchized interlocutor of poetic/cultural
condition) to oration (I as arbiter of the imaginary condition). This field
of intervention I often find less entreating, in some ways less the   
jouissance, an more an efigy of the entrapped or of entrapment. As to the  
materialization of the social field of itervention Wittgenstein said  
"Psychology connects what is experienced with something physical, but we   
connect what is experienced with what is experienced." I ask what then does
poetry connect?

Now is this "blackmail?" (the Barthesian blackmail of theory) I'm not sure.
I'm also not sure what you mean by the poem's and the theory's autonomy;   
I'm not sure there has ever been such a thing as theoretical autonomy,
certainly not technological autonomy. And when it comes to technology, not 
much can be left out. The theoretical apparatus evident here of course is  
not culturally bankrupt, certainly it isn't grammaticaly bankrupt even if  
it is sometimes critically tedious. The fact that the theoretical aparatus 
no longer provides the surprise, and then perhaps the strangeness, needs   
deparately to be examined. But the condition elemented by the grammar 
emerges, or maybe the grammar elemented by the condition emerges. Sure the 
often "found text" quality of her work speaks to a possibility of a text   
made powerless by its automaticness, that risk that much experience-based  
art suffers (I'm thinking of Surrealism, Dada, Minimalism, even some  
Absract Expressionism). But her insistence that this experience never be   
deflated, or deflected by appropriative gesture, be that through an   
acquiescence to theory, to the text, or to the culture, or importantly to  
imagination, speaks to the possibility of this text to reveal the often    
conditions of mind and society. No structure is independent here and each  
is spatially dis-posed and recomposed.[It strikes me that the form she has 
adopted may be an effort to channel the constant abridgement of this  
dis-position into a consumable form, a bite-sizing of experience,to effect 
more of a tension between elements and thereby permit more experiential    
hinges.] Another thing which may contribute to these pieces opacity is that
they take on an epigrammatic tone and in that some morality which when
viewed under a theoretical umbra disengages the personal from the textual, 
perhaps interupts the very thing which makes an epigram work. But I'm not  
so interested in that as a stumbling block to the poems effectiveness. I am
concerned with the experience of the poem which insists upon an ideology   
for its effectiveness.   

"I can only hazard it" (pg 85) aside from encapsulating the pronoun shift  
and the subsequent question of being in action, speaks not only of the
hazard of this movement from "I" to "it" but also speaks of the obstacle   
toward acting and guessing, or thinking. These permutations are held in    
place (position is so vital here) by the shape of technology. The shape of 
technology here is much like "a place to put the eye" and the struggle
between the technology as in human art and technology as in capital   
industry, but also the struggle between the personal and the social, the   
private politic, the body and the "apartment" it is in reveals what "color 
contends for, eye" The concept of a destabilized I shifting from definite  
to indefinite, viewer to view is always engaging the machine of that  
coordinate structure I -- technology -- eye. These places of contention are
constantly destabilized by the visuality, but they always promote a   
imaginary bifurcation which is in-effect a dialectic. To go further would  
be to fill out...   

Of course one of if not the most important features of this movie is its   
sexual composition. As a man, I can not put my finger on it without its    
touch being an additional technology for the text to contend with.    
Nonetheless, these "loaded fingerings" (p79) bear the same shifts, the same
constant limits, or positions that the text is constantly critiquing. This 
is not only the figural body of the text, but of an opression which is
spelled out in a "finite number of units," a real body. The transparency   
and caculability of currency, of surplus and exchange require this tension 
to be placed upon the body and upon the poetics. The internal is never
exiled by the external, nor is it ever completely decribed by it. Most
importantly, though, the internal the "inner" is not completely collapsed  
by or filled by "economic arousal" the text itself is evidence of this, not
to mention Diane Ward's existence. The text suffers its own visuality which
engenders an imagination engaged with sexual conditions. If the mind/brain 
is the largest erogenous zone, what is the mind's eye and what is this eye 
in the field of social intervention. What is its field of vision?

This is not so much ingratiation of the text, or a display of my enamored  
economy, as it is a stir of the pot of my considerations. It barely   
envisions only some of the concerns and even at that sometimes thinly. It  
would be good to hear any comments.

Patrick   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  3-FEB-1
994 09:47:01.59
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   Interview with Diane Ward  

Date: Thu, 03 Feb 1994 09:45:03 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: Interview with Diane Ward 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

We (Patrick Phillips and Diane Ward) had this informal discussion/interview
on Tuesday, February 1, 1994. 

We primarily discussed the title poem of *Imaginary Movie*, Potes and 
Poets, 1992. The transcription begins as our discussion gained speed. 

None of this should be published elsewhere without contacting Diane or
Patrick. I didn't get a "release" from her and want to respect her privacy.

The interview was interrupted, which I thought appropriate, by her son who 
still needs to be by her side after the earthquake. I was interrupting his 
sense of safety, which wasn't entirely appropriate.    

P  Its form becomes a discussion between my imagination, the culture's
   imagination and the poem's, a discussion which often is absent from the 
   page entirely. This absence, or in effect ascribed culture, is what keep
s    
   me. This keeping remains political in the slippage between those   
   participants in the discussion. It is this slippage which is the field o
f    
   intervention for me. This is the level of engagement. This is personal, 
it   
is ideological, it is social.  I'm very interested in the function of the  
   imagination in this field. 

Here her son needs her and the question goes unanswered.    

P  The poem sets up frames... 

DW They are frames for the "viewer" the author and the reader    
   trying to deal with the screen which is the poem for conversation, the  
   back and forth dialogue. where the writing exists is in the dissolving  
   aspect of the work.   

P  The grammatical situations are often setting up ideological frames 
   (pg 49)

DW Which is a context for the discourse 
   The text is intent on not allowing the individual so much

   I don't see the frustration or violence of erasure in the text as a
negative   thing. I'm trying to deal with the nature of that exchange 
between, not so    much the writer and the reader, but the person and 
society, or the person  and authority and how to reclaim that self within  
the context of the language and the visual context of your existence. The  
constant barrage   of information. That's what I'm dealing with and that   
piece. And it's    successful in that way and I almost don't  want to write
after that. Of  course I am. (pg 36)    

P  Why is it successful? 

   It's formally on the page this contained thing. I think each individual 
   frame, in terms of its meaning, or its series of images, is always 
frustrated,it never congeals, or it never comes together as a  formal 
frame in that   context of the page. So that it frustrates the control of  
the formal page by subverting it, by frustrating the logic of expected
images.   

P  Is the writing cultural or theoretical. I think if you write out of a   
thecultural you write "of" something; if you write out of the theoretical  
youwrite for something. And I think you note this later on in the poem.    
   (pg 91)

DW Well I think that's there. You can almost call the cultural a starting  
point   or a recognition of position and the exploration in terms of the   
   theoretical would be, not the solution of the problem of position, but..
..   
   (p 37) 
P  a tool with which you...   

DW where they are played against one another. A lot of times in my work,   
   not only in this piece, but in other work, I try to subvert the duality 
of   
   thought, of experience. I really work with that pretty consistently.    
   Through the use of language and images.   

P  Wittgenstein (in Remarks on Color) said "Psychology connects    somethin
g    
experienced with something physical; we connect what is    experienced with
experience." By setting up bifurcation and abrogating   that agreement sets
up a soft focus on the edges of those experiences so    that they meld. ...

DW Um hmm...   

P  Another thing which may point to this is the kind of thing you set up in
a  line like "I can only hazard it" aside from encapsulating the   pronoun 
shift and the subsequent question of being in action,  it speaks not    only    
of the hazard of this movement from "I" to "it" but also speaks of the
   obstacle toward acting and guessing, or thinking. ...    

DW ...and the overcoming of the obstacle.    

   What you said about the psychological earlier. In order to ground my    
work 
I keep bringing it back to a real personal, physical experience of it.  As 
a woman it's really kind of hard to emphasize the body imagery  without    
getting tangled up in these cliches. I don't really us it in a feminist    
   body conscious kind of sense. I use it to grasp the more abstract aspect
s    
   of perception. To bring the world which is at those soft edges back, to 
letit go, to bring it back. (pg 85)

P  I like that. I find comfort in that. Not only in the way you use light  
to dispose of a very physical situation but to return to a physical   
situation. And then you'll use shadow as a notion between those two   
physicalities   and immaterialities. (pp 50, 51)  

DW And I find it really workable to even the field that way to bring this  
work    which could go off into nowhere. It's almost a political act. It   
emphasizes all parts of discourse and experience equally, and that's also  
very    important to me. It's part of that subversion of the duality process.   

P  This is what I was saying about imagination. That once the form of the  
   poem becomes a discussion in my imagination, the slippage between  
these
aspects that's off the page, it becomes a political act because these 
   things begin to intervene on one another, socially and that becomes a   
   function of the imagination and it becomes replayed in this conversation
   for example, in the class tomorrow, or in my own work. It's very   
   instrumental. And I'm wondering if that's experiential in your part or  
   cognitive, in other words  as you're writing do you erase and rewrite to
   build in this, or do you allow it to build on its own?   

DW I think the latter. I would allow it. I work a lot and rework it. I am  
really  interested in the process of the discourse and not really the 
discourse  itself.  

P  So it's not so much a political agenda, but an ontological one, or an   
   experiential one.

DW Right. The experiential is really important to me.  

P  Of course one of the most important features of this movie is its sexual
   composition. As a man, I can not put my finger on that sexual   composit
ion  
without my touch being an additional technology for the text    to contend 
with. That once I describe it, it (the sexuality) is conscribed,   that it 
is no longer an experiential condition, but it is also no longer   female. 
(79, 95, 65)   

DW What I really hope is that my work that I do is not that ephemeral,
that    your discussing it  conscribes it as you say. A lot of what I do in
talking    about allowing these discourses, or exploring them, is just that
,    
is allowing the technological to exist along side the sexual and not  
reallymaking a judgment about the clashes so much as exploring them.  

P  Shifting to a  more formal characterization, the frames seem sometimes t
o    
   take on an epigrammatic tone and in that tone some morality. I'm   
   wondering how when I say epigram and morality, how that strikes you.    

DW I think that when I set up that formal frame and that I had to almost   
work    against it. There's a play. Some of the pieces are open ended and  
some of    them are very well scribed and refer back to themselves. In a wa
y    
I think    that's very formal concern and a playful nature of the piece. Th
e    
whole   morality thing I think is part of the voice that comes in reaction 
to whole   idea of the big screen and the control of that. Whether it's    
true, whether   it's a real moral voice I'm not sure.  (pg 72 -"tightly    
scribed") 

P  I'm interested in what people call fragments.--Holderlin's Hymns and    
"Fragments," or that people call A Tomb for Anatole "fragments," or that   
   Creeley's Pieces may not really be pieces as such.  

DW Well. I'm not interested in that so much.  One of the things is the
formal  and the way language is used in that in contrast with each other   
and it is  again not making a value judgment on a nice formed piece. I find
this    thing Imaginary Movie frustrating in that way. That "Oh this isn't 
   finished, or it's just a fragment because of the way it's laid-out.

P  I don't see a Tomb for Anotole as fragment as such. Whether he wrote    
   them on scraps of paper, or in shards of passion, they're not fragments,
   but it's fascinating that people would consider them as such. 

DW  It's not only fascinating, but it's a little annoying. That you would  
have    to, as a writer, as a poet would have to conform your work to what 
can be  read as a finished piece. How frustrating. How insulting. A lot of 
people  have dealt with that in a more thorough way, Jackson Mac Low  for  
   example. It's part of what I'm doing.
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  4-FEB-1
994 11:19:37.15
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: the book arts

Date: Fri, 04 Feb 1994 10:56:41 -0500   
From: Catherine D Yates <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: the book arts    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Joe:  "One of the issues I find provocative is the idea
of using hypertext as a metaphor for constructing a    
different sort of printed text...what if one were to...--   
- take the electronic form, ...and push it metaphorically   
in some unexpected *material* directions?..."

Joel: "What do you mean by printed text...forgive me for    
needing examples" & "I have been fascinated with the   
concept of the Search Engine and the logic of search   
strings...wandering free in a field of unrestricted    
text...you find what you ask for..."    

I am replying not because of what I know about hypertext    
and search string technology but because of what I know
of the opposite if we can take the simplistic duality of    
print making, writing and electronic writing, searching
as a point of departure, more simply, to address your  
queries in terms of oldslow and newfast.

I just learned how to operate a lithographic press.  You    
pull the bar down on your plate (stone), put the clutch
in, & turn the cog.  Ink is smashed into the paper under    
the pressure of approximately 900 pounds per square inch.   
If you forget to take the clutch out before you lift up
the bar, the handle on the cog will fly toward you, hit
your nose at great unstoppable speed & break it.  You  
will have to find someone willing to clean up the blood
with appropriate blood safety anti-viral gear.    

One thinks about an image, what would you want to draw on   
such a plate (stone) and as a poet what would you write
on it?    

Few of us have drawing skills, are trained to reproduce
in charcoal the sinews and breasts of the human form. Few   
of us have this same knowledge put into choosing words 
which could describe our experience of living or even to    
convey information to someone.

For example what I draw on a hard ground zinc plate is 
closer to an after-image, a burnt and glinted shape just    
left of your pupil inside the tissues of your eyelid, of    
a bluff in the Hudson River Valley north of White Plains    
than God's hand reaching for Adam though that might be 
what I mean. (no Feminist version of this reference comes   
appropriately to mind)   

It takes me a month of dips into sulfuric acid and
tireless wiping ink into the crevices of the zinc to   
figure this image onto the page, an image which   
registered in my mind in just a fraction of a second   

Over the core of the month, the drawing was first a face,   
then two masques, then a tough rock and a fist.   
Meanwhile, I think about writing into this print & manage   
only to print back wards in water based crayon two
things:   

    "with"

 &   

 "girl in winter"   

which is all I have time for & all I know.   

This is my way of taking up Joe's curiosity about 
hypertext and unexpected *material* form.    

I don't think that electronic forums take care of the  
slow operations of living.  There is a kind of reverse 
nostalgia that maybe we could keep track of what we know    
or say because of a technological frontier.  Do not think   
that I am, however, willing to do away with it.  I am  
avid about a relationship to stringent conversation by 
way of the keyboard, by way of e-mail.  

This is my way of taking up Joel's careful urge to define   
a "text" as a way to get to an understanding of   
"hypertext." (He uses Greek epic cycles, James Joyce...as   
possible ways to understand the concept of "hypertext" 
which I am not addressing per se).  I am defining a text    
& it's "material" both in terms of how a particular text    
is made, physically and where the text/image might come
from, experientially.  In terms of "wandering free in a
field of unrestricted text" and whether SearchEngine   
changes our concept of "reading" hence "writing" I would    
say: 

Yes. 
No.  

Yes, SearchEngine changes one's awareness thus, access to   
textual (written) information and must change how one  
would read through it.   

No, SearchEngine does not change your awareness thus   
access to understanding the (written) textual information   
nor will it change our capacity to reply.    

I believe one's "awareness" and one's ability to "speak
about" or "draw about" what one knows and learns are   
skills which are developed not because of electronic   
space but because of what one seeks, or bumps into.  Not    
to say that one couldn't have all of one's serious
physical, intellectual, artistic  experiences on, in   
SearchEngine, that is surely to come, but that one does
not figure things out, survive because of the speed of 
and the mere availability of information.    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  4-FEB-1
994 15:46:01.37
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: the book arts

Date: Fri, 04 Feb 1994 12:38:25 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: the book arts    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

katie [i am most comfortable in lowercase] i take you to mean    
text-from-life as blood-from-stone...   

to which:  yes, the sensitivities we develop to a medium are not simply a  
function of the medium... the transparencies (historically, palpably) 
associated with media perhaps one of the places to draw out latent    
structures (that, i would think, are correlative to metabolic    
impulses---but this reveals a certain body-centered aesthetic to which i am
predisposed)...

that is, i find it difficult to construct a 'complete' account of my work  
'with' or 'through' corresponding 'material' simply because i'm not certain
that i necessarily engage (setting aside the more conscious deliberations  
of craft) in a conscious processing of same, or in a quasi-conscious  
forgetting of the 'stuff' at hand (as in this last poorly constructed 
example, the little noninklings ' ' serving to introduce self-consciousness
into my ruminations)... there is some empirical work (wish i could remember
where at the moment) to indicate that 'getting lost' in the flow, so to    
speak, is ultimately beneficial to creative processing... but of course    
this doesn't begin to address what sorts of "objects" we wish to objectify 
(and what sorts of subjects correspond thereto)...

to some extent, to argue from mediation (much as from design) represents a 
residual form/content dualism... that is, to the extent that we read-write 
'through' a given medium (i.e., as a mediator) to a presumed
experience-construction of content that is somehow exhausted-(or,
worse)"explained" in such terms... that is, without content-of-the-form    
interference, seamlessly...   

but your post concludes on the related, perhaps more pressing issue of
survival in an age of information... hence opening to the question of what 
sorts of experiences we might wish to have not so much out of regard for   
aesthetic taste (itself socially-situated), but for signifying practices   
that speak to our more urgent places in time(s)... and here, i think, is   
where the tendency in many circles to view something like hypertext as
simply 'facilitating' a more 'interactive' response to 'knowledge
production' (those cursed little marks again, drats!) appears a bit   
naive...  

i mean, hypertext is not necessarily going to make anything, incl. life,   
any easier... i look to it to provide a more complex representation (yes,  
even mimetically) of how meaning/knowledge emerges from information   
flows... alternatively, possibly, to help think our way out of the    
information metaphysics this culture would seem to be so caught up in...   
hence perhaps to open to a renewed appreciation of contingency (and   
associated ambiguities), the temporal dimension proper, that underwrites   
all (mortal) practice (ssorry for any new age intimation)... but hypertext 
is simply one aspect of an emerging network of new networks, all of which  
augur, most importantly for me, the possibilities (and associated
limitations) of alternative communities (of writers, citizens, etc)...

as you so eloquently suggest, what happens to the page in the midst of
these (potentially social) changes will probably be less a matter of  
emphasizing any material method per se than a consequence of how we learn  
to survive and seek out together...

joe  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  4-FEB-1
994 15:51:47.44
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   subject/object/philosophy/lyric  impulse  

Date: Fri, 04 Feb 1994 13:23:10 -0500   
From: Charles Bernstein <[email-masked]>   
Subject: subject/object/philosophy/lyric  impulse 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Marc Christensen, the editor of the Wayne Literary Review, from  
Wayne State in Detroit, writes that he is looking for work for a 
special Summer 1994 issue (dealine May 1): "Theory poetics art   
culture": "quality creative writing needed which aspires towards 
an effacement, blurring, or subversion of the subject/object
relationship between theory and art."  (He mentions that he first
saw my work in a 1991 issue of Meanjin, the Australian magazine, 
in a section edited by Sigi Jottkandt, now at UB & on this list.)
Write Marc Christensen at Wayne Literary Review, WSU Dept. of    
English, 51 West Warren, Detroit MI 48202.   

Henry Weinfeld called to say that he and Stephen Fredman are
editing a special issue of Sagetrieb on the intersection of the  
lyric and philosophical impulses in 20th century poetry.  They   
are looking at proposals for through the spring.  Both are at Notre   
Dame.
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  5-FEB-1
994 17:42:48.72
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   "allowing to sound"   

Date: Sat, 05 Feb 1994 17:40:24 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: "allowing to sound"  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Pardon my abstracting from Patrick's long message on Diane Ward  
the following passage.  The message was addressed in particular  
to an unnamed interlocutor but was distributed to all of us on   
the poetics list.  I deleted one set of statements from within   
the passage (marked below by ellipses within brackets) becauses I
didn't quite understand what Patrick was saying and because the  
technical character of those statements seemed to derive from the
"reading" of Diane Ward's *Imaginary Movie*--a book I don't know--    
and so I was unsure how relevant they are to a discussion of
poetry and poetics in general.  And I put the word reading in quotes  
only because of what Patrick himself says, that is:    

I don't "read" this text so much as allow it to sound  
out its own cultural relevance. This is not as passive 
as it may seem.  This sounding invites a text which is 
an "imaginary form" which insists [**on what? here is  
where i begin to lose track--b.f.**] no matter how
digruntled I may become with the way the text sits on  
the page.[**...**]  This is the level of engagement.   
This is personal, it is ideological, it is social.  You
mention the social as a field of intervention.  So
often, even [**but why "even"?**] in O'Hara and   
Reznikoff, I feel the poem is a description of    
something material, a personalization which elementizes
some margin running the gamut from imprisonment (I as  
the disenfranchized interlocutor of poetic/cultural    
condition) to oration (I as arbiter of the imaginary   
condition).  This field of intervention I often find   
less entreating...  

I'll cut it off there because the other half of the sentence
refers to the statements I deleted.

I return to this message because I would like to take issue with 
what I take to be an analogy Patrick is drawing between the two  
sides of two different distinctions.  On the one hand, between   
reading a text and allowing it to sound (with the implication    
being that the latter discovers a world of discussion and   
interaction unavailable to the former); on the other, between two
conceptions of the social poem, one that seems performative 
(Diane Ward), the other linked to modes of representation (O'Hara
and Reznikoff).  Unstated as such but governing Patrick's remarks
(or so I believe) is the twin association of (1) "reading" with  
"representation" and (2) "allowing to sound" with "performance." 
Is that correct?    

My reconstruction of the argument is necessarily hazy because I'm
unsure what this "allowing to sound" actually consists in, and   
I'm also unsure what sort of social engagement this "allowing to 
sound" engenders.   

I'm all for the discovery of new modes of reading, and for rich  
phenomenologically tinged accounts of how the poem solicits the  
reader's attention.  I only recently re-read Nick Piombino's
essays from *L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E* magazine and was struck with the   
depth and beauty of what he describes.  His work in that area has
not been taken up and I dare say a critical practice that took   
Nick's theories of reading as its starting point would look 
different than anything presently being practiced.  My problem in
the present context is with the promotion of a certain sort of   
text and a certain sort of "reading" that defines itself by 
disparaging reading as such.  To disavow reading would seem to me
to dictate the terms on which the text can be approached.   
Speaking as a reader, my inclination is to cry foul.  Also, 
however, I wonder what the actual value of this "allowing to
sound" can be if it is only applicable to one kind of poem.  If  
it's impossible, for instance, to allow O'Hara's poetry or  
Reznikoff's "to sound," I wonder if the social engagement   
discovered in *Imaginary Movie* is not MORE rather than LESS
restrictive.   

But these are simply questions that point to a need for
clarification.  My other interest in all this is more pedestrian:
What is the social poem?  What ideas about the social poem do we 
entertain without reflection, and where do we see poets working  
to articulate newer or deeper ideas about poetry and society?    

Patrick mentioned that he is teaching Diane Ward's work and that 
his musings were inspired by that.  By a strange coincidence, my 
own teaching takes me to a similar line of thinking.  I gave my  
students Langston Hughes's essay "My Adventures as a Social Poet"
(from the recently reprinted collection *Good Morning  
Revolution*).  In the coming weeks I'll be trying to figure out  
how best to teach them Charles Reznikoff's *Testimony*, which in 
my opinion is a profoundly complex text, not at all a simple
collection of voices and stories.  After Reznikoff I'm taking up 
texts that are not poetry, but at the very end of the semester   
I"m going to try to incorporate Alice Notley's poem "White  
Phosphorus" (from her book *Homer's Art*) in a more general and  
historical account of the Vietnam War.  

Anyone else working in this area?  Any thoughts?  

Ben Friedlander
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  5-FEB-1
994 23:22:52.83
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "allowing to sound"    

Date: Sat, 05 Feb 1994 23:22:11 -0500   
From: Juliana Spahr <[email-masked]>  
Subject: RE: "allowing to sound"   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Ben, I too was bothered by the separation of reading and sounding
but felt it might be more just another example of the semantic   
confusion that seems to take over net discussions. (restrictive  
editing seems to have a direct relation to vocabulary confusions)
in these discussions) But I like the larger question of
where these take us--how does sounding allow reading; how reading
sounding. I think you are right--Piombino is the place to look.  
Also Dahlen and Howe and at times the essays of Andrews.drews.   

But it is your question of what is the social poem that
provoked me to finally reply to something on this list.
I think the answer is the poem is the social poem. But that 
is my easily dismissed anti-Adorno (and the rest) optimism  
speaking that I've finally accepted because the whole thing 
doesn't seem like it is worth much without it. I liked your 
teaching narrative mainly because I think I am using a 
similar area of concern to direct my class--moving from
Heart of Darkness to bell hooks' "narratives of struggle" to
a study of contrasts between Cullen's "Heritage" and   
Lindsay's "The Congo" and Hughes "Weary Blues" and Smith's  
"It A Come" to Apocalypse Now and the accompanying
apparatus to Erica Hunt's "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics"    
to Teresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Dictee" to Leslie Scalapino's    
"Waking Life." I am trying to examine in just he most  
basic levels--what is testimony or struggle or opposition.  

This has been in some ways the major question of the poetry 
of the 70s (it might get its most reductive play in the
often drawn contrast between the work of Adrienne Rich and  
the work of, say, Nicole Brossard; Rich seen as the necessity    
of a narrative and standardized diction for political  
purposes, Brossard as the necessity for rewriting the language). 
We all know these arguments. But in some ways they weren't  
really answered (or at least I feel that way; I am still    
confused if it necessary to start with the assumption of    
a standard in order to articulate a right, or a document    
of rights). S  

So I am wondering how these issues play out for others, especially    
in the context of the classroom (which is in some ways a    
testing ground). I am wondering where others locate the
political assumptions of poetry. I am wondering how others  
fit the aesthetic and social concerns of theorists such
as Brecht, Adorno, or more recently, Jameson's call for
mapping the postmodern into the poetic. And I am wondering, Ben, 
whether you think I have done a great disservice to your word    
"social" by merging it with my vague "political." 

Juliana Spahr  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  6-FEB-1
994 13:16:26.77
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: the book arts

Date: Sun, 06 Feb 1994 13:13:06 -0500   
From: William R Howe <[email-masked]> 
Subject: RE: the book arts    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

in response to joe's comment that he feels *most comfortable in  
lower case* i find it interesting to note that most computer systems  
are completely case insensitive (meaning they make no distinctions    
between lower and upper case). this is only changed by the  
applications that we choose to run on them (especially higher order   
applications that have been designed for a maximum of  *user-    
friendly* bells and whistles). We on the other hand are very aware    
of the fact of cases. We use cases to clue us into various kinds of   
syntax. case then becomes a kind of covert linguistic organization    
that we are blind to as long as it is present, but as soon as the rUles    
of caSe iNteGrity haVe been ruptUred wE Become awaRe oF case.    
And, it is at times like this that we realize that lower case letters and  
upper case letters not only look different on the page but mean  
differently as well.

Bill Howe 
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  7-FEB-1
994 22:31:52.46
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   the social poem  

Date: Mon, 07 Feb 1994 22:28:39 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: the social poem 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Juliana, first of all, no, your merging of "social" and
"political" doesn't do me a disservice.  I admit I was impressed 
last year when Tom Loebel told me the two are quite distinct--   
impressed though I myself am hopelessly confused about the  
difference.  Tom I guess had in mind a technical distinction that
holds sway in political science (which I believe is what he 
studied before switching to English), but of course readers and  
writers of literature don't always recognize that distinction.   
(Langston Hughes, for instance, in his "Adventures as a Social   
Poet," speaks of social *and* political issues--about poverty and
about being black in America, but also about the Scottsboro boys,
about segregation.) 

Nevertheless, the very *possibility* of a distinction has proven 
useful.  By speaking of the "social" poem, for instance, I would 
evade some of the cant that collects around the word "political."
Also, I hope by returning to a vocabulary that emphasizes the    
documentary over the activist to reexamine some of our prejudices
*against* the documentary (what you were referring to as "the    
often drawn contrast between the work of Adrienne Rich and the   
work of, say, Nicole Brossard; Rich seen as the necessity of a   
narrative and standardized diction for political purposes,  
Brossard as the necessity for rewriting the language").  For both
those reasons I tend to prefer, like Langston Hughes apparently, 
to use the word social to refer to both the social and political,
rather than using the word political to refer to the political   
and social (the latter choice being much more common these days--
perhaps why you referred to the social as "my" word).  

Second, as far as teaching is concerned (and I'm still such a    
novice at this, still so easily surprised at how quickly my 
constructions of the classroom can collapse, that I hesitate to  
offer this, but...), I seem to be moving toward a course similar 
to yours.  Like you, I'm asking my students "what is testimony or
struggle or opposition," and trying to do so (since the class is 
*composition*) by engaging them "at just the most basic levels." 

I've tried to organize the class around two overlapping sets of  
questions.  (1) What does it mean to speak for "a people"?  How  
is that different than speaking for yourself?  Where do the two  
tasks intersect and where do they part company?  (Here the  
principal texts are *Testimony* and *The Souls of Black Folk*.)  
(2) What does it mean for a writer to take music as a model for  
writing?  (*The Souls of Black Folk* and DuBois's emphasis on    
"the sorrow songs.")  What does it mean if the writer's words are
not his or her own, or if they're modeled on the language of the 
courts?  (Reznikoff's *Testimony*.)

Because I prize all the texts I'm teaching, I'm hoping (for 
myself--*forget* the students here!) not only to discover what   
the resources of the so-called "social" poem ARE, but to    
illuminate these resources as a continuum of values, not a set of
mutually exclusive choices (here is where my students really do  
enter the picture--can I somehow escape my own didacticism in    
order to make these choices available to them?).  Isn't the 
subtext of the "often drawn contrast" between Brossard and Rich  
an attempt to proscribe certain forms of writing?  And what kind 
of task is that?  I mean, I love Nicole Brossard's work, but
doesn't the sanctimoniousness of the sheer *use* of that work to 
criticize another's make you want to prefer Adrienne Rich?  (And 
isn't that contrary preference the very essence of an  
oppositional poetics!)  This seems to be a little of what was at 
stake in the upholding of Diane Ward as versus O'Hara and   
Reznikoff.

Ben F.    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  7-FEB-1
994 23:18:47.88
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: the social poem   

Date: Mon, 07 Feb 1994 23:08:21 -0500   
From: Kenneth Sherwood <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: the social poem  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Ben et al,

Your musings on the social-in-the-political and the political-in-the- 
social help distill the my muddy thoughts of earlier today.  As if    
the terms could be discrete at all, the 'political' has taken a  
particular resonance, popularly.  Isn't to call one's poems 
social as over 'political' to propose that they are not overtly functional 
(as with propoganda), or rather, not purely concerned with overt political 
effect (since by such measure our most purportedly political poems fall    
ineffectual) but with a double burden?  

How to call that double burden, how shoulder it?  Perhaps I invest too much
in your preference for the one word; I imagine claiming "social" for  
my own poetry in hopes that its fact of being, my activity in arranging    
its language, bringing it before a public in various manners implictly
renders it a social act.  And here I suppose I've so sullied the word 
it designates but sense of ripples on the surface after sinking. 

What of my reliance on 'hope'.

KS   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  8-FEB-1
994 13:30:29.26
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   The Socio-political Ward   

Date: Tue, 08 Feb 1994 13:28:09 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: The Socio-political Ward  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

The responses to my post have generated several questions circling the
issue of "reading" as *opposed* to "sounding". They have also pointed to a 
tendency toward a lexical pile-up in my writing. I'd like to unpack some of
my person to person considerations so that they may be more easily    
approached by a wider audience. I should say that I had initially sent my  
reflection on "Imaginary Movie" to one person in response to some of his   
questions and perhaps it was unfair to throw this on the List without some 
attention to detail. I also wish to see if I can give a sense of what I    
find social and political about reading around IM and "this kind" of text. 

As to "I don't 'read' this text so much as allow it to sound out its own   
cultural relevance," "sound" was primarily used to contrast a broad field  
of effects with "read" which in my response to the "unnamed interlocutor"  
referred to a once-through oral reading which was ultimately unsatisfying  
for him. There is, as Ben points out, a disparagement of reading here, but 
one which doesn't so much devalue reading as place it in a broad 
relationship with the imaginary. "Sound" was a con-fusion of effects for me
(and for others) - a pun attending to the metaphor of movie, an attempt to 
allude to a sonar-like  (non-visual) means of finding the depth of a text's
cultural reference, and a wish to find a measure of intention, or of what  
utility the imaginary is when "reading" such references. These three  
characteristics of the rather unstable, and somewhat tired "sound" helped  
me locate the text and the imaginary in a larger matrix than "read."  
"Reading" still remains an area of contention. I'll drop "sound" because it
has a bad ring to it.    

As this idea of reading and sounding may relate to Piombino's "Writing and 
Imaging," my interest is to "parse" not the "symbolic value of images", but
the *social* value of the "after-images" I find in reading "Imaginary 
Movie." These are subtle, but valuable distinctions which I think may help 
get to how the text is for me is ideological and thereby social and   
poitical. 

The distinction between image and after-image is made by Piombino as a kind
of  "shadowing" -- "the image layered on and under, like the creation of an
aproximate sign." What I find so compelling about *Imaginary Movie* is
Ward's use of these "approximate signs." These after-images layered on and 
under a textual and imaginary horizon induce a soft focus between these    
lines. Ultimately I am interested in what these after-images *do*, how they
interact and what is induced in the "reader" through this interaction. To  
say the text is comprised of after-images, not signs, but the collusion of 
approximate signs, promotes an idea of text more like an idea of 
imagination. Through the blurring of the distinction between language and a
cultural imagination the text becomes, or aspires to, a visual   
representation of the imagination, an "imaginary movie."  A reading becomes
a viewing, a mix of motivated participation, reading as in "I read you,"   
and unmotivated participation, a mind's-eye view. What is key for me here  
is that this view does not consist of a "visual field" per se, that there  
is no object which occupies our retina, either elemented as word, or as    
imaginary object. There is nothing in our experience that is surrounded by 
nothing, wholly marked off and distinct. Or, as Merleau-Ponty says, a 
"visual field is not made up of limited views."  Reading urges a 
participation in fields of reference which are limited views.  Viewing has 
little of the demarcation reading requires, either in the viewed or the    
viewer.   

To a larger experiential condition, I can testify that I have not read IM  
in five or six days. In spite of lapse, I am always remembering, always    
suffused with the elements of its experience, the viewings that Imaginary  
Movie clipped for me. From this experience I sense no distinct visual 
fields. The sexual takes place within the technological, the value of the  
economic within the exchange of testament. This, whatever it demonstrates  
for me, is social.  It too takes place in this unframed field of aproximate
signs, of after-images, of the *means* toward communication and of the
un-ending *ends*. What is instrumental for me here is that  it is not the  
poem which foments the condition, but the experience that foments the poem.
The induction into the functional resistance that awareness builds is 
social, as evidenced  in some small way by my attempts to make it so  
through letters and postings. It's often difficult to go back and  forth   
between experience and culture this way with poetry that is declarative. I 
just now opened up "Testimony" into the "South" to a terrible child beating
and I must say that family terror has a cultural oscillation we all   
continually suffer.  I was quite uncomfortable with this portrait.    
Nonetheless what is the difference between this portrait of family violence
and that on "911" except for the difference between exhortation (Reznikof) 
and expoloitation (911). (I am not ridiculing Reznikof here!) My initial   
*reflection* was the horror of  the "Die, God damn you!" And then I   
reflected on the reflection itself, something I cannot wholly do//separate 
in the experience of IM. 

Finally, it *is* the reading, the response to the references in words like 
technology,  "Industrial Hygene,"  in concepts of exchange and power, 
violence and sexuality, which is important in politicizing this social
text. For me it is the ideology which contorts the reference enough for    
there to be a  soft edge, a value placed upon the after-images so that
these approximate signs are motivated. The conditions of culture here 
become their own critique and thereby our experience, our bodily experience
maintains a level of this critique. By and in this there is a    
politicization of experience, which for me drops away at the moment of
reflection. Reflection here is a kind of sustained being, this is what I   
meant when I said Imaginary Movie insists. To suggest in what  it insists  
would entail this kind of explaination, or something more. One last thing. 
In my class, there were several different connotations of "poiltical" which
proved stumbling blocks, or at least obstacles for definition. Here I want 
to suggest that the motivation of the imaginary beyond reflection and into 
some level of sustainable critique is of itself politcal. *Imaginary Movie*
accomplishes this for me.

Patrick   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  9-FEB-1
994 15:09:07.33
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: the social poem   

Date: Wed, 09 Feb 1994 11:07:13 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: the social poem  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

All:  I find Susan Stewart's brief essay in *Profession 93*, "The State of 
Cultural Theory and the Future of Literary Form," to be pertinent to the   
issues being discussed hereabouts (Andy Levy brought it to my attention)...
It's pretty dense, but it raises some provocative questions, e.g., whether 
a reexamination of the lyric (of aesthetic form in general) might help to  
produce a more "dynamic and concrete avenue of activism" for intellectuals 
looking "to diversify literary representation under the rubric of
multiculturalism"...

Joe  
From:   UBVMS::V139HLA3 9-FEB-1994 18:54:22.99    
To:CHARLES
CC:V139HLA3    
Subj:   improved blanchot response 

Response to Blanchot's _The Unavowable Community_ 

Last week Ron Silliman gave a paper to Joan's seminar using 
metaphors of superconductor conductivity and electrical resistance    
to explore the "polylexic" of poetry and community.  These two   
metaphors took off on their own while "community" and "poetry" got    
lost somewhere in the traditional prose.  Two things:  I was
apprehensive:  it seems "poetry" and "community" were made to fit,    
or even forced into the literary convention of the metaphors -- no    
matter how skillfully they were deployed (and they were) I was   
unsettled; the metaphors got us no closer to what was at issue --
nothing was learned about community _or_ superconductors -- I    
wondered "what next?" and "more".  My uneasiness with his talk made   
me suddenly apprehensive about mapping the structure of emedia onto   
Blanchot's meditation on community.  "What's the use?  What does it   
do?" 

Self and community have a non 
-reciprocal but mutual   
dependency.  The Self can only
feel its solitude in the absence   
of community.  In this way the
Self is made aware of community    
in the presence of its lack.  It The Net confirms community in   
is solitary only in the   the absence of community.  Only   
remembering of community.ghosts are connected to the   
Likewise, community is invoked   user.  When I sit in front of   
holding the hand of the dying --my terminal I can contact   
of a dying individual; to invokeanyone in absence.  On the Net   
it any other way, in speaking it    There is, at least for the   
for example, is only to invoke time being, a kind of democracy   
an _absence_ of community.  Here(though only perhaps "an image   
is the Communion.  But there is  of").  Equality is imposed by   
something more:  the impossible the sameness, or at least   
impulse towards equality in the  compatibility of the material   
face of Self-Otherconduit of communication   
relationships.    (terminal, keyboards, drives,   
 memory blocks, etc.).  But   
The act of communicating isthere is really only   
deadly to its content.a reflexive equality -- who is   
"Community" cannot be spoken    more the stranger than someone   
with intent.  Absence is neededyou can't see.  Nothing is more   
to affirm it.  The absence of*unavowable* than someone in   
content in the ecstacy of shared espace.  Emedia is _absolute_   
communication.  The meaning of   absence.  There are no deaths   
the content only surfaces with a  to witness yet the voices it   
communal agreement for functional makes audible invoke an   
or work related use.overwhelming absence -- all   
The unavowable community exists those who can communicate   
somehow in the expressionlessness but are not.  It is not   
of communication.  Clarity is to a community dependent on   
be eschewed as purposeful, as absence, but is a community   
work.  "A law which presupposes exclusively _of_ absence.   
community (an understanding or
a common accord, be it the   "Commodity is spoken in   
momentary accord of two singular  a clear voice. And   
beings, breaking with few words    commodification of work(s),   
the impossibility of Saying   the valuing of labor in the   
which the unique trait of  measure of money feeds an   
experience seems to contain; its  inequality that makes a kind   
sole content:  to be   of community utterable in the   
untransmittalbe, which can be  form of commerce.  Information,   
completed thus:  the only thing  always difficult to commodify   
worthwhile is the transmission   [*think on the contortions of   
of the untransmittable."(17) intellectual property law*],   
 ironically evades the commodity   
Writing must be worklessness.   community.  It is hard to make   
Writing is an action, a verb,it signify (money).  In this way,   
not a object; its noun form   an information exchange (without   
solidifies the community and  the communal agreement, but with   
for the sake of the community    an ecstatic communication, or   
must be banished.  Blanchotjust ecstacy) is not valuable,   
consoles:  the object/writingbut is the basis of our   
is "always already lost".  ecommunity.  _Nothing_ is   
    exchanged and our work ethic   
Articulatable community produces   chides us for it.   
friendship and "Friendship calls   
upon the community throughThe writing here is a non-   
writing."  But this friendship   product.  It is not consumed.   
is only developed in drunkenness    The action of writing, the   
where "friends disavo[w] their  solipsistic ecstacy in the act   
previous friendship in order to  of writing, is the democracy.   
call upon *friendship*    And from this emanates the grandiose   
(camaraderie withoutdefence of access.  Everyone can   
preliminaries) vehiculated by    and indeed _must_ be an author for   
the requirements of being there". the sake of equality and the   
When the familiar (ie. the denial of clarity.  Graffiti in its   
meaning), made so by agreement,   self-assertion, in its *Saying as   
supplants the unutterable,    the all-important thing*, is the only   
Blanchot experiences my   real forerunner and the paradigm for   
uneasiness.  In the hurt that   true democracy.   
he cannot hide, he falls back 
into his own textual trap.    Yet truer equality is to come in   
He resorts to naming and access to experience in only the most   
idealization of the real.existential of contemporary ways.  In   
  Virtual reality the Ideal is the perfect   
This may inspire groans (or   stand-in (not even a substitute)   
yawns).  It is cliche:  "random  for the real....  Why do we always   
signifiers", "to reveal by   smart a bit when the real is   
not revealing", "absence is the    supplanted?  Is it the reduction   
core". Need it be said that  of experience?  Is Violence again   
they are necessarily  done?   
impossibilities (oxymoronic) in    
their articulations in (yet my writing and your   
language?  In the end Blanchot reading is real.  they are   
almost warns of the spaces of  experiential.  a change in   
"freedom" inbetween the workthinking about the real is needed.   
and the unwork.  And says they  there is nothing virtual in my   
carry with them (*signify*fingers on the keys, electrical   
almost) "responsibilities" for  resistance in silicon, or your   
"new relationships".  eyes on the monitor.   

I want to ask "Where do we progress to from here?"  "What comes  
next?"  "What now?"  What goes  >>> HERE <<<  ?  There is a certain   
presumption in these questions, and in the word "new".  *New* does    
not interest me, getting at the latent does, as does getting at our   
material relations to the things we have.  Have I also exposed an
attachment to the real?  

From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group"  9-FEB-1
994 23:45:32.83
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   Poetic Community 

Date: Wed, 09 Feb 1994 23:43:54 -0500   
From: Martin Spinelli <[email-masked]>
Subject: Poetic Community
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

From:   UBVMS::V139HLA3 9-FEB-1994 18:54:24.07    
To:CHARLES
CC:  
Subject:    Blanchot Response 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
some thoughts on what's been going on in this space and
reading Blanchot for the first time

i'd appreciate any ideas or suggestions.

-Martin   
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Response to Blanchot's _The Unavowable Community_ 

Last week Ron Silliman gave a paper to Joan's seminar using 
metaphors of superconductor conductivity and electrical resistance    
to explore the "polylexic" of poetry and community.  These two   
metaphors took off on their own while "community" and "poetry" got    
lost somewhere in the traditional prose.  Two things:  I was
apprehensive:  it seems "poetry" and "community" were made to fit,    
or even forced into the literary convention of the metaphors -- no    
matter how skillfully they were deployed (and they were) I was   
unsettled; the metaphors got us no closer to what was at issue --
nothing was learned about community _or_ superconductors -- I    
wondered "what next?" and "more".  My uneasiness with his talk made   
me suddenly apprehensive about mapping the structure of emedia onto   
Blanchot's meditation on community.  "What's the use?  What does it   
do?" 

Self and community have a non 
-reciprocal but mutual   
dependency.  The Self can only
feel its solitude in the absence   
of community.  In this way the
Self is made aware of community    
in the presence of its lack.  It The Net confirms community in   
is solitary only in the   the absence of community.  Only   
remembering of community.ghosts are connected to the   
Likewise, community is invoked   user.  When I sit in front of   
holding the hand of the dying --my terminal I can contact   
of a dying individual; to invokeanyone in absence.  On the Net   
it any other way, in speaking it    There is, at least for the   
for example, is only to invoke time being, a kind of democracy   
an _absence_ of community.  Here(though only perhaps "an image   
is the Communion.  But there is  of").  Equality is imposed by   
something more:  the impossible the sameness, or at least   
impulse towards equality in the  compatibility of the material   
face of Self-Otherconduit of communication   
relationships.    (terminal, keyboards, drives,   
 memory blocks, etc.).  But   
The act of communicating isthere is really only   
deadly to its content.a reflexive equality -- who is   
"Community" cannot be spoken    more the stranger than someone   
with intent.  Absence is neededyou can't see.  Nothing is more   
to affirm it.  The absence of*unavowable* than someone in   
content in the ecstacy of shared espace.  Emedia is _absolute_   
communication.  The meaning of   absence.  There are no deaths   
the content only surfaces with a  to witness yet the voices it   
communal agreement for functional makes audible invoke an   
or work related use.overwhelming absence -- all   
The unavowable community exists those who can communicate   
somehow in the expressionlessness but are not.  It is not   
of communication.  Clarity is to a community dependent on   
be eschewed as purposeful, as absence, but is a community   
work.  "A law which presupposes exclusively _of_ absence.   
community (an understanding or
a common accord, be it the   "Commodity is spoken in   
momentary accord of two singular  a clear voice. And   
beings, breaking with few words    commodification of work(s),   
the impossibility of Saying   the valuing of labor in the   
which the unique trait of  measure of money feeds an   
experience seems to contain; its  inequality that makes a kind   
sole content:  to be   of community utterable in the   
untransmittalbe, which can be  form of commerce.  Information,   
completed thus:  the only thing  always difficult to commodify   
worthwhile is the transmission   [*think on the contortions of   
of the untransmittable."(17) intellectual property law*],   
 ironically evades the commodity   
Writing must be worklessness.   community.  It is hard to make   
Writing is an action, a verb,it signify (money).  In this way,   
not a object; its noun form   an information exchange (without   
solidifies the community and  the communal agreement, but with   
for the sake of the community    an ecstatic communication, or   
must be banished.  Blanchotjust ecstacy) is not valuable,   
consoles:  the object/writingbut is the basis of our   
is "always already lost".  ecommunity.  _Nothing_ is   
    exchanged and our work ethic   
Articulatable community produces   chides us for it.   
friendship and "Friendship calls   
upon the community throughThe writing here is a non-   
writing."  But this friendship   product.  It is not consumed.   
is only developed in drunkenness    The action of writing, the   
where "friends disavo[w] their  solipsistic ecstacy in the act   
previous friendship in order to  of writing, is the democracy.   
call upon *friendship*    And from this emanates the grandiose   
(camaraderie withoutdefence of access.  Everyone can   
preliminaries) vehiculated by    and indeed _must_ be an author for   
the requirements of being there". the sake of equality and the   
When the familiar (ie. the denial of clarity.  Graffiti in its   
meaning), made so by agreement,   self-assertion, in its *Saying as   
supplants the unutterable,    the all-important thing*, is the only   
Blanchot experiences my   real forerunner and the paradigm for   
uneasiness.  In the hurt that   true democracy.   
he cannot hide, he falls back 
into his own textual trap.    Yet truer equality is to come in   
He resorts to naming and access to experience in only the most   
idealization of the real.existential of contemporary ways.  In   
  Virtual reality the Ideal is the perfect   
This may inspire groans (or   stand-in (not even a substitute)   
yawns).  It is cliche:  "random  for the real....  Why do we always   
signifiers", "to reveal by   smart a bit when the real is   
not revealing", "absence is the    supplanted?  Is it the reduction   
core". Need it be said that  of experience?  Is Violence again   
they are necessarily  done?   
impossibilities (oxymoronic) in    
their articulations in (yet my writing and your   
language?  In the end Blanchot reading is real.  they are   
almost warns of the spaces of  experiential.  a change in   
"freedom" inbetween the workthinking about the real is needed.   
and the unwork.  And says they  there is nothing virtual in my   
carry with them (*signify*fingers on the keys, electrical   
almost) "responsibilities" for  resistance in silicon, or your   
"new relationships".  eyes on the monitor.   

I want to ask "Where do we progress to from here?"  "What comes  
next?"  "What now?"  What goes  >>> HERE <<<  ?  There is a certain   
presumption in these questions, and in the word "new".  *New* does    
not interest me, getting at the latent does, as does getting at our   
material relations to the things we have.  Have I also exposed an
attachment to the real?  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 10-FEB-1
994 10:41:25.17
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   "911"  

Date: Thu, 10 Feb 1994 10:35:22 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: "911" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Ben, I hope you see my point bout reflection concerning texts like    
"Testimony." On the other hand I have been reflecting on the social and    
cultural/ideological crossfire situated by Rezinkof's choice of "examples,"
his choice of line breaks, his use of language and have begun to wonder at 
what length we have to go to get to these cultural intersections that are  
quite different from the "experiential" brought to the fore in texts like  
IM. (I have a cold right now and don't have a lot of faith in the sense I'm
making, so I hope this erads.) Anyhoo, the social currents instigated in   
"Testimony" come from a different place, exterior, as examples, yet they   
are pervasive; we have to go out to get at what's in. This movement also   
provides a motivated critique, but I'm not sure that it doesn't remain
captured as in some amber, a specimin. I'm also not sure whether this 
virtual litho-graphy is not the way we process things anyway. The constant 
conundrum of speculative existence. Just to say, I'm not excluding the
variorum of experience, how we process dictum, how we think alike, how we  
take in the scene.  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 10-FEB-1
994 21:18:11.37
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "911"   

Date: Thu, 10 Feb 1994 21:16:57 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: "911"  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Patrick, this is my first attempt to make use of the "reply" function of   
this system & to play with the so-called "chevrons"--I hope this doesn't go
through all wampy-jawed.  Anyway, with that proviso, let me try to address 
your last two posts.  In "THE SOCIO-POLITICAL WARD" you say, to explain    
your preference for *Imaginary Movie* over *Testimony*, "It's often   
difficult to go back and forth between experience and culture this way
[i.e., as you do "reading" Diane Ward's work] with poetry that is
declarative."  Leaving aside for the moment your characterization of  
*Testimony* as being "declarative," and leaving aside also the distinction 
between "experience" and "culture"--I think I agree in principle with both of   
those assumptions but find them too limited in practice--the point seems to
be that the reader's options with regard to a critical engagement with
*Testimony* are limited by the visceral impact of the work.  Now, under the
heading "911," you elaborate by writing:

>[...] I have been reflecting on the social and   
> cultural/ideological crossfire situated by Rezinkof's choice of "examples,"   
> his choice of line breaks, his use of language and have begun to wonder at    
> what length we have to go to get to these cultural intersections that are
> quite different from the "experiential" brought to the fore in texts like
> IM. [...]    
[...] the social currents instigated in 
> "Testimony" come from a different place, exterior, as examples, yet they 
> are pervasive; we have to go out to get at what's in. [...]    

I gather you're saying that the complexity of Reznikoff's work (marked by  
the elaborate artistry of "choice," which hides as artlessness, the basic  
view of *Testimony* so far as I can tell from the little bit of the   
literature on it I've seen--Charles Bernstein's recent *Sulfur* essay being
a notable exception) corresponds in some way with the elaborate "overlays" 
(as I believe you termed them) of Ward's *Imaginary Movie*.  With this
you're establishing an equivalence of sorts between the two--a safeguard in
some way from the charge that you are disparaging Reznikoff--while    
preserving the distinction you insist on between a text based on the  
"interior" and one based on the "exterior."  Am I reading you right?  That 
the "social currents" of *Imaginary Movie* are "instigated" (nice word!)   
from within, directed *at* the reader, who is the text's exteriority, while
the social concern of *Testimony* somehow enters the poem (as if it wasn't 
there all along!) from this same place where the reader resides.  I think  
you can see right away the problem I would have with that description of   
*Testimony*:   

That the distinction between the outside and the inside of the poem doesn't
hold up once you begin to speak of reference.

That the mechanics of this reference--by which I mean the poem's 
relationship with its exteriority--are not sufficiently explained in terms 
of "crossfire."

That the role of the reader as an *intelligence*, though it is assumed, is 
not explored.  And that there can be no real understanding of reference without 
such an exploration.

That the very notion of "declarative" assumes a communication between 
individuals, and until we address the particular character of this    
communication in *Testimony* we will not progress very far in    
understanding just what sort of social concern this poem expresses.   

That it is only by carefully observing how the poem utilizes *our*    
intelligence that we can begin to glimpse the intelligence of the poem
itself (a formulation I prefer to, but for which you might substitute,
the more vexed phrase "intention of the author"). 

What's noteworthy to me is that you have gone to great lengths to provide  
this sort of "testimony" (if I might put it so) to the process of reading  
Diane Ward's work, while relying in your characterizations of Reznikoff on 
more or less superficial impressions.  I don't say this to knock you--not  
at all--I'm struck that even the best readers of *Testimony* (Milton  
Hindus, for instance), despite the evidence of their own research, offer   
what seem to me superficial descriptions of what *reading* Reznikoff  
requires.  Here again Charles B's essay is an exception--and though I find 
his imputation of opacity with regard to Reznikoff's *language* to be a bit
bizarre, what he says about prying *words* open does I think speak very    
cogently to the *composition* of Reznikoff's work.  Well, let that hurried 
depiction of the essay stand for now.   

Tried to get in tonight to hear Khalid Abdul Mohammad (the Nation of Islam 
guy) but they ran out of tickets.  I'll let this drop here for now, go on  
to dinner.  See ya--
Ben  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 11-FEB-1
994 17:10:33.93
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   Poetic Community 

Date: Fri, 11 Feb 1994 16:47:18 -0500   
From: [email-masked]    
Subject: Poetic Community
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Martin,   

In your Blanchot Response you clearly outline my understanding   
of a brief entrance I made into "The Unavowable Community"  
which came about when Pierre Joris who translated this text 
moved to Albany to teach.

You touch in detail on some of the concerns I hold on to as I    
continue to participate in these virtual communities of
oversensitive? or are we overlyInvolved readers of peers,   
teachers, & by consequence at times, close friends.    

What we have in common is that we are taking our writing as our  
writing to one another SERIOUSLY.  

One could consider in doing a kind of personal spreadsheet the   
extent to which one can  r e a l l y   speak thoroughly about what    
one is reading or writing TO s o m e  o n e in a given {life}{time}.  

What I notice in my own emulations, my "addresses" on the Net, is
the bold arrogance which dominates as commotion:   the hope 
that I have something to say to -----> & it is disturbing.  

 for ex to -----> you    

Probably, I don't.  
Probably, 
"this is just to say"    
"I'm sorry I ate...'your Blanchot Response'  
"it was so cold & ..."   

SO   

to appreciate your "reading"  
- in particular  your recognition of the "graffiti" (SELF-  
assertion), your skepticism about "democracy" in electronic 
writing, your willingness to take an almost (Feminist?) stance   
here & a minute to talk about how we talk here    

My additional curiosity is about to whom we choose to reply to on
the Net as well as why we talk in certain tropes = attitudes
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 11-FEB-1
994 20:12:12.32
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   "in time"   

Date: Fri, 11 Feb 1994 20:08:50 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: "in time"  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

keith waldrop cited or mis-cited or whatever by jean-luc nancy is old news.
i've found something even stranger.  there is a copy of robert kelly's *in 
time* (frontier press, 1971) in rodolphe gasche's office,   
alongside--speaking figuratively--robert heinlein's *i will fear no evil*, 
several many volumes of lukacs (in german and in english, all so pristine  
as to seem unopened, if not unread--but even that he *has* them is amazing),    
& what looks like a full run from the '70s of *tdr*.  i mention only the more   
peculiar offerings of course.  but for those who may be contemplating some 
version of "rudy's marginalia," i think this kelly connection may be  
significant.  who said there was no poetry after mallarme?  

b.f. 
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 11:26:12.14
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   rudy's marginalia

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 11:20:29 -0500 (EST)  
From: Loss Glazier <[email-masked]>  
Subject: rudy's marginalia    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Ben, I'm a little curious about "rudy's marginalia."Is this an observation 
on "the order of things"?  Or is it because I have no sense of what   
the "Kelly connection" constitutes?
 -- Loss  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 12:42:36.25
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   "Community" 

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 12:19:32 -0500 (EST)  
From: Loss Glazier <[email-masked]>  
Subject: "Community"
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

The idea of a listserv as constituting "community" poses problems.  First, 
in that a listserv is "virtual," i.e., we are not really "there."  In 
this regard, a community is almost always defined by location.  Secondly,  
most definitions of community imply a sense of commitment--to take this    
further, I would say entrapment, ie, if you think of a Blue Ridge mountain 
community, most people don't have the mobility or means to move. "There"   
is fixed; its participants are fixed--for better or worse.  An electronic  
list implies no commitment whatsoever: any person can unplug at any time;  
the largest percentage of any list does not participate but stands in the  
shadows examining the record of the conversation.  To say that we have
in common taking each writer's writing seriously is a kind thought.  I
hope it's true--but is no ground to call this endeavor a "community." 
(Your name, the name of the sender of the second "community" message, 
is even unknown / undecipherable.) The idea of an electronic democracy
is probably the least tenable of these ideas, just about as true as   
an other so-called "democracy" ie, a place where people who have 
power are equal does not argue for equality for all people. 
So, what then, would we call this? 
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 12:42:37.80
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   r's m  

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 12:40:27 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: r's m 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

loss, no connection that i can cite, no order of things save the disorder  
of bookshelves in an office.  rodolphe's marginalia is no more existent a  
project than the tain of melville, just a happy joke on all of us who 
thought gasche didn't care for poetry.  maybe he doesn't, maybe he does.  i
found it funny in any case to find robert kelly there, in *that* office--  
the *only* poet whose work i happened to see.  read or unread i can't say. 
but from a superficial glance (honestly, i wasn't snooping--one of the comp
lit grad students, stephen gingerich, is using that office this year while 
gasche's on leave; steve & I had a brief conversation about what was &
wasn't on the shelf), the only books that *really* looked read, dog-eared  
in other words, were the sci fi novels--not just heinlein but zelazny too. 
of course, i know he reads zelazny because there's a quote from z at the head   
of one of g's essays in *glyph* (maybe the *moby-dick* essay!).  presumably,    
however, gasche's library at home is where the marginalia's scribbled, the 
intimate secrets of reading which susan howe is drawn to in melville.  &   
seriously, i meant it all as a joke--a good-natured one.  the waldrop 
sighting too.  ben  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 13:14:31.73
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   The Social Poem: for the record 

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 12:47:38 -0500 (EST)  
From: Steve Evans <[email-masked]>    
Subject: The Social Poem: for the record
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

The recent exchange of posts on Diane Ward's *Imaginary Movie* and on the  
social poem has added a valuable dimension to my thinking this past week,  
so let me first register the gratitude I feel towards those who have part- 
icipated.  As the topic evolves, it appears that a hasty response I wrote  
privately to Patrick on 1 Feb. has come to produce a few effects--through  
its cited and implied presence at certain stages of his sustained posting  
to the list on 2 Feb.--within the ensuing discussion.  I had hoped to avoid
entering this space on what could be construed as a sour note, since my    
initial response to *IM* was not a positive one, but I think now that it   
would be better to trust that P's indefatigable, meticulous, and generous  
(though I must add, also terminologically baffling) practice of "sounding" 
Ward's work will more than compensate for whatever criticisms I first thought   
to advance.    

The following two paragraphs, then, are "for the record."  I have omitted  
one unsympathetic comment that concerned the presentation of the work by   
Potes & Poets Press, otherwise I have avoided the impulse to amend or 
elaborate these comments.  Because I do, however and alas, have more to say,    
I will tax everyone's patience with a second posting that will follow on   
the heels of this one.   

ORIGINAL NOTE: 

Dear Patrick (please note the ungodly hour at which I composing this [it was    
two in the morning]):    

Just a quick note to see if I can draw you out on the title poem of the book    
you will be discussing on Wednesday.  I read the poem this evening, aloud, 
and gave some thought to it.  But I must admit, it felt more like anemic cin-   
ema than imaginary movie.  Jen tells me that this book, and specifically this   
poem, has been an important one for you, and I trust that this means I am  
missing something.  Technically, the repeated six-line stanzars struck me as    
only erratically interesting as a unit of composition: the stakes are low, 
mistakes are hard to discern (can they be made?).  Less sonically engaging 
than, say, some of the work in couplets in *Relation.*  A certain, quite   
familiar, indistinction at the level of lexicon: I'll trade the whole gamut
of pronouns (the deployment of which strikes me as tired even in Ashbery) for   
a few committing descriptives (but then I like Reznikoff and O'Hara because I   
like the social as a field of intervention).  Though I can anticipate certain   
points of contact with a theoretical apparatus (most obviously, of course, 
feminist film theory circa Mulvey), which, patiently articulated, would "fill   
out" the poem, I am concerned for both the poem's and the theory's autonomy:    
there is a trace of what Barthes called "the blackmail of theory" (i.e. here's  
an aesthetic object such as your theory predicts for) here. 

Which is not to put you, or the poem for that matter, on the defensive.  I'm    
just ticking down a list of resistances that are more likely to originate in    
my hasty and perhaps insufficiently attentive reading than in the text. What    
I could use is some "testimony" regarding the coordinates you've found to  
provide a thicker and more moving engagement with the poem.  Estrin's public/   
private remark doesn't help me so far: much too sweeping and indiscriminate to  
provide guidance (what isn't appropriable under this rubric?).  Ditto the  
concept of *politics* (and for the same reason). [following this, some
pleasantries in the original have been omitted]   

But enough, I do hope you're well, and that my remarks will not seem to re-
quire undue cognitive regression on your part in order to answer them. /S. 

END ORIGINAL NOTE   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 13:17:52.74
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 12:15:49 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Loss, I've just gotta jump in here with some friendly amendments to your   
last one...    

Note Howard Rheingold's recent book on virtual community, worth taking a   
look at... Howard had sent me an earlier essay (over the nets) in which    
he'd argued, in effect, pretty much the same thing:  to paraphrase (and too
hastily) that these "places" are altering what "community" is and can be,  
and that they most assuredly will not be w/o their problems...   

I'd argue that lists and the like begin to take on a more stable sense of  
"community" (whatever we mean by same) once folks find ways to complement  
same by meeting in the flesh---conferences, gatherings, snmail, what have  
you... Surely some of you folks at Buffalo see one another ftf, hence the  
list works somewhat differently for you than for many of us outside your   
geographical environs... 

In any case, I would argue against simply conceding that older notions of  
"community" must dominate these regions (and some of this slippage can be  
pursued alphabetically), even as I would concur that we would do well, as  
you suggest, to continue to  challenge the (communal?) basis of these our  
'exchanges'... 

Joe  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 13:26:28.57
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: r's m   

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 13:14:45 -0500 (EST)  
From: Loss Glazier <[email-masked]>  
Subject: RE: r's m  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

ben, i guess actually understtod t'was in jest, though something that 
intrigues me is the relation of science fiction to all this and especially 
that science fiction, which once held as its location outer space, has now 
penetrated the "inner reaches," ie the field of computers.  To discover it 
as the marginalia of those bookshelves is interesting, methings.  loss
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 14:05:29.15
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 14:03:01 -0500   
From: Kenneth Sherwood <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Since Loss and I have actually *spoken* of this notion "community", I 
feel compelled here to insert some form of response.  But first, 
must we assume that the quality of this "compulsion" reflects Loss's  
geographic proximity: just outside of shouting distance?    

That the idea of electronic communities poses problems, I will not    
dispute, yet I cannot abide the implied distinction between "virtual" 
and "real" as pivoting at "committment".

While we are not compelled to any poetics@ubvm committment, many here 
writing have demonstrated a significant concentration of effort to    
address fellow participants, an *integrity* of engagement which, in   
fact, may exceed that displayed in the communities cited as authentic.

I will want to STEP HEAVILY on fact of this "community" and membership/    
participation/spectatorship as specifically NOT grounded in entrapment.    
The unmotivated, intense character of exchanges here indeed distinguishes  
it as a poetic community.

I think it's mistaken to ground "community" merely in shared circumstances 
of geography, since the 'situations' of this list's members has and   
continues to propose relationships of an equal or stronger INVESTMENT.

(ps: Loss, the sender of the second community message was Katie Yates)

...dee dee,    
dee dum...
... it's a small world   
after all....  

____________________________________________________________________________    

  Kenneth Sherwood  |"Fragments are
   [email-masked]   |  our wholes" 
  RIF/T (e-poetry@ubvm)  |--Clark Coolidge   
____________________________________________________________________________    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 14:08:02.92
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   The Social Poem  

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 13:10:47 -0500 (EST)  
From: Steve Evans <[email-masked]>    
Subject: The Social Poem 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I want to follow up on my posting "for the record" with a few thoughts
that are perhaps a little more substantial.  In light of the postings 
by Juliana, Ben, Kenneth, and Patrick himself, it would appear that the    
salient moment in my private reply to Patrick is the somewhat flippant
graph of my own value-constellation represented by the claim that "I would 
trade the whole gamut of pronouns...for a few committing descriptives (but 
then I like Reznikoff and O'Hara because I like the social as a field of   
intervention)."  Upon consideration, I think this largely gestural move on 
my part introduces some untenable polarizations (Ward vs. Reznikoff & O'Hara;   
lexical indeterminacy vs. social commitment).  In brief, I throw down a    
gauntlet that I feel fairly certain non of us on this list would consent   
to run.  But if there is something redeemable in this remark, it might be  
in the connection (albeit so enjambed as to be indiscernible) between "value"   
and the "social."   

My thinking in this area owes a debt to Bakhtin/Medvedev's *The Formal Method   
in Literary Scholarship,* and especially to the discussion of "social evalu-    
ation" that is found on pages 119-28. I will excerpt just three claims made
in this book.  First, and mainly as a corrective to personalizing the theme
of value, I would recall their statement that "the notion that evaluation is    
an individual act is widespread in contemporary '_Lebensphilosophy_,' and  
leads to conclusions no less false.  Evaluation is social; it organizes inter-  
course" (126).  The second claim is perhaps more specifically relevant to our   
discussion.  M/B argue that "social evaluation is needed to turn a grammatical  
possibility into a concrete fact of speech reality" (123), basing this on their 
premise that "the utterance is not a physical body and not a physical process"  
[something some of us might wish to contest, certainly], but rather "a
historical event, albeit an infinitesimal one.  Its individuality is that of    
a historical achievement in a definite epoch under definite social conditions"  
(121).  Finally, because it serves to indicate their more general take on  
"value" and its relation to "formal" decisions, there are the following sent-   
ences: "Social evaluation organizes how we see and conceptualize the event 
being communicated, for we only see and conceptualize what interests or    
affects us [or as Stein says: It is very likely that nearly everyone has been   
very nearly certain that something that is interesting is interesting them].    
Social evaluation also organizes the forms by which the event is communicated:  
the arrangement of the material into digressions, returns, repetitions, etc.,   
is permeated with the single logic of social evaluations" (127). 

M/B conceive of "social value" as the medium that pervades, supports, and  
constrains the generation of specific meanings from the field of linguistic
(or grammatical) possibilities.  It is their answer to the question of why 
such a limited number of linguistic combinations result in the production  
of "sense" (and thus to the opposition of narrow vs. broad band that Pat   
termed "reading" v. "sounding").  Zukofksy had, I think, something similar 
going on when he wrote: "_Impossible_ to communicate anything but particulars-- 
historic and contemporary--things, human beings as things their instrument-
alities of capillaries and veins binding up and bound up with events and   
   The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having
a reference.  It is not infinite.  Even the infinite is a term" ("An Objective" 
in *Prepositions* 16).   

My answer to Ben's question of "what is the social poem" would then be: that    
poetic practice which proceeds by "particulars" as they circulate in the   
social    
medium of value.  There are other media, other practices, other ways  
of fashioning the particular.  There are words that wobble out of orbit and
*do* escape having a reference (or at least first order reference, though  
they are usually recuperated at the level of the social through categories 
like "nonsense," "difficult writing," "writing elites do and I don't under 
stand," etc.).  To pick up on Juliana's list of people thinking about this 
question, I think Bruce Andrews calls this "horizoning" in his *Politics of
Poetic Form* essay (Roof 1990).  In short, I recognize the "unframed field 
of approximate signs" (as Patrick so memorably puts it) as a possibility of
writing, but as a possibility that the "social poem" as I understand it re-
fuses to convert into an end in itself. 

I would attribute Patrick's provocative unwillingness to distinguish betw. 
*Testimony* and *Rescue 911* to an unwillingness to conceptualize social   
value (though as Peter Gizzi pointed out to me, the word "rescue" does
resonate in Reznikoff's project, though more in a Benjaminian direction of 
"redemptive critique" than in the frame of network television, which is    
directly where my students took it also when I taught Rez's book last sem- 
ester).  So many decisive levels of mediation are manhandled in this ana-  
logy that I doubt Patrick would "upon reflection" stand by it.  Likewise,  

though, the concept of "reflection" as he uses it fails to distinguish between  
the hyper-presentation of a presence (i.e. contemporary barbarism ala Cops &    
Rescue 911) and Reznikoff's preserving of an absent present through testimony   
(i.e. a project oriented to the redemption of historic and contemporary suf-    
fering, always *particular* in Zuk's sense).  The eerie affectlessness of  
much of *Testimony* couldn't be further from the adrenaline-soaked stimulations 
of exploitation t.v.  Nor is the "exhortation" dogmatic; it is ethical in  
any meaningful sense of that term. 

I apologize for the length of this posting, which exceeds by several screens    
my own e-mail attention span (unless I download, print out, and thereby re-
establish the space of reading as I've previously known it...).  It's just that 
these topics are central to my own thinking, and to the values that direct 
that thinking: poetry and social emancipation.    

From under a lot of snow..., and noticing that everyone's posting today....

Steve
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 14:46:08.00
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 14:45:14 -0500   
From: Pierre Joris <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Maybe the internet community -- & I do think there can be/ maybe even 
is/ such a thing is the kind of community Blanchot speaks of,via, thru
& around Bataille, when he suggests the possibility of a "community of
those who have no community." 

=======================================================================    
Pierre Joris| Je ne connais pas d'autre grace que celle
Dept. of English |d'etre ne. (I know no other grace than the
SUNY Albany |grace of having been born) 
Albany NY 12222  |  
tel&fax:(518) 426 0433|    Isidore Ducasse aka Comte de Lautreamont   
=======================================================================    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 16:32:51.57
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 16:28:54 -0500 (EST)  
From: Loss Glazier <[email-masked]>  
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

First, Ken's objection,  
 I cannot abide the implied distinction between "virtual"   
 and "real" as pivoting at "commitment" 
requires brief clarification, that is that this distinction does not pivot 
on "commitment," but pivots on phsyical proximity, "entrapment," as I 
penned it, also to the objection:  
 I will want to STEP HEAVILY on fact of this "community" and
 membership/participation/spectatorship as specifically NOT 
 grounded in entrapment. 
But in this objection, perhaps is a key.  I think of membership, 
participation, and spectatorship as all being very relevant terms to  
describe what we here engage in.  That is, membership, as if a club   
(again contrasted to the idea of democracy)--also invoking exclusivity,    
participation--a kind of virtual intramurals, (doesn't that mean "outside  
the walls"?), and spectatorship (somehow, Christians being fed to lions    
come to mind, especially with the theme of redemption that was floating    
here some time back, though perhaps it would be more benign to think  
again in terms of intramural sports.)  (Perhaps a relevant metaphor,  
except we might not be "coached"--but think in terms of doing outside 
class time, of doing it voluntarily, of its being a forum to sharpen our   
technical/theoretical skills).
   I understand that my choice of word, entrapment, is somewhat  
adversarial, yet the point is not needless controversy but a resistance    
to the LULL of romanticized notions of communality.  (That is, common 
effort, common ends, shared means.  Not unrelevant thinking perhaps of
communes in the Sixties and whether or not these generated new social 
forms.  Contrasting Sixties communes perhaps, with underground   
newspapers--which invoked no sense of community but of statement,
that is, words, generated with somewhat common goals but always  
typified by divergent approaches to said goals.)  
   How can geography be so important?  We are physical beings, not    
virtual ones.  
   I think of Joe's statement, that lists are made more real
 once folks find ways to complement same by meeting in the flesh--    
 conferences, gatherings, snmail...
and think that this is not untrue, in fact desirable, but casual (vs. 
causal); take for instance how well people get along with their siblings   
when they no longer live at home.  
   Communities also involve a degree of isolation, as a group.   
   Think of prairie communities in the old west, or think of Jonestown,    
Waco, the Manson family.  (Of course these are "religious," again an  
invocation to redemption and the Word.) 
   Regarding Pierre's suggestion,  
 Maybe the internet community -- & I do think there can be/ 
 maybe even is/ such a thing is the kind of community Blanchot   
 speaks of,via, thru & around Bataille, when he suggests the
 possibility of a "community of those who have no community."    
I might suggest the *impossible* nature of such, that is:  (1) if you can  
only be a member of a community once you have no community, then (2)  
you have a community so then (3) you are therefore no longer without  
community then (4) you are thus exiled from the community of which    
you have just become a member.
   Obviously, Ken's and my efforts in RIF/T focus at a common place in
voice or literary idea.  Perhaps there is a difference with a list--so I   
will not blur the discussion by referring to the electronic journal.  
   And obviously (perhaps Blanchot's statement refers more to) the    
*yearning* for community--which may possibly never be attained.  
   This discussion may all hinge on a definition of community.  And we
may choose to define it to suit our criteria.  Even so, what makes this    
different than an intramural sport?  It's not the "integrity of  
engagement" because that exists in other venues which would in no way 
aspire to community status.  What makes us aspire to regard ourselves 
as community?  Ken, you suggest that    
 The unmotivated, intense character of exchanges here indeed
 distinguishes it as a poetic community.
and yet this takes place in political debates, in Sproul Plaza at UC  
Berkeley, (and what's that corner of is it--Hyde Park?--in London) and
there's no aspiration to community.
 I only pose this because I'd like to get a finger on it.  "Poetic    
community" eludes me.  Was this list a community when it was rather   
inactive?  What if everyone unubscribes tomorrow?  Though I too would 
like the comfort of being part of a better whole, I don't exactly see the  
point where these aspirations converge...or if they ever can converge.

From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 21:23:38.60
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   the social poem  

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 21:21:50 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: the social poem 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Steve, I have what I suppose must be an antinomian streak that   
forces me, often against my will, to take issue with positions   
that in fact attract me a great deal.  Something of the sort
occurs now, reading your eminently useful contribution to the    
discussion of the social poem.  Take issue with is too strong--to
question, and so, perhaps, modify. 

What you say about value seems both right and necessary.  The    
implications with regard to our discussion are significant.  That
evaluation is a social form, an activity whose meaning and whose 
value, constituting an "historical event," is *objective* (in a  
sense that clarifies what Zukofsky and Reznikoff had in common as
"objectivists," i.e., more than some sentimental attachment to   
Pound's dictum "direct treatment of the thing"), that the   
subjective is therefore no less "objective" than those forms of  
evaluation which *call* themselves objective (i.e., that    
subjectivity no less than objectivity has a social content and a 
political form), that the individual is derived from the social  
and not the other way around--these are all helpful correctives  
to the "untenable polarizations" (as you put it) that at every   
turn threaten to undermine discussions of poetry, to turn   
discussion into an argument between schools.  Not that there
aren't differences between Ward and Reznikoff--of course there   
are--but that the differences we have been attempting to identify
as essential *between* their projects occur first of all *within*
them.

To take one example:  if "social value" is "the medium that 
pervades, supports, and constrains the generation of specific    
meanings from the field of linguistic (or grammatical) 
possibilities," then the "social value" of Reznikoff's 
*Testimony* will be most directly evident in those places where  
his actions are ostensibly *individual*--his choices, his   
juxtapositions, the ways he alters the original material.  The   
"social value" of the material itself, which we might naively    
assume to be an unmediated glimpse at the United States, is in   
fact measurable only by way of a regression to the archimedean   
point of individuality where the social first allows itself to be
glimpsed.  To take the social content of the poem as an
*un*mediated view of the social field out of which the poem is   
lifted would be to forget that the social *is* mediation.  (And  
in this forgetting the "eerie affectlessness of much of
*Testimony*" begins to be felt.)  The poem thus flips the   
relation we might expect to find between the social and the 
individual:  "outside" the poem, the individual is a construct of
the social; "inside," the social is a construct of the 
individual.  This is not to insist, however, on a dichotomy 
between inside and outside--or rather, it's to insist that the   
dichotomy occurs equally on both sides of the mythical boundary  
that the dichotomy is said to put into effect.  NOT that *Imaginary   
Movie* works from within while *Testimony* works from without, but    
that in each work a dynamic is established between inner and outer,   
subjective and objective, social and personal.  The singularity  
of the poem rests precisely here, in the character of the dynamic
that governs the poem's meaning.   

Or if I might say that again, a little more simply, the
distinction between individual and social *has* to occur *within*
the poem, in order for the poem to be intelligible according to  
*either* category.  That, in any case, is the logic of 
Bakhtin/Medvedev's formula, which conceives of individuality as  
an historical achievement, a social form.    

And it's in light of this analysis that I feel drawn to question 
your definition of the social poem.  Much as I share the values  
that your definition privileges--"poetic practice which proceeds 
by `particulars' as they circulate in the social medium of  
value"--I wonder that the emphasis on "particulars" doesn't 
attempt to establish yet another dichotomy between poems that    
only makes sense within them, here between the particular and the
general.  You refer, of course, to "other media, other practices,
other ways of fashioning the particular" (but since these would  
have to be circulations in a "medium of value" other than the    
social, I wonder what they can be), and you refer also to poetic 
practices "that wobble out of orbit and *do* escape having a
reference" (and you qualify this, but again I wonder what sort of
work you are referring to--and I wonder also at the equation of  
particularity with reference).  Nevertheless, I think the   
upholding of particularity as opposed to generality--or to be    
more accurate, a *proceeding* by particularity instead of   
generality--only makes sense if "as opposed to" is understood    
as occurring *IN* the poem.  And if that's the case, then the    
generality is as essential as the particularity.  And  
isn't that in fact the case in *every* poem?  For surely there   
are no purely particularist or purely generalizing poetries...   

This isn't simply a matter of logics and abstract 
argumentation.  *Something* occurs in Reznikoff that seems to    
both of us illuminating about poetry in general and the social   
poem in particular.  For both of us, the specificity of
Reznikoff's content and the redemptive quality of his formal
appropriations of that content are not only striking but    
exemplary.  I would want to say, however, that too great an 
emphasis on the historical moment *Testimony* enshrines and on   
the apparent lack of mediation in the poem's presentation of this
moment blinds us to the insistent leveling of particularity that 
also occurs, and the shrewd, often polemical presence of the author   
in the ways this leveling is interrupted.  It's interesting that 
my students last week noted first of all--somewhat complainingly--    
the repetitiousness of the book, the endless permutations of
violence and neglect was "predictable," they said.  We spent a lot    
of time talking about courts and law and what testimony is in    
*that* context, and after a while they grasped that not all 
testimony is true.  They began to notice, also, Reznikoff's 
sarcasm, and the fact that not all meets the eye in these stories.    
Of course this only annoys them further since if there's anything
they hate more than the depressing it's the subtle--*Testimony*  
being both.  All of which is to say that the particularity has   
meaning above all because of the clarity with which Reznikoff    
organizes it conceptually.    

I could say more about *Testimony* in this regard, but the  
message is long enough.  A quote then from Charles Bernstein's   
*Sulfur* essay:

I've been told that Reznikoff disliked obscurity and   
would certainly not have wanted his work to be    
characterized as obscure.  Yet Reznikoff, from the
beginning, seemed to expect that obscurity was the
likely outcome for his poetic work and seemed to accept
that with remarkable equanimity.  Perhaps he understood
the nature, the social structure, of obscurity better  
than his contemporaries.  Neglect, disregard--the 
socially obscure, the forgotten and repressed, the
overlooked--this was his subject.  
Hiding in plain sight you may never be found:  if 
sight is not to "See by but to look at," not to use but
behold.   

I like that.   

Ben F.    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 12-FEB-1
994 22:48:46.03
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   marginalia  

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 22:48:11 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: marginalia 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

loss, it finally sunk in.  i hadn't quite grasped the double meaning of    
marginalia, illustrated rather nicely by the shelves in gasche's office:   
myself meant the comments scribbled in the margins of a book (sheltered at 
home), you meant the marginal items in the library (consigned to the  
office).  ah, why am i so slow? (as pere ubu once sang...)  
ben  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 13-FEB-1
994 02:51:27.34
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 01:20:41 -0600   
From: Mn Ctr for Book Arts <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Loss, I would agree that a list-serve, or any other kind of group
connected by its own whim to sit at a terminnal as well as the current
technology (which is never current) is not a  "community" in the sense of  
a Blue Ridge  Mountain or north Central Wisconsin Amish or many other 
non-mobile communities, I wonder why you think that the definittion  of    
"community" should not grow to encompass current  groupings. I'm not  
against calling  it something else, but I also don't really see the need   
for a new coinage & am sometimes distrustful of such.  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 13-FEB-1
994 10:13:33.24
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 10:00:32 -0500 (EST)  
From: Jed <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Does "community" involve companionship? Or may it simply consist of collective  
anonymity? In the strictly civic sense of vernacular usage, community means
little more than the aggregate of people and activities that bring them momenta 
rily together in public spaces--little league ball, traffic snarls,  school
board bonds--which amounts to a collective display of the heaping potential. A  
primary reason why the net increasingly seems a site for community--or at least 
why most discussions on the net erupt into these speculations about community-- 
is because it enacts *both* the aleatory potential of the casual encounter and  
the motivational tensegrity of contact: "Contact," as I recall, was the little  
mag that William Carlos Williams edited, was't it?
  --Jed Rasula 
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 13-FEB-1
994 21:53:00.55
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   Martin Spinelli's reply framed in Error   

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 21:51:14 -0500   
From: Charles Bernstein <[email-masked]>   
Subject: Martin Spinelli's reply framed in Error  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

From:   IN%"[email-masked]"    
Subj:   POETICS: error report from UBVMS

Return-path: <@NOPLACE.gg.unattainable (Ver.333)  
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Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 17:59:33 -0500   
From: BITNET list server at UBVM <[email-masked]> (1.8a)
Subject: POETICS: error report from UBVMS    

The enclosed mail file, found in the POETICS reader and shown under the spoolid 
8043  in the  console log,  has been  identified as  a possible  delivery error 
notice  for  the following  reason:  "Sender:",  "From:" or  "Reply-To:"  field 
pointing to the list has been found in mail body. 

------------------------ Message in error (141 lines) ------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 17:58:38 -0500 (EST)  
From: [email-masked]   
Subject: Re: "Community" 
To: [email-masked]  

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  
Loss,

To take Ken's objection one step further:    
I can't abide by the distinction between the "virtual" and  
the "real" at all.  

"Being there" has never been a criterion for the real. 
Snmail, telephone conversations, chance meetings in the
stairwell at Lockwood are certainly not virtual experiences.
They all have, in some form or another a "real" material    
presence -- Yes, they are not transparent like anything dependent on the   
casual agreements of language, they are mediated, but they  
are no less real.   

We are all *really* here with our  
*real* eyes reading from our *real* monitors at our *real*  
keyboards banging away at the keys (perhaps with, as Katie  
suggests, intensity, sensitivity, and seriousness).    
Whether this is
 "munity" 
   COM mitment 
  munication   

doesn't really hold my interest.  What I am trying to get   
at, what I tried to suggest in my first post, was that the  
unreflexive use of the word "virtual" ("not quite as good   
as", pejorative less or unequal, or even suggesting    
the existence of an "Originary") to describe what we're
doing has some *real* dangers.

"Virtual" carries with it the kind of implicit indictment   
that resonates in the voices of our "being-there" mates and 
companions:    
   "How much time can you spend doing 'that'?"    
   "You're not done with the phone yet?!?"   

Quotes"""" are always cold    
and only make me more hungry  

--martin  
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

{at this point in his original post Martin repeats Loss's previous    
message; I have deleted this. --The List Owner}   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 13-FEB-1
994 22:20:39.85
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 22:19:10 -0500   
From: Pierre Joris <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Tom & Pierre's stuff on community: 

Here a communal post, collaged from a couple e-mail exchanges between 
Tom Mandel & Pierre Joris. Following Pierre's posting of the Blanchot 
quote, Tom e-mailed him  both to get back in touch after a few  years & to 
continue the exchange on community. Pierre answered, Tom too & they   
culled from the private e-mail what they thought could be   
usefully shared with the net community on the subject of community.   

"Community! -- Well, the first para of your e-mail shld/cld 
have been posted to the POETICS List, while the 2nd was clearly to me 
& so you e-mailed the whole to me. Which makes for at least 2    
community tiers on the net: those who don't know each other otherwise 
than through the discussion threads, & those who have known each other
face to face. Or at least some such division exists to begin with,    
thoug it may alter. In that sense the net-community is again like many
other communities, composed of different intensities,different   
vectors. All this seems rather banal... Mut maybe we should post the  
non-personalized parts of these 2 email messages to the POETICS list? 
Or speak there to this tiered affair?"  

"... a community also of those not known to each other, of the   
unknown; and, it is interesting to watch a range of behaviors develop 
among people unbounded by outcomes of close living. On the one hand a 
kind of intimacy and relaxation, on the other... frivolousness? would that 
be the right word? At the very place in an expression where it most   
ought to matter what one is saying, there seems to rise a "not-mattering"  
often, so often, rendering discourse subtractive rather than additive.
Perhaps "the gift" is after all basic to communities and not present  
in this one. It's hard to take anything away from these postings,
a thing useful I mean."  

"But perhaps we should go ahead, and include my   
remarks in this paragraph and just the (kind of obvious) further 
remark that "community" with its "commonality" and its "unity"   
in it only *has to* mean people unified by something they have in
common, and in common are usually both social thematics and a    
dwelling place. These two are usually also two sides of the same 
coin (i.e. a town spread around a church). In the case of the    
net, the two are moved apart: the medium of communication is not 
the reason we are in communication.

   Most communities also involve a kind of discipline as to 
the outcomes of anyone's contributions. It matters in immediate  
ways what you say in a real-world community, because of the 
multiple intersecting relations one has with everybody. If you   
argue with the butcher in church, you may not get the best cut   
of meat across the next-time counter, right? And more serious    
versions of this. The net community, with its abstraction of
the context/contact layer, makes for a simpler and more unidimensinal 
community, and also means that there's less at stake in what
anyone says; this leads to a sense of experimentalism wch is
great, and it also leads to pushing "d" for delete very very
often, and that takes care of that. Again, without much
consequence. Perhaps, the net is more like Goethe's term: elective    
affinities. A version of acquaintanceship and even (argh)   
professionalism. Is the poetics forum more like a convention
than a community. That's it! It's a virtual convention!"    

=======================================================================    
Pierre Joris| Je ne connais pas d'autre grace que celle
Dept. of English |d'etre ne. (I know no other grace than the
SUNY Albany |grace of having been born) 
Albany NY 12222  |  
tel&fax:(518) 426 0433|    Isidore Ducasse aka Comte de Lautreamont   
=======================================================================    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 13-FEB-1
994 23:23:16.91
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   The Wobbly Social Poem

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 23:20:50 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: The Wobbly Social Poem    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I continue this personal/community fold (develped further by Steve's  
unmasking of the "unnamed interlocutor") with yet another public/private   
posting. This is an excerpt of one I sent to Ben in response to his "re:   
"911" on Feb 10.    

Ben  

I'm *becoming* interested in the difference between the two examinations   
and not so much interested in the *equivalence* (A safeguard indeed, but it
would be a poor one under any thoughtful look-see!) My surface casting, the
superficiality, is due to my beginning, that I ain't done much thinking    
about the Rez/Ward issue as I've set it up. You bring up a *vital*    
situation in talking of intelligence, I prefer reconnaissance. When it
comes to reference under this kind of mission, I need some brooding -- not 
so much what kind of thoughts I spy, but what ideas hatch.  
I'll sit on this one a coupla days, 'll have another look at Charles's
piece and we'll see what comes up....   

Snowing like a dandruff commercial --   

Pat  

The exposure of a personal/public here speaks on at least a coupla fronts. 
One is as a formal gesture toward "the other" conversation on "community." 
Another, and the one I'll attend directly to, is a notion of frame, or
field. My desire, as Steve suggests, not to "conceptualize a notion of
social value" is so bound in my appreciation of unframed field of
aproximate signs that some people may see this as a destablization of 
particulars. That this destabilization could in turn lead to the demise of 
a critique, even my own sense (or lack thereof) of contiguity, and could   
thereby promote an ugly conjunction of "911" and *Testimony*. In the terms 
of the political question arises: How can a critical theory lack a    
*particular* ideological framework and is it this a lack of particularity  
that conjoins such things? Although the first part of the question is 
somehow more interesting it is the second part that I think has more  
relevance in terms of the "social poem." (For some reason this idea, the   
"social poem," seems anemic, like generic drug; something's hiding in 
there.)   

On the surface of things, like words, I "wobble out of orbit," often as a  
matter of course. In my wobble the terms of argument become indiscrete;    
however, this is not to say that this wobbling undermines my reference, nor
does this wobble undermine a word's reference.  Here lies the kicker. At   
what point does this wobble become an element of theory distracted from the
social discourse (a point brought up in Steve's initial personal, now 
public post)? And at what point is this wobble a "social evaluation." My   
wobble is social, not theoretical. Its point of arrival is quite close to  
its point of departure. It would appear that this is an important point,   
one that in my book is an edge of confluence which resists  
conceptualization, but one which is constantly demanding it.

Here's one of the reasons I included that "private" post. What I've just   
begun to try to uncover are the similarities in the expedient forms in
*Imaginary Movie* and *Testimony*. What are the motives, how are texts,    
words motivated inspite and because of their wobble. *Testimony* veils a   
culture just out of reach both temporally (the turn of the century) and,   
spatially through the constantly mis-placed modifier ("The *United*   
States"). This veil positions the reader, creates a point of reference from
which judgements are made and then, through "subsequent" portraits, those  
judgements are stressed in to a re-making. The coordinate structure of
*Testimony* forces a de-limitation of reference points while never    
relieving the reader of a concise condition. This reinforced delimitation  
is in itself often a ethical and moral co-ordinate structure which in many 
ways could be likened to a "structure" of *Imaginary Movie*. However, the  
temporal shift that the reader must engage in is a relentless positioning. 
This situation, though the terms of its economic and social critique are   
current, becomes fused with the nostalgic. In other words, because of "its"
reflective composition *Testimony* is a compromised dis-position. Just how 
*Testimony* resists falling apart in the echo of its own distance, or just 
how in its portrait is not of his grandfather, or of our grandparents, but 
stays here, now, is a matter of technique, economics and morality. It is   
also a matter of its instability.  In that instability its reference is    
clear.    

For Reznikof, the wobble is stated in action, the unsaid, a testament of   
the given in the *form* of our activity. That for Ward this unsaid is in   
the abridgement of meaning, doesn't alter this engagement so much as it    
alters the textual form it takes. What is stated in both texts differs
dramatically from what is experienced in each text. The linguistic wobble  
in Ward is radically different from the conceptual wobble evident in Rez., 
but its object remains the same, its reference is clear. If we are to rely 
upon the term, or the area of definition as the condition of the 
"revolutionary word," a concept which for me remains highly suspect, we    
still have to engage those areas of ideology and the social which defy
boundary in order to discover the term. 

This doesn't answer anything, but continues to set up a range of problems  
for further rumination   

Thanks Steve for the word "wobble." I kinda caught it for a ride here.

Pat  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 14-FEB-1
994 10:27:54.52
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: Martin Spinelli's reply framed in Error    

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 10:13:05 -0500   
From: Katie Yates <[email-masked]>   
Subject: RE: Martin Spinelli's reply framed in Error   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

This is from "Tristan and Isolde" from the third section "The Community    
of Lovers" of Joris' translation of Blanchot's "The Unavowable Community"  
in which Blanchot is responding to a recit, "La Maladie de La Mort" written
by Marguerite Duras (1982):   

   No, end, then, to a recit that also says in its
   own way:  no more recit, and yet an end, perhaps    
   a remission, perhaps a final condemnation.  For
   it so happens that one day the young woman is no    
   longer there.  A disappearance that cannot surprise 
   as it is but the exhaustion of an appearance that   
   gave itself only in sleep.  She is no longer there, 
   but so discreetly, so absolutely, that her absence  
   suppresses her absence, so that to look for her is  
   pointless, just as it would be impossible to rec-   
   ognize her and join her, be it only in thought that 
   she has existed only through the imagination, cannot
   interrupt the solitude where the testamentary word  
   is murmured endlessly:  the malady of death.  And   
   here are the last words (are they the last?):  
   "Soon you give up, don't look for her anymore, 
   either in the town or at night or in the daytime:   
   Even so you have managed to live that love in the   
   only way possible for you.  Losing it before it
   happened."  

Martin,   
   This is my way of dealing further with your concerns surrounding   
qua real  
qua virtual    
   How?   
1.  To go back into Blanchot and find some more inferences, illustrations  
    of untransmittable transmissions, unintentional community, ....   

2.  I happily find the ci-dessus & want to think (or is this talking) 
    about what is happening (a transmission via Lyotard's The Differend    
    in the virtual or real relationships between Duras, Blanchot & Joris.  

3.  For example, we are reading Joris' translation of Blanchot's reading   
    of Duras -ok- who are we reading?  I ask this within the confines 
    of formal discourse:  Literary Criticism or Literary Theory because    
    they are priviliged in this electronic {poetics} dialogue which does   
    not necessarily need to abide by the same strictures.  Yet, for the    
    most part it does.  This is an example then of how limited we are 
    in our range of how to talk about writing or write about talking  
    (replace "write" or "talk" in the above clause with "read").  It  
    may be interesting to figure out to what extent writing on email  
    is talking and to what extent it is writing...attention-wise...   

4.  My reading of the above from The Unavowable Community is:    
   +Real concern is rare & in the stairwell it is also rare 
& on stage (in relationship, in conference...)    
no surprise.   

 So the effect of commitment in one's reply  
 is notable in the absence of that integrity 

5.  The illusions of presence are magnified in electronic media but the    
    magnification intensifies the speed with which we can reply(retort)    
    as well as the frame within which we can respond.  It is more possible 
    then ....  

 "Losing it before it happened."   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 14-FEB-1
994 13:18:21.86
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: Martin Spinelli's reply framed in Error    

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 13:14:53 -0500   
From: Tom Mandel <[email-masked]> 
Subject: RE: Martin Spinelli's reply framed in Error   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Losing it before it happened... this is an experience free of conversion   
   and which "all" have shared.    
How does the testamentary word transmit when what is shared (of which 
   this testament wd be witness) is virtual? Even the phonemes of
   testamentary rch w/ a visceral. 
"...has existed only through the imagination...," which rubric finds no    
   fit w/ these media. A network is, specifically, a set of 
   mechnisms for conversion and reconversion, and it presumes    
   (i.e. offers no way to question) and ignores (i.e. does not   
   "process" in any way) all issues of status in what it finds   
   to pick up and move. I.e. "the absence of that integrity."    
Does reply give an effect of commitment? or commitment show its effect
   in a reply. I.e. does commitment come from the reply or from  
   the social engagement and its bindings? These, which precede  
   both question (concern) and reply, precisely are at question  
   on a network; the intimate laxity. All the stones seem lead   
   across some stream but never to another side than this.  

  **********************  T O M  M A N D E L  **********************  
  2927 Tilden St. NW  *  Washington DC 20008  *  Voice: 202-362-1679  
  [email-masked]  FAX: 202-364-5349  
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From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 14-FEB-1
994 16:20:59.54
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: Martin Spinelli's reply framed in Error    

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 14:29:46 -0500 (EST)  
From: Jed Rasula <[email-masked]>  
Subject: RE: Martin Spinelli's reply framed in Error   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Reading Tom Mandel, I get to the thought:    

Reply is an *affect* of commitment.

The stones always do lead to "this" side; but the word is (as the
 place is) a deictic, a shifter; it locates with reference  
 to the "speaker"--or the keypad pusher.

Would the net (does it?) seem less metaphysically perplexing to those 
who grew up in rural areas and got used to telephones with party lines? (Rural  
electrification programs being what they were in the 30s, the USSR got Stalin & 
the farmbelt got party lines...)   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 16-FEB-1
994 05:09:44.13
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   the social poem: recitative

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 01:58:55 -0500 (EST)  
From: Steve Evans <[email-masked]>    
Subject: the social poem: recitative    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

"A reading that is watched over" (as Ben puts it) seems not a bad defin-   
ition of this list.  It certainly revalues the participation of those, clearly  
the majority of subscribers, whose "presence" is otherwise referred in a more   
ominous direction by the term "lurking."  But then, who's to say angels/intel-  
ligences (at least the sort whom this list is likely to attract) don't *lurk*?  
Rilke's did... 

Culling over the thread, testing my sense of what has been said to date, I 
find myself thinking of Juliana's comment that "the poem is the social poem."   
By which Juliana might mean politely to say that "social" doesn't really   
advance our thinking beyond the point "poem" has already brought it to...  

In which case, shifting the question to "what is testimony or struggle or  
opposition" seems a more generative option than the one I've noticed my    
own thoughts to be drifting into: i.e. placing an article before an adjective   
(the social) and counting the resulting abstraction as a cognitive gain.   
Truth is, everything that lead me to introduce the term in my note to Patrick   
is lost once that abstraction has occurred.  

The Jameson of *Marxism and Form* has an interesting take on why this 
swivel (more determined than a wobble) between concretion/abstraction might
haunt our mediations on society.  He notes that   "society is clearly not  
some empirical object which we can meet and study directly in our own ex-  
perience: in this sense the neo-positivist criticism, which considers the  
idea of society an inadmissible abstract construct or a mere methodological
hypothesis with no other kind of real existence, is justified.  At the same
time society--precisely in the form of such an impossible,suprapersonal ab-
straction--is present in the form of an ultimate constraint upon every moment   
of our waking lives [he's clearly an optimist vis-a-vis the unconscious!]: 
absent, invisible, even untenable, it is at the same time the most concrete
of all the realities we have to face.... (57).    

That doesn't seem a bad way of parsing the problem "society" poses for thought  
and linking it to the one it poses for (everyday) practice. 

As for poetic practice, I will tempt the anti-Adornian in Juliana only
slightly by rewriting an admirable phrase from *Minima Moralia*: "you 
must have tradition in you to hate it properly."  In the context of this   
discussion, I would say: the poem must have society in it to hate it  
properly.  Against one variant of the "necessity for rewriting the language"    
argument Juliana mentioned, I would add: society is neither reducible to,  
nor even "structured like" a language....  One could, hypothetically, "hate"    
the structures of signification, and one could (though not without paradoxes)   
even practice that hatred or opposition in one's writing, but that would   
not be, in my definition, necessarily the same thing as "hating society prop-   
erly."    

But to get that word, "hate," to have the inflection I want, I'll need a   
couple of stanzas from O'Hara:

Poem 

Hate is only one of many responses 
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there  

think of filth, is it really awesome    
neither is hate
don't be shy of unkindness, either 
it's cleansing and allows you to be direct   
like an arrow that feels something 

out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe...   
    *
The fact is that oppositional practices can stay clear of neither hate
nor violence: that Reznikoff's *Testimony* admits and re-cites (while 
refusing to turn into arias) scene after scene of hate and violation releases   
us into a comportment beyond fear and amazement, beyond the "awe" that O'Hara   
speaks of.  *Testimony* refers us not to the unmediated traumatic occurrence,   
but to the comportment that might make such occurrences impossible: "why be
afraid of hate, it is only there"--why be afraid of hate, in other words, when  
the absence of our ability to respond to it is what truly is fearful? 

But Benjamin said it better in 1939:    

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in 
which we live is not the exception but the rule.  We must attain to a con- 
ception of history that is in keeping with this insight.  Then we shall    
clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emerg-  
ency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.  
One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its    
opponents treat it as a historical norm.  The current amazement that the   
things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century   
is _not_ philosophical.  This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--
unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it 
is untenable ("Theses on the Philosophy of History").  

This opens the wider question of what view of history would be tenable, and
what relationship Reznikoff bears to the history he writes and the history 
he, albeit infinitesimally, and from within the social-structure of obscurity,  
helped to make.

I sure could use some help....

Steve
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 16-FEB-1
994 09:34:07.87
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   hate   

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 09:32:33 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: hate  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Just a quick response to Steve's post before going off to teach.  The 
structure and value of "hate" in *Testimony* is of course utterly different
than in O'Hara's work.  The epigraph to the first volume, which reveals    
quite a bit of Reznikoff's method in this book, comes noteworthily from the
New Testament: 

 Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and    
clamour, and railing, be put away from you, with  
   all malice. 
*Ephesians* IV, 31  

In a book that both depicts and arouses all these feelings we are called   
upon to put them aside--*this* is justice, for Reznikoff.  Perhaps, like   
Benjamin, he would say that our amazement at these stories, or at their    
accumulation, is not philosophical (or:  judicious).  Perhaps he would be  
curious about our amazement.  Perhaps he would share it.    

Amazement is just one of many responses...   

Thanks for the thoughtful reprisal of how we've gotten here, Steve.   

Ben F.    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 16-FEB-1
994 12:14:50.21
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: The Wobbly Social Poem 

Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 18:27:48 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: The Wobbly Social Poem
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

I want to reserve my right, as they say, to say something at a later date  
about the "intelligence" that reading calls upon, or substantiates.  I've  
mentioned to Patrick already that for me the word alludes to those angelic 
orders which Henry Corbin says Islamic mysticism terms "intelligences."    
I've been reading Corbin nibblingly as a way of finding a new path into    
Olson's poetry, which many of us here in Buffalo are now reading for the   
Creeley seminar.  I want to say that there's an angel of reading, and most 
of what is sort of stupidly accounted for as "self-reflection" really makes
more sense when understood as a reading that is watched over.  I want also 
to say that it's impossible for me to think about the so-called "social"   
poem without reference to its opposite.  Which would be, to my mind, not   
the *anti*social poem (the antisocial is no less social than the law  
abiding), but the poem concerned with what's trans-social, trans-historical,    
mystical, ontological.  And I think this opposition is again one that only 
makes sense *within* a poet's work, is not a means of categorizing the
differences *between* poets.  Reznikoff is an easy example of this--though 
not perhaps in *Testimony*--since in Judaism the trans-historical uses the 
historical as its referent, and Reznikoff's ideas and imagery in large part
derives from Judaic sources.  (See, for instance, "Jerusalem the Golden.") 
But Olson too is a wonderful example of the social poem giving way to its  
opposite, only to be rediscovered in the most improbable manifestations.   

OK.  I save all that for later--or rather, I offer it as a possible direction.  
And in the meantime I wonder just what "wobble" means.  Patrick? 

> On the surface of things, like words, I "wobble out of orbit," often as a
> matter of course. In my wobble the terms of argument become indiscrete;  
> however, this is not to say that this wobbling undermines my reference, nor   
> does this wobble undermine a word's reference.  

A habit of communication.  But this habit would seem to be "revolving" toward   
an articulation that is itself revolution.  That is, the undecidability of 
your immediate meaning demonstrates a stance that is ultimately opposed    
to the immediacy of understanding which communication *seems* to depend on.

   [...] My    
> wobble is social, not theoretical. Its point of arrival is quite close to
> its point of departure. It would appear that this is an important point, 
> one that in my book is an edge of confluence which resists
> conceptualization, but one which is constantly demanding it.   

If I'm right then I would have to say your wobble is social and yet in
a wholly theoretical sense--theory enacted as a social relation.  Moreover,
your attempts to resist not only demand conceptualization, they can be
intelligible only to the extent that we (your interlocutors) *do*
conceptualize them. 

Is this how poetry operates?  That what poems "do" is intelligible only    
insofar as we accept this doing as a "saying."  That what poems "say" makes
invisible the fact that this saying is also a "doing."  Here we return to  
Charles Bernstein's comment on Reznikoff about hiding in plain sight. 
There's a Blaser poem too that comes to mind:

THE TRUTH IS LAUGHTER    

Locked out, and at the same time locked 
in the look-out   what perfect rose could    
I say or write   the Nietzschean brilliance, 
who knew that *the best writers understand   
form as what others consider content*   

We're probably not too far either from the old "How does a poem mean?" line
that I got in high school.  But I too would like to write or say the  
perfect rose.  And why has wobbling got to be so dramatic?  What if this   
very sentence, held out to you as simply as a plucked flower, turns   
methodically on an axis, round some sun of meaning toward its point of
origin?   

Ben F.    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 16-FEB-1
994 15:16:16.95
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: The Wobbly Social Poem 

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 14:32:29 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: The Wobbly Social Poem
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Though "wobble" has a depth which commands more attention (something I'll  
give when I have a little more time), now I'll just give a quick response  
to Ben's post before I too go off to class.  

In response to your plucking of Glaser's rose, I turned to Zukofsky's *80  
Flowers*. 

   "X"    

   Of thousands grown climb head-on-head
   A "X" unknown stand indued 
   no glue kiss'd peon knee   
   "freesia's" iris grass-tropical tru scourge    
   bee earthflight magnetic north 4-native   
   dial-canter excellence scent one-thousandth-in 
   one-night "lady's-eardrops-fuschia" seaborne northeast unnailed    
   papyrus-bath-nut "trailing arbutus fringed-gentian hydrangea" 

As we know, Zukofsky could not only name whatever plant he saw, and could  
follow that name through the vague maze of usage back thousands of years,  
but could truly course a wobble of his own making. He can also serve to    
throw off our compass and perhaps can help us to locate that berm we seek. 

As to round which sun this flower methodically turns I can only hazard...  

Patrick   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 16-FEB-1
994 17:33:23.83
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 11:42:43 -0500   
From: James Sherry <[email-masked]>  
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

The idea of virtual community seems to be more complex than location. One  
interesting though oversold index of its uses is in Howard Rheingold's
*Virtual Communities* or some such title. Rheingold is one of the leading  
journalists of the virtual reality group.    

Along with the word community is the word communication, a footnote   
to our poetry, but another comm word. Having read our collective 
communications for a few weeks I wonder if there might be a 
recognition of epistolary form for computer terminals that will add   
to the commutativity of our community.  

The notes in short paragraphs are a lot easier to read than the huge  
blocks of undifferentiated prose that remind me of someone trying to  
prove the opacity argument of the 1970s. And the messages that use the
screen as a field communicate a lot more meaning than their lexicons. 

The potential speed of responses on email can change what we say. The 
accuracy of messages also plaz w/ th' erasability of the matter and its    
speeeeeed. Layout composition play screen size spelling spin.    

 On Sat, 12 Feb
1994, Loss Glazier wrote:

> The idea of a listserv as constituting "community" poses problems.  First,    
> in that a listserv is "virtual," i.e., we are not really "there."  In    
> this regard, a community is almost always defined by location.  Secondly,
> most definitions of community imply a sense of commitment--to take this  
> further, I would say entrapment, ie, if you think of a Blue Ridge mountain    
> community, most people don't have the mobility or means to move. "There" 
> is fixed; its participants are fixed--for better or worse.  An electronic
> list implies no commitment whatsoever: any person can unplug at any time;
> the largest percentage of any list does not participate but stands in the
> shadows examining the record of the conversation.  To say that we have   
> in common taking each writer's writing seriously is a kind thought.  I   
> hope it's true--but is no ground to call this endeavor a "community."    
> (Your name, the name of the sender of the second "community" message,    
> is even unknown / undecipherable.) The idea of an electronic democracy   
> is probably the least tenable of these ideas, just about as true as 
> an other so-called "democracy" ie, a place where people who have    
> power are equal does not argue for equality for all people.    
> So, what then, would we call this?    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 17-FEB-1
994 13:44:31.70
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   from Arkadii Dragomoschenko

Date: Thu, 17 Feb 1994 12:07:31 -0500   
From: Charles Bernstein <[email-masked]>   
Subject: from Arkadii Dragomoschenko    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

--Boundary (ID 6bR7XQfMFfF8oDJV788cNA)  
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII   

[Arkadii Dragomoschenko sent me this letter on the occcasion
of his dropping out of the Poetics listserv.  He gave me    
permission to send it on.  Arkadii live in St. Petersberg.] 

Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 11:44:15 +0300   
From: "Arkadii T. Dragomoshchenko" <[email-masked]>

Thank you, Charles, I think I will try to be in touch with  
Joel and time to time, I hope, he will make me know what    
happens there, in an electronic space of talking... To be   
sure, the "problem" of community (if there exists such 
problem) is rather interesting for new and new generations. 
Yet, to my mind this very process of    
configration/reconfiguration or - in other words -
articulation of indifferent relations in a certain pattern of    
community is like "chemical" process taking its course in our    
own body. The main thing, as it seems to me, lies in mutual 
disposition of two perspectives: "we" in my "I" and at the  
same time - "I" in this "we". The dynamic of their
intersections produces the sytax of community, this it to   
say, its ideology. Meanwhile I think that the latent interest    
in such question sounds as possibility of writer to form    
his/her own reader, audience or at last - public, i. e - the
*presence* of his/her work which have constitute his/her    
presence in turn... Anyway, with my best - Arkadii.    

--Boundary (ID 6bR7XQfMFfF8oDJV788cNA)--
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 17-FEB-1
994 21:20:36.96
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: from Arkadii Dragomoschenko 

Date: Thu, 17 Feb 1994 19:33:42 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: from Arkadii Dragomoschenko
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

>  [...] The main thing, as it seems to me, lies in mutual  
> disposition of two perspectives: "we" in my "I" and at the
> same time - "I" in this "we". The dynamic of their   
> intersections produces the sytax of community, this it to 
> say, its ideology. [...]    

huh? 
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 18-FEB-1
994 10:40:06.46
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: What does "wobble" mean?    

Date: Fri, 18 Feb 1994 10:38:48 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: What does "wobble" mean?   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I'd like to respond to Ben's question "just what does "wobble" mean" by    
trying to negotiate my way through several essays I've recently been  
reading.  

Initially wobble was brought up by Steve in "There are words that wobble   
out of orbit and *do* escape having a reference." The question became for  
me - how does it happen that a word wobbles out of orbit and what "social  
evaluation" does it need to maintain some form of revolution. However, to  
approach this quite particular terrain without scaring off the meaning
hiding there I think instead of going at the wobble through an examination 
of reference, it may be better to examin experience.   

This week I've been looking at several texts, including Benjamin's "Some   
Motifs in Baudelaire" in an effort to get to some measure of experience.   
Something fell into place when reading and I was helped into the idea that 
wobble is the product of shock, I suppose a kind of violence, even a  
catastrophe. Not to be distracted by the cosmological metaphor, I stayed   
close to Benjamin's examination of Baudelaire's city. Taking a cue from    
Silliman's examination of the same essay, I looked for Benjamin's proposal 
that shock was not merely caused by something physical, something present, 
but by something quite absent as well. "The masses had become so much a    
part of Baudelair that it is rare to find a description of them in his
works." But, how does something not textually evident insist, that is,
"stand in" for that which is textually evident? And what about this   
insistence of absence is a shock?  

Benjamin's discusion of the past, of tradition, (which is backgrounded much
in the way the city is "backgrounded" in Baudelaire) goes hand in hand with
his idea of "Erfahrung." Experience, for Benjamin, fends off shock and
allows us a sense of place and relative position, comportment. "The shock  
experience which the passer-by has in the crowd" is more the jostling of   
what is lost in the social than it is a jostling of what is there. "The    
jolt in the movement of a machine is like the so-called "coup" in a game of
chance...Since each operation at the machine is just as screened off from  
the preceeding operation as a "coup" in a game of chance is from the one   
preceeding it...[t]he work of both is equally devoid of substance." With   
each "throw," each turn of the worker to the piece, experience is lost,    
time is lost, the past is lost, completion itself is screened off from any 
preceeding operation. So "wobble" here can contain the out of phase   
relationship with "experience" induced by the shock of being stripped to   
the perpetually new.

This textual play on Benjamin's part pulls the force of value into the idea
of shock. Something we must have if we are to say a word wobbles. But what 
is the value of nothing and when does this nothing become the past so 
thoroughly that every thing has become so occult, so "new," so now. Adorno 
picks up this thread of Baudelaire in Benjamin in *Minima Moralia* #150    
"Late Extra" in order to examine this newness. "Today the appeal to   
newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough,  
has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The    
decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an  
everchanging sameness. This drains all firmness from characters." (p 238)  
But if we are to pick up again that what is jostled in the crowd is what is
"lost" *and* "there" and that the lost is shock producing, perhaps the lack
of firmness in characters actually produces experience. In this case the   
wobble would be not false mimesis at all, but a continual production of the
shock, which in Benjamin's case, constantly acts to firm up consciousness, 
experience. In reference to Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*   
Benjamin quotes "...consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory 
trace." Perhaps here wobble is not only the out of phase relationship with 
experience, but also the site of just such a trace. Of course this    
consciousness would constantly be coming into contact with the catastrophe 
of modern existence which in itself induces a fleeting, but continual hope 
for what is lost; the big jostle.  

So wobble at the moment of the word has for me an extreme astronomy, or    
better, entails a diagnosis of the wakes or traces of multiple asynchronous
orbits: tradition, the past, loss, consciousness of loss and presence, the 
catastrophic impact of Capitalism upon intimate and public spheres and in, 
or of these orbits, language. 

The follow up in this lead to the trace will lead me inevitably to Derrida,
again, probably to *Cinders*. It will urge me to re-examine ideology as an 
apparatus, probably in Althusser. But this (Althusser) brings to mind 
Simone Weil and I'll stop here with this quote and I'm not sure exactly how
it fits in...  

   For every task, there exists a limited and small number of    
   possible errors, some which would break the machine, others   
   which would ruin the piece.

Patrick   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 18-FEB-1
994 11:58:41.03
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   from Evan Heimlich    

Date: Fri, 18 Feb 1994 11:55:45 -0500   
From: Charles Bernstein <[email-masked]>   
Subject: from Evan Heimlich   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Date: Thu, 17 Feb 1994 14:47:38 +0000 (U)    

From: Evan Heimlich <[email-masked]>  
Subject: Re: the heaping potential 

   Reply to:   RE>the heaping potential 

Add a teepeeing he-spoon of potential-flour, 
William Least Heat Spoon and wash hands in free basin. 

the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    
the heaping potential    

was: 
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 10:00:32 -0500 (EST)  
: Jed <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: "Community" 
In--to: Message of Sun   

Howe's your community.  Virtually heaping.   

[email-masked]
--------------------------------------  

In response to the message repeated below:   

Date: 2/13/94 9:20 AM    
To: Evan Heimlich   
From: UB Poetics discussion group  

Does "community" involve companionship? Or may it simply consist of   
collective
anonymity? In the strictly civic sense of vernacular usage, community 
means
little more than the aggregate of people and activities that bring them    
momenta   
rily together in public spaces--little league ball, traffic snarls,   
school    
board bonds--which amounts to a collective display of the heaping
potential. A   
primary reason why the net increasingly seems a site for community--or
at least  
why most discussions on the net erupt into these speculations about   
community--    
is because it enacts *both* the aleatory potential of the casual 
encounter and  
the motivational tensegrity of contact: "Contact," as I recall, was the    
little    
mag that William Carlos Williams edited, was't it?
  --Jed Rasula 
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 18-FEB-1
994 22:17:42.70
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   wobble wobble    

Date: Fri, 18 Feb 1994 20:18:56 -0700   
From: "GENE E. HULT" <[email-masked]>    
Subject: wobble wobble   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Hmm... first of all, Benjamin's not totally correct re: Baudelaire's  
lament over the continual new.  In Baudelaire's Salon Criticisms,
he pushes for a sort of mixture: "the relative or circumstantial and the invaria
ble or eternal: 'I defy anyone to find a single scrap of beauty which 
does not contain these two elements...'"  Which is a point of view    
I find myself falling for time and again.    
   And experience... experience may lessen the shock of some of  
the unknown, but it's my experience that experience leads to sightings
of further absence... as in, the more we know, the more we see the    
parameters (or lack thereof) of what we don't understand... and that  
leads to a sort of perpetual wobble.  When that hits language, we
then get into all that buggy semiotics.  When is a rose not a rose,   
when it's wobbling?  A wobbling rose?   
   It's all fine to point this stuff out, but what to DO with    
it afterwards?  How is it going to change how your put down on paper  
a line of your own writing?  Do we paper over the gaps in language,   
or admit to the unknown and get caught up in that particular lament   
over and over?  (It sure didn't help Baudelaire any... suicide is not 
an option.)  Anybody write fiction?  Because I'm having particular    
problems reconciling this sort of wobble with the necessary "story"   
in fiction... if even the words aren't to be trusted, if the metaphors
are all transitory, how can we trust something as "invented" as fiction?   
Or is willing suspension of disbelief enough (as it is in the grocery 
store, where we use words for simple transactions)?    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 19-FEB-1
994 01:08:26.23
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: wobble wobble

Date: Sat, 19 Feb 1994 01:08:42 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: wobble wobble    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I don't believe I ever hint that Benjamin was entirely correct re:    
anything, or propose his examination as the final word. In utilizing  
Benjamin, I wasn't attempting to examine Baudelaire, but to use some of the
tools Benjamin uses in his *Motifs* essay. To this, I think if you'll look 
closely you'll see that I was trying to get at a mode of experience which  
is an attempt to deal with the constantly absent, but to deal with that    
absence in a particular way--something which approaches your "perpetual    
wobble."  

As to the Salon Criticism quote, it appears to me that often the 
circumstantial is often eternal in Baudelaire. This would present a problem
with your analysis of my post as well as with Baudelaire.   

I'm also not satisfied with Benjamin's definition of "Erlebnis" and   
"Erfahrung," and the parallel construct of voluntary and involuntary  
memory, or for that matter, of his use of memory as opposed to remeberance,
[though I do have a fondness for the conjunction of, *not* the opposition  
of, consciousness and trace.] These "rails" running through the essay 
sometimes provide too clear a structuralist proposition which merely points
at a possible absence. But point it does.    

As to what we *do* afterwards. There is no afterwards, this comes after.   
This is the attendant (perhaps not so attendant) spiel.
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 19-FEB-1
994 02:03:53.83
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: wobble wobble

Date: Sat, 19 Feb 1994 02:02:53 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: wobble wobble    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

> It's all fine to point this stuff out, but what to DO with
> it afterwards?  How is it going to change how your put down on paper
> a line of your own writing?  Do we paper over the gaps in language, 
> or admit to the unknown and get caught up in that particular lament 
> over and over? [...]   

Begging for the moment the question of what "this stuff" is, I would  
answer, for myself, that a radical doubt that language ever reaches its    
destination, the fearful perception that words must travel a long way,
across a veritable world, in order to let the past clasp hands with the    
future, is not a state of affairs that demands a response, but is the state
of affairs our responses are born in.  Papering over the gaps in language  
is its own lament, admitting that the unknown is there is another way of   
ignoring it.   

>    [...] Anybody write fiction?  Because I'm having particular 
> problems reconciling this sort of wobble with the necessary "story" 
> in fiction... if even the words aren't to be trusted, if the metaphors   
> are all transitory, how can we trust something as "invented" as fiction? 

But isn't the question of believability an intrinsic one in any kind of    
narrative?  Isn't the element of surprise, which the so-called "wobble"    
makes possible, one of the principal pleasures of fiction?  I think we have
a tendency to overdramatize the difficulties of language, to think that our
doubts are peculiar to our own age.

On another note:    

James Sherry wrote, "The notes in short paragraphs are a lot easier to
read than the huge blocks of undifferentiated prose that remind me of 
someone trying to prove the opacity argument of the 1970s. And the messages
that use the screen as a field communicate a lot more meaning than their   
lexicons."

Am I the only one to find this statement remarkable?  The publisher of Roof
Books advocating something that sounds a lot like projective
verse--labelling something called "the opacity argument" a form of    
nostalgia!

Undifferentiated prose of any length sounds awful.  Let difference bloom in
the hugest blocks!  

Ben Friedlander
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 19-FEB-1
994 16:35:56.50
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: from Arkadii Dragomoschenko 

Date: Sat, 19 Feb 1994 16:31:08 -0500   
From: Katie Yates <[email-masked]>   
Subject: RE: from Arkadii Dragomoschenko
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I am perhaps avoiding the ideological problem of this *quest*ion* of com-  
munity but wish to address Arkadii's:   

 "mutual disposition of two perspectives:  'we' in my 'I'   
   'I' in my 'We'   

with the following forced juxtopposition between Don Byrd & George Oppen - 

In the most recent (and final) issue of NOTUS Byrd writes his essay   
"Sound's Domain:"   
 Organization or formal reality, by contrast, is  
 closed and circular.  It is never self-present;  
 indeed organization only appears in consciousness
 to the being which discovers that it makes the mark   
 which distinguishes itself as a separate identity.    

Oppen quotes him own poem in a letter to Sherman Stein [late Spring '67"   

Substance itself which has been the subject of all our planning  
And by this we are carried into the incalculable  

What I wish to consider here is weight with which each man considers him,  
a "self."  Byrd speaks of a solitary epiphany or reconcilliation of the    
matters of one's existence.  Oppen by contrast is willing to bear the 
weight of human limitation with at least one other ......My interest is    
limited by a severe need to understand how pronouns reflect where the 
attention of the writer is.  In all 3 of the above cases & in my own, I    
recognize at least some level of deliberation in how the self (I) is  
described in relation to other (we?) kyates  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 20-FEB-1
994 15:50:32.57
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: What does "wobble" mean?    

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 1994 10:57:22 -0700   
From: Tenney Nathanson <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: What does "wobble" mean?   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

As I read (or read, a few months ago, so this may be off) the Benjamin stuff on 
what he calls "shock defense" (a purposely awkward locution?) and the Freud
metapsychology i both BPP and Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, it seems to   
me perhaps to authorize instead the formulation that the text, as part of a
shock defense, a parrying of the new (after all it's [hyper] conscious) is 
there INSTEAD of experience, instead of a memory trace (Freud) or "Erfahrung."  
(There's something bizarre about the metapsychology, or at least about Ben's    
appropriation of it, so all this might best be taken I think as parable or 
trope).  So the wobble might be caused by a lexical or idiomatic memory trace,  
submerged, out of some OTHER context? (cf. Cavell on Thoreau, or Bernstein on   
Cavell on Thoreau?).  That is: the words I use to parry shock have another,
older history, not "meant" by my use of them but trailing....    
good book: Susan Buck-Morss, /The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the 
Arcades Project/    

Tenney Nathanson    
(hope this posts....)    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 20-FEB-1
994 15:51:03.17
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: What does "wobble" mean?    

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 1994 11:01:52 -0700   
From: Tenney Nathanson <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: What does "wobble" mean?   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

or, for that matter, the "trailing" history might NOT get evoked.  Less wobble, 
perhaps, and in Jameson's system: less "modernist" and more "pomo"....
unless that sense of blanking out or bleaching out, as I'd trope it, is after   
all akin to what others are troping as "wobble"   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 20-FEB-1
994 18:28:41.59
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   Community and the Individual Talent  

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 1994 18:27:15 -0500   
From: Charles Bernstein <[email-masked]>   
Subject: Community and the Individual Talent 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Community and the Individual Talent

I had a number of thoughts, over these past weeks of   
posts, about community, but I've misplaced them.  

Every time I hear the words literary community I  
reach for my bivalent autocad simulation card
emulator. 

Poetry is (or can be) an aversion of community in 
pursuit of new constellations of relationship.    

In other words, community is as much what I am    
trying to get away from -- reform -- as form.

So there are a spectrum of communities, from the  
closed community modelled on the family, to  
communities fixed by location (what might otherwise    
be called, for example, neighborhoods) or civic   
identification (the community bounding a literal and   
figurative commons or commonplace) or political   
ideology, to utopian communities that have either 
sought to form a new place or to remain open by   
refusing to be grounded by a place.

Literary communities have often been understood in
terms of place -- the "local" -- as Michael Davidson   
writes about the emergence of a literary community
on the West Coast in his book on the SF Renaissance,   
or in terms of scene (a local hub within a place) or   
group.  Black Mountain remains crucial because it 
forged an arts community from writers and artists 
from many places.  Most recently, the connections of   
writers within an ethnic, gender, or racial groups have
been designated as communities.  Schools or  
movements have not usually been called communities,    
although Ron Silliman, among others, have wanted to    
insist that a shared aesthetic project among writers in
different locations can best be understood on this
model of community.  It's possible to speak of the
"poetry community" in the sense of "the poetry    
world" (in the sense of "the art world") -- but such a 
formulation immediately suggests that arts funding
agencies are nearby (more commonly, one speaks of 
the "small press community").  I would say "poetry
communities" but this begs the questions even as it    
suggests relief.  Many poets that I know experience    
poetry communities, say scenes, as places of their
initital exclusion from publication, readings,    
recognition.  Being inside, a part of, is often far less    
striking that being left out, apart.    

Communities, defined by what they have in common -
- a place, an ideal, a practice, a heritage, a tradition -- 
cannot immunize themselves against what they do not    
find common.  To have a community is to make an   
imaginary inscription against what is outside the 
community.  & outside is where some poetry will   
want to be.  That is, some poetry will want to work    
against received ideas of place, group, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, person, member, individuality, 
tradition, aesthetic tendency.  One does not use  
collective nouns, or at least not without skepticism (if    
not anxiety).  

Robert von Hallberg, in Culture & Value, argues for a  
poetry that reflects community values; this is what he 
calls a poetry or accommodation and also, for the U.S. 
in the 1970s and 80s, a suburban poetry.

I suppose it has something to do with how    
comfortable you feel about the confines of family or   
nation (fine or confining).  As the critic asked the poet   
who had slipped on the ice and was lying in the   
middle of the road -- "Are you comfortable?"  --"I
make a good living."

(I take it Steve Evans comment in his introduction to  
the "Technique" in o.blek/Writing from the New    
Coast about his generational "hatred of identity" could
also apply to a hatred of community, and perhaps that  
is implicit in his recent discussion of "hating society
properly" and also "hating" tradition.  Would this
include a hatred of virtual, or for that matter   
unavowable, commuities?  Echoing W.C. Fields 
famous repost to being corrected about his insistence  
that Jews were running the Studio --- Catholics, worst 
kind of Jews -- might we say: Virtual communities,
worst kind of communities!?)  

Any discussion of community would do well to start
with the idea of institution rather than association.  
For the rules of our associations, one on one or one   
with many, is fundamentally an institutional matter    
(in the sense that Erving Goffman details in his many  
works).  So that I would say the first fact about the  
"community" made possible through modems hooked   
up to mainframes that are teleconnected is that the    
access and protocols of this community are   
predetermined by the institutions that give us entry   
into them; for most of us on this particular list 
"membership" in the university "community" -- (and
for the few on commercial services bearing the insignia
of ".com" at the end of their e-mail addresses, they   
have simply paid to have access to this already formed 
nexus.)   

This is changing but that only makes more crucial the  
need to acknowledge the overlay of different 
institutional interests that mediate our interactions in    
these spaces.  We don't shed old institutional habits as    
we inhabit new institutional spaces so much as project 
our old ways onto the new spaces.  A great deal of
sociological analysis is sure to follow us here.  But it is 
interesting to consider, what patters of "who speaks?" 
in "live" group settings -- meetings, seminars -- are also  
present in listserv situations, which may at first appear   
to be free of the need to interrupt or speak up or find
a temporary opening in the discussion.  

For example, I will soon begin monitoring how long
each of you spends online with Poetics@UBVM or    
whether and what you download.  -- The potential for   
monitoring such transactions, as well as doing various 
forms of statistical analysis of posts and activity, is
part of the medium of our communing here.  Several
subscribers have noted that one of us has chosen to    
conceal his identify from the publicly available list of    
subscribers; am I right to "out" Chris Funkhauser of   
our SUNY-Albany node?    

I have set up this listserv so that anyone can subscribe    
and I am automatically notified, but also so that the  
list itself is not listed in any directories of listserves. 
At some point, to keep the list at a scale small enough,    
or "common" enough, to work, will it be worth
considering eliminating open subscriptions?  

The idea of possibly hidden listeners is something a   
listserv invokes insofar as the communication is  
considered interpersonal, private in the way a letter is,   
or even a seminar or meeting; although we accept that  
we never know who buys our books (or checks them  
from the library).  But perhaps the situation here is  
more like a performance, were we make our recits  
individually to an audience that is able to see one    
another, even if, when on stage, our view of the  
audience may be blocked by the kleiglights.  

That, anyway, would bring to mind Rousseau's 
preference for public meetings over and against public 
spectacles (theater): the public convenes to consider its   
circumstance, its common needs.    

What is public space and why does there seem so little 
of it, as if the public had become a commodity no 
longer in much demand, but still available for import  
at high prices, free trade notwithstanding?  (We  
import it from ourselves and the tariffs are high.) So 
little public space, that is, so much public speactacle.    

This suggests the civic values of spaces like these: not    
reinforcing existing communities but taking up the
constitution of social space. 

If I resist the idea of a literary community, while    
working to support the "actually existing"   
communities of poets among which I find myself, it is  
because I want to imagine reading and writing,    
performing and listening, as sites of conversation as much as    
collectivity.  I want to imagine a constellation of    
readers who write, to and for one another, with the    
links always open at the end, spiralling outward --    
centrifugally -- not closing in.   

At one point in these parts, posts -- a message   
identified as from Lolpoet (Loss Glazier), echoed G.E. 
Moore's shaking of fists at the skeptics ("at least I  
know two things that are real!"):  "We are physical    
beings, not virtual ones."  My heart sank, for it is our    
virtuality that allows for hope.  V139HLA3 (at Buffalo 
it is an institutional privilege to have your name be  
used as part of your user ID), aka Martin Spinelli,    
wanting to put off the idea that this space of exchange
in unreal, insisted, "We are *really* here with our    
*real* eyes at *real* monitors" (but unfortunately no  
real italics): yet, my real eyes do me no good if I    
aspire to something else than what I see, and what I   
want to monitor is neither real or unreal.   

So my hope for electronic communication is not    
that it engenders virtual communities, but rather 
virtual uncommunities.   

-Charles Bernstein  

(rest area)    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 21-FEB-1
994 00:13:11.96
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   "Community" 

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 1994 20:50:57 -0800 (PST)  
From: peter quartermain <[email-masked]>   
Subject: "Community"
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Yes. This conversation is (like the idea and institution    
community) fascinating, like a snake eyeing a mouse.   
"Community" is virtually undefinable [pun intended],   
possibly undesirable, and ever shifting, perilous --   
the more closely defined, the more closely and powerfully   
an instrument of control. *Odi et amo*, then. Like
definition, it feeds on hunger.    
Do not pass "Go"; and don't   
forget to cut the grass (if not the mustard).
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 21-FEB-1
994 00:30:59.06
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: "Community"  

Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 00:18:12 -0500   
From: Linda Reinfeld <[email-masked]> 
Subject: RE: "Community" 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Yes, chilling.  The List generates Owner and Orders: IMPORTANT. Spread no  
information.  Download and be counted. The tiger springs in the new year.  
Us he devours. 

Or, "It's just ordinary hopelessness."  

+--------------------------------------------------+   
| Linda Reinfeld   [email-masked] |   
+--------------------------------------------------+   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 21-FEB-1
994 13:23:45.62
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   derek jarman

Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 08:50:08 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: derek jarman    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Here in the anti-community chamber, the brain, the obituary watch
continues.  Donald Judd last week, and now this.  I forward (without  
permission, but so it goes) the following from the derrida-list: 

> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 1994 21:28:00 +0000 
> From: Andy Butler <[email-masked]>    

> To return to an earlier debate, I spent this afternoon watching videos   
> with friends.  By common consent we watched Jarman's Wittgenstein, and   
> even the person who was resistant admited he enjoyed part of it.  My own 
> wavering between thinking it a masterpiece and flawed masterpiece moved  
> further toward the masterpiece: the Wittgenstein actor excellent, Tilda  
> Swinton imcomparable, Michael Gough as wachable as ever, Maynard Keynes  
> entertaining.  Only the rough trade Johnny stands out as unconvincing. I'd    
> forgotten the importance of the Martian, and how he appears, naked, to   
> speak the final words of the film.    
>    
> We then watched an episode of Northern Exposure, the cricket score and   
> ate.  Then the news announces that Derek Jarman has finally died of an HIV    
> related illness.  I'd last seen him on a Channel 4 Christmas Eve rpogramme    
> "Camp Christmas", looking ill but alert.  I knew there couldn't be long to    
> go. I'd heard that he'd been in hospital bnut no more.    
>    
> Personally I think this is a great loss: to experimental film, to British
> cinema (whatever that means) and indeed to film world wide.  We have
> also lost a forthright commentator on Gay / Queer / HIV issues.  Working on a 
> shoestring he produced astounding art.  Not to everyone's taste, yes, on 
> the edge of pretentiousness but that's part of taking risks.  With Edward
> II, Wittgenstein and Blue Jarman reached the height of his powers; there 
> can be no one to replace him.    
>    
> Cheers (and ins ombre mood already this weekend)
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 22-FEB-1
994 20:24:50.69
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   Institution?

Date: Tue, 22 Feb 1994 13:06:11 -0500 (EST)  
From: Jennifer Moxley <[email-masked]>
Subject: Institution?    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I think you boys must be getting a little saddle weary from all that wobbling.  
Those who muse around in definitions of community without self-referentiality   
obviously can "step away" long enough to question: are we in one? do we want    
one? etc... Most people on this earth are born into your vagary.  And I think   
the likelihood of any significant change happening surrounding community is
very low among our current poetic dissidents if we don't feel "wrongly defined" 
only "wrong definitions" --changing definitions is easy, we're poets, or are    
we?  I notticed that M. Hult admitted he goes to the grocery store which   
reminded me of something I read about the new left in the 60's, it's not that   
anyone said to the women leftists, "you can't speak," it is simply that the
dynamic was such that even theorectically sophisticated women felt invigorated  
but shut down from participation.  The way they were defined proceeded any 
definition changing they might have wanted to take part in.    Being left out,  
cut off from the dominent modes of whatever, while remaining in a position of   
priviledge via class and gender, can sometimes make us forget to keep a keen    
eye peeled on the house that shut the door in the first place, and subsequently 
our shack takes on an inflated importance.  I find it interesting that while    
we spend a lot of time opposing our enforced and chosen communities we still    
accept their terms.  I think this is because it isn't that we hate our
communities, but rather that we hate that the possibilities they open to us
(academic, poetic, love relationships, virtual and democratic communities) are  
rarely realized.  I just hate that.  But it's like always waking up to a sink   
full of dirty dishes, you must say to yourself, at least I have dishes.  We
cannot extirpate ourselves from community any more than we can talk about the   
social as if we aren't in and defined by it,  neither can we give up hope that  
we might be able to risk humiliation and defy these spaces that define us. 
-Jennifer Moxley    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 22-FEB-1
994 20:30:17.97
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: Community and the Individual Talent   

Date: Tue, 22 Feb 1994 12:47:37 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: Community and the Individual Talent  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

charles, that virtuality could be a virtue///

"virtual uncommunity"---community defined by what is excluded from    
same?---"i never wanted to belong to a club" etc?... in what ways is this  
specifically *virtual*?...    

real vs. virtual---yet another site of collapse... what *about* the body,  
finally?... that is, the site whereupon such collapses--culturally,   
socially--are instituted, the "who" that does/does not speak, that is/is   
not allowed access, etc... does 'virtual uncommunity' renegotiate zones of 
institutional exclusion such that a 'we' denotes absence thrice removed?...

"not only are these [not] my words, not only am i not t/here, but i stand  
apart from you, to boot" 

hence through this absence/addresslessness (think nomads with newtons) to  
rethink, or begin to rethink, presence (of others, or of congenial others  
etc)?... calling the bluff, as it were, of a certain telos of presence
(this is fuzzy, yes, and formal)...

trafficking in wish lists:  i would wish, were i the type (am i?), that the
virtual were deployed as real, not over and against reality, but of the    
various realities that we construct... it's taken a mimetic shape thus far,
but it needn't... hence virtual becomes, under one definition (from a new  
bill on the washington state govt. agenda---"public health & safety act    
1994" bill, sbr 6174---and I shamelessly excerpt from a post to the media  
lab's narrative intelligence list):

NEW SECTION.  Sec 702.  (4)  "Virtual Reality" means any computer or  
other electronic technology that creates an enhanced illusion of 
three-dimensional, real-time or near-real-time interactive reality through 
the use of software, specialized hardware, holograms, gloves, masks,  
glasses, computer guns, or other item capable of producing visual, audio,  
and sensory effects of verisimilitude beyond those available with a   
personal  
computer. 

note "verisimilitude beyond those" etc...    

but to get back to community commentary:  a bit smartass, i know, but i'm  
thinking of the uncola at this moment... i'm wondering what it is, exactly,
your concluding hope constitutes (as in 
constitution---bodily/legislative)...   

i want to point out---and here i'll risk as much as you have, ethically, in
doing so (which is not to suggest that either of us is being unethical,    
however impolite, but that ethos is always at stake)---that un-concealing  
(there's that un again) chris funk at suny/a was unconcealing a grad. 
student (chris---hi!, permit me to speak of you in the third person for a  
moment)... were you aware of chris's postsecondary status?... not that you 
wouldn't have unconcealed, say, a faculty member---but that there are 
institutional distinctions of community, as we're all aware, that go beyond
listowner/non-listowner status, and that these raise issues, as you   
intimate, of power... much as i have just un-concealed chris's status in   
this institutional hierarchy...    

i write the foregoing noting that, whatever my intentions, i risk a   
culpability on many counts... and what does it mean to be "polite" around  
t/here, anyway, esp. given the potentially international context(s)?...    
"netiquette" hardly seems an answer... i have some ideas--- 

it sounds, in all, as though you would like to see these spaces mitigate   
the "hatred" you refer to... does this mean that they help to mitigate
differences in difference?... wherever this stuff 'goes' that i'm in the   
process of typing, fact is that it emerges pretty much out of something    
american///    

forgive me this latter---it needs to be unpacked---are these the places    
through/in which to venture forth so?///

am i publicly, well, what am i?... wouldn't ontological questions of  
identity be inscribed (o.k.---yuck) within a social controversy situated at
the level of "national" or "continental" (as in north american) conceptions
of community?... i mean, is your projected uncommunity international in    
scope, or transnational? (is the internet?)... new world borders?... or no 
borders defined as such, in national/international terms?... or---    

what what?...  

i am a bit too persistent (and digressive) perhaps... and i mean, as you   
are aware, no flames at all... i take these spaces as providing both for   
performative possibility as well as intimate deliberation... integrity, all
told, is something i hope for within any un/community...    

i would like to read more...  

best///   

joe  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 08:22:54.66
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: Institution? 

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 07:55:32 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: Institution?
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Jennifer, 
   I don't think I was wrong to detect a criticism in your remarks not only
of *the content* of my (and others') postings, but of the very *fact* of them.  
That's what principally annoyed me.  Is this the same as my response to    
James Sherry?  I wanted to be ironic there but say that in telling others to    
shut up he was adopting the rhetoric of poets I know he dislikes.  Likewise
with Tom Mandel--let him know that he couldn't simply brush aside what
others say without answering to his rhetoric.  Have I brushed aside what   
you wrote?  This is what I objected to: 

> [...] you boys [...]   

and that whole sentence, not only is it dismissive, but the imputation that
it's a boys' club (and that we're playing cowboys and indians) is extremely
insulting 

> [...] Most people on this earth are born into your vagary.

the imputation that we lack "self-referentiality" (by which i take it you  
mean self-knowledge?) is one thing, but to suggest that our supposed ignorance  
is a "vagary" others are subject to, not only on the poetics list, but
their whole lives...!  what sort of power are you attributing here to the  
"boys"?   

> [...] it's not that    
> anyone said to the women leftists, "you can't speak," it is simply that the   
> dynamic was such that even theorectically sophisticated women felt invigorated
> but shut down from participation[...] 

though your "i was reminded of" doesn't really link this statement to the  
discussion on the poetics list in any specific way, the implication is
clear:  the "boys" are shutting you down.  perhaps i'm not jaded enough to 
accept such a ghastly charge with humor, but i do think it IS a ghastly    
charge, & an undeserved one, & it makes me angry. 

The rest of your post had less to do with the poetics list and more to do  
with this analogy, and I don't particularly object to it--though I might   
say, having never fully ascertained what it was that made you dissatisfied 
with the discussion, or feel shut down, I had little to say in response.   
Your post is as abstract, in its way, as any of Steve's or mine or    
Patrick's or whoever's.  

And yes, I DID think I was doing you a favor, of not "flaming you" on the  
list (which I wouldn't do) or just being pissed off and remaining silent   
(which I would do only if i didn't know you or count you a friend).  Ben   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 09:58:27.01
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   yow!   

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 09:54:35 -0500   
From: Benjamin Friedlander <[email-masked]>
Subject: yow!  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

well, those of you who've read my last message (which i meant to send 
privately) can draw your own conclusions.  robert duncan said the
psychopathology of everyday life is a manual of composition, so freudian   
slips might in some way indicate a desire to compose without composing...it
would seem some part of me wanted this private correspondence to spill into
the public.  but most of me didn't, doesn't...and i apologize to jennifer  
for any difficulty or embarrassment this may cause her.  frustration run   
amok!  ah dear 
 ben f    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 10:52:22.40
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   From Andrew Levy, re: Community and uncommunity, 2 of 4  

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 09:44:32 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: From Andrew Levy, re: Community and uncommunity, 2 of 4 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I am not a subscriber to the UB Poetics list (or any other list) because I 
cannot afford the privilege.  That is, I own neither the hardware nor 
software needed to participate electronically from home, and Illinois 
Institute of Technology, where I am teaching as a pre-doctoral fellow, does
not provide even its full-time Humanities faculty with computers.  The best
I might muster is limited on-site use of a machine in another    
location---and I don't own a vehicle, making it difficult for me to   
schedule my time on campus around such peripheral activities (however 
valuable).  I mention my personal situation as it brings to mind very 
serious matters concerning the issue of institutions, participatory systems
of information exchange and creation, and social progress---this latter in 
that its directions, purposes and results rely heavily upon one's ability  
either to heed or to ignore the divisions of class, and local, national and
global economics.  This is inseparable from the question of electronics    
above.    

E.g. does my situation problematize or effect in any way Charles' query    
about the possible need to eliminate open subscriptions?  Of course, what's
true electronically is sometimes true in the print world.  For example, I  
just saw a copy of _Lingo_ #2 on the magazine stand at Barnes & Noble.
There was an article about the New Coast conference at UB last spring, and 
a few other pieces that looked interesting.  The price, however, was  
$12.50.  I generally don't spend $12.50 for an issue of a magazine.   
Instead, I bought the recent issue of _Artforum_ for $7.  Inside, I found  
an article by Jonathan Crary---founding editor of Zone, and professor of   
art history at Columbia.  Bernstein's question, "What is public space and  
why does there seem so little of it?," and consequent hope for "the civic  
values of spaces like these:  not reinforcing existing communities but
taking up the constitution of social space," receives substantive
problematizing when juxtaposed against Crary's reflection on electronic    
communications and communities (echoing to some degree Jacques Attali's    
prognosis of intellectual productivity complicit with the distribution of  
information and its technologies, absorbed into and enhancing the
north-south hemispheric disequilibrium of resources and capital, and  
further straining the already growing fragmentation of east/west 
relations---the buying & selling of people; see _Millennium:  Winners and  
Losers in the Coming World Order_---it's a disturbing and frightening 
book.)    

I quote, rather extensively, from Crary's text:   

"... Many evocations of an emerging 'on-line' world assume as a matter of  
course, or else never question, that a more or less uniform and available  
information and communication culture is now being installed globally.
Generalizing language of the following sort is depressingly pervasive:  'In
the near future we may all be on-line.'  Beyond the curt and brutal   
exclusions of the words 'we' and 'all,' this class of statement, in its    
sweeping untruth, resonates with both a complacent faith in the certainty  
of modernization and a banal anticipation of its posthistorical  
fulfillment.   
    "That western patterns of technological consumption could ever be 
extended to a world now six, soon ten billion people boggles the most 
elementary economic, not to mention ecological, common sense.  The    
inescapable yet continually evaded truth is that participation in the 
emerging information, imaging, and communications technologies *will never*
(in the meaningful future) expand beyond a minority of people on this 
planet.  Before supposing 'we' will 'all' soon be in cyberspace, consider  
an isolated statistic:  less than 20 percent of the world's population
today have telephones.  Despite relentless claims that the new computer    
networks are somehow egalitarian, in the next half century somewhat fewer  
than that 20 percent are likely ever to have economic access to the   
capabilities of these systems.  An argument for a higher estimate would    
depend on projected growth rates that are historically unprecedented and   
are unsupported by even the rosiest long-range economic forecasts.    

(cont'd)  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 10:52:25.95
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   From Andrew Levy, re: Community and uncommunity, 1 of 4  

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 09:44:18 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: From Andrew Levy, re: Community and uncommunity, 1 of 4 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

2-22-94   

I'm not sure what to call myself in this social space.  A "hidden listener"
perhaps, though as I'm not on-line, I'm not electronically hidden.  I have 
been able to follow several parts of various discussions on the Poetics    
list [e.g., the wobbly, social poem??] thanks to occasional hardcopy  
provided by Joe Amato---sympathetic to my un-linked status.  Should Joe and
I worry that we're breaching an institutional decorum, i.e., subscribing to
the UB list?---does providing me with hardcopy of certain conversations Joe
believes I'd be interested in suggest indiscretion on his and my part...   
that I'm nosy, spying voyeuristically into the dialogue/communications
passing between people, some of whom I know and consider friends, others   
whom I don't know?  

I believe Charles is wise to raise the question of meanings and  
potentialities within an interrogation of  "the idea of institution rather 
than association."  For example, as an "outsider" (I'll say something about
my situation in a moment), I tend to think a more productive way to   
conceptualize/practice the activity on the UB Poetics list would be to
consider the fact that it constitutes not a literary community or
"uncommunity" (it in no way resembles whatever forms *that* has taken in   
the past), but an electronic community.  I think it would be important to  
investigate exactly what electronics *is*, and along with that research one
could link the question of... and/or one might discover one's whole sense  
of what constitutes community has changed, and continues to---while mapping
the specific and local details and densities of "old institutional    
habits... inhabit(ing) new institutional spaces."  Tho I wonder how "new"  
these spaces are?   

What I would hope to experience in any kind of community would be the sense
that it's an effective community.  That it consist "not of propositions to 
be communicated from A to B but of orientations in fields of meaning  
[there's that word "field" again, Ben], measures by the scales in which    
humans share not a perspective or a belief but a world that opens to this  
or that particular vantage and practice.  In order to constitute an   
effective community rather than a symbolic machine for social production,  
organized beings must orient themselves in their media-scapes" (Don Byrd,  
_The Poetics of the Common Knowledge_, 23).  

(cont'd)  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 10:52:29.45
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   From Andrew Levy, re: Community and uncommunity, 3 of 4  

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 09:44:50 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: From Andrew Levy, re: Community and uncommunity, 3 of 4 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

[quoting from Crary]

"To avoid misunderstanding, my argument here is not for or against any
given technological arrangement.  Rather, it is against the fictions, 
mystifications, bad faith, and worse in critical analyses that ignore the  
immensity, and the violence, of this disequilibrium.  For our new
electronic communities and digital subjectivities, whatever their local    
value and however subversive they might seem, are also part of an
intensifying process of global polarization, segregation, and    
impoverishment.
    "...The sleek cyberdream of a collapsed global surface of instantaneity
and dematerialization persists only by erasing the waking actuality of a   
world that is increasingly unlivable for most of its inhabitants.
   "Some critics have celebrated the advent of an era of 'generalized 
communication' in the belief that new technologies will open up a
multiplicity of 'local rationalities,' a multicultural world in which 
ethnic, sexual, religious, and other minorities would all have voices.  But
such a multicentered pluralism would depend on the universalizing and 
impossible idea of a relatively even distribution of technological culture.
 Instead, population is acquiring increasingly potent, supple forms of
technological expression while the majority continue to inhabit radically  
dissimilar 'off-line' spaces and temporalities (or machinic 'creolizations'
that will never mesh on equal terms with the most powerful networks). 
   "With the growh of telecommunications and information systems in the    
West, Japan, and elsewhere (along with the corporate scramble to control   
and reorganize this arena of exchange), what used to be thought of as 
'consumption' is increasingly synonymous with 'communication.'  Within this
field, where 'interactivity' is a new word for 'shopping,' it is becoming  
harder to distinguish effective resistance from what are merely alternate  
fashions of consumption.  The 'grand narratives' and authoritarian    
perspectives may to some extent have collapsed, but the new proliferation  
of voices, truths, and subject positions has as much to do with the logic  
of the electronic marketplace as with the inception of any new public 
sphere."  

[the above paragraphs are from Crary's article in the February issue of    
_Artforum_, 58-59, 103.] 

(cont'd)  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 10:52:31.56
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   From Andrew Levy, re: Community and uncommunity, 4 of 4  

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 09:45:04 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: From Andrew Levy, re: Community and uncommunity, 4 of 4 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

In the context of Crary's examination, the resulting economic disparity    
between the haves & have-nots is manifest not only "in political and  
economic crisis but, perhaps just as important, in the phenomenon of  
radically dissimilar perceptual and cognitive lifeworlds."  Beavis &  
Butthead vs. Whitman & Emerson.  As mentioned in Charles' posting, being   
outside a (literary) community is a sometimes self-elected position.  When 
it comes to electronic communities, however, the decision and possibilities
of that choice are mediated, if not imploded, within the social space of a 
discriminatory and post-apocalyptic economy of knowledge many people will  
be powerless to affect within the space of the screen, having no terminal  
or one not monitored by management from which to speak.  Crary goes on to  
mention that some current research in the neurosciences suggests that 
prolonged use of new image technologies "will produce *physical* remappings
of neural connections in the brain."  How large will the boundary between  
"inside" and "outside" become when heightened by unbridgeable perceptual   
and cognitive divides? "... the prospect is for medicobiological elites and
castes of a sort unimaginable even in the most archaic premodern societies"
(103).  Crary ends by asking how one is to stay in touch with, listen to   
and learn from that majority of voices "outside the circuits of compulsory 
communication and 'augmented' realities?"  This question complements Don   
Byrd's profound and densely complex investigation in the book referenced   
above.    

I'm sure some of the concerns and ideas of which Crary speaks are not "new"
to many of the subscribers to the UB Poetics list---but I thought it  
appropriate to interject them directly into the discussion and making of   
cummunity *here*.   That's a typo, but let it stand.  By the way, I (aka   
Andrew Levy) am not actually "posting" this response.  Instead, Mr. Amato  
has been kind enough to volunteer his services.  Also, my apologies to
anyone who objects to my eavesdropping and textual intrusion into this
space.  Please direct all objections to Joe Amato---otherwise, I'll never  
know.

best to everyone hovering, lurking, listening, or subscribing!   

Andrew Levy    

p.s. A book I've found useful for thinking about community is _The Coming  
Community_, by Giorgio Agamben.  His work in this book would also
complement, I believe, Steve Evans' thinking about identity and the "hatred
of identity."  

[p.p.s. all typos, garbling and related wobbling by Joe]    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 17:53:44.28
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: Institution? 

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 13:46:11 -0600   
From: Joe Amato <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: Institution?
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

well, i don't wanna 'take sides' re the disagreement, public/private and   
in-between, 'between' ben & jennifer... 

but i *would* like to say [and i'm editing in here that i'm not at all
pleased with how this post turned out] that i've noted posts similar to    
jennifer's on a number of lists (that is, from women, and addressing  
similar issues), and that i think we would all do well to consider the
extent to which these spaces are gendered so as to exclude possibilities   
for all... that is, that women might feel somehow excluded from these 
environs is not simply an idiosyncratic or sensitive (which is to say 
hypersensitive) observation... there are a number of related issues   
here---the sorts of subject positions that technologies typically help to  
institute, even within a presumed space of first amendment freedoms, public
domain and such---and it is likely, i think, that many of these issues are 
backgrounded in the midst of differing levels of dis/comfort vis-a-vis such
public spaces...    

that is, it's not that wobbling per se, whatever one makes of same, is a   
poor point of departure (and as i recall, there have been both women and   
men involved in that discussion, if predominantly men (this latter    
observation perhaps significant in itself))... it's more to the point that 
such a discussion---and i've certainly indulged mself in similarly    
compulsive (?---is this fair?) threads/exchanges---bypasses perhaps without
much forethought or deliberation (around t/here, at least) questions  
pertaining to---not how "we" is/are conceived contra or in association with
various "i's"---but how "we" as an implicit operational construction  
has/have already de facto eliminated particular "i's" from its/our field of
possibilities...    

who is we not speaking?... and why?...  

joe///(awaiting meanings of silences, departures... which will, w/methinks,
require a few words from our sponsors...)    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 18:26:41.12
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   angry boys  

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 15:02:49 -0500   
From: Kristen Prevallet <[email-masked]> 
Subject: angry boys 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Ben: 

You can dish it out but you sure can't take it.   
You're Freudian Slip was successful, and now you  
had better answer to your own rhetoric instead of 
calling everyone else on theirs.   

I can see that you took Jennifer's message personally, but  
you shouldn't have. The bigger issue has to do with talking about
community in terms that, whether you mean to or not, and I know you   
don't, are purely rhetorical and thereby exclusionary to those   
who don't know what the heck you're talking about. Not that I have    
any big ideas about how to make this e-mail thing *useful*--I just    
think that you all have to be careful about laying down the terms for 
conversation, and then getting "angry" when someone calls you on them.
   It's funny, because I did not find Jennifer's posting "abstract"   
at all. Rather, it is among the most straight forward of most of what I    
have read on this thing. And I shall add this, apologizing if it has already    
been said, for I joined the list late: What is the point of all this  
talk about community and when will the talk stop and the communializing (word?) 
begin?  I guess that's the problem with virtual--its all talk about   
the talk about the talk, removed, from EXPERIENCE.

Kristin Prevallet   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 23-FEB-1
994 18:59:06.73
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   Gender 

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 15:49:17 -0500 (EST)  
From: Loss Glazier <[email-masked]>  
Subject: Gender
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I'm not sure what direction this leads but it occurs to me that Kristin's  
comment that "Ben can dish it out but not take it" might overlook the 
basis of Jennifer's disatisfaction, as I see it 'that the holds  
of abstraction are dominated by men' (paraphrase).  Whether this is or
is or not true is one of those endlessly debateably points, on which  
I'm willing to willingly give ground just because I can't see a defining   
argument in either camp.  It's clear that much of technology has been 
developed by males, I don't think that bears any argument.  But is the
invoking of "boys" because of use of abstraction an accurate call?  I can't
enter into this because I don't know but (and it may be unnecessarily tedious   
to do so) want to suggest that there are always other elements (not under- 
estimating gender at all) but what about class, ethnicity, geography as    
poet-entially also influential?  Is it relevant that discussions of   
community lead to a recognition of difference within the "community"?  Isn't    
it far too reductive to draw the line at gender--I mean arent' there all   
sorts of gradation of experience and social location (including gender,    
aren't there gradations of "male" experience and "female" experience  
despite one's biological gender?) that make such divisions incredibly 
destructive?   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 24-FEB-1
994 01:42:41.25
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   community a'gin  

Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 01:37:16 -0500   
From: Belle Gironda <[email-masked]> 
Subject: community a'gin 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Thanx to Andrew Levy for contextualizing the community discussion
in a lrger world. (Post)-apocalyptic tho' his "posts" are.  
meanwhile:
I'm happy to have entered the list at this incipient moment when 
the (I thinK) necessary/requisite activity of community
formation   is happening.
  Inevitablethat in a purely text based environment, "community" 
must produce itself (identity) textually via some discussion
which takes as its subject its subjects (us) & our relations
(community--or the hope/dream/image/concept & c. of).  
  The "signs" seem good  when, in this process, exploding   
Freudian cigars go off, voices who feel themselves somehow  
silenced speak out, dissenting, a "Dad" (mon Bernstein) chimes   
in w/ affectionate pronouncements and (as i began w/) a bucket   
brigade of un-wired wisdom makes its way from Indiana (is that the    
right M-western territory?) via Amato's  transcription to the list    
reminding "us" (can I say so?)    of    
how lucky we are   and   
the responsibilities    implied    
 by fortune    

Belle Gironda  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 24-FEB-1
994 01:46:29.46
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   Ah...  

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 23:47:44 -0700   
From: "GENE E. HULT" <[email-masked]>    
Subject: Ah... 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

It is rather wonderful to read people talking to each other 
(even if in anger) rather than making guarded intellectual  
pronouncements.  But what are we all here for?  It's a poetics   
forum, so let's discuss poetry!  Anyone have a particular favorite    
he or she has read lately to share with the rest of us?  Anyone  
feeling particularly brave and want to share one they wrote?
Let's get this thing in high, useful gear.   

Gene Hult 
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 24-FEB-1
994 01:55:25.07
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   a'gin  

Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 01:49:51 -0500   
From: Belle Gironda <[email-masked]> 
Subject: a'gin 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Oh,  
& I meant to say that the point Katie Yates made via Blanchot    
seems vital in that the "I" /"We" relation ultimately frames
all our possibilities for speaking to each other and encompasses 
(uh, I don't know if that's the word but..) categories (word?)   
like gender, race, class, which matter but which (seem)
automatically  
reductive by virtue of their (well-meaning)  
ambitions.
BG   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 24-FEB-1
994 10:34:24.71
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: Institution? 

Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 10:33:56 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: Institution?
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Doesn't it appear that just when you think you got "community" down,  
something discombobulates...  

Like Kristen, on one hand I feel its too bad that we have to negotiate the 
notion of community. It's kinda like thinking about thought. When one 
brings some thing, something particular, into a group, no matter if its a  
loosely knit group, there is a focal point that in turn defines the group, 
or community.  

On the other, I feel relieved by Jennifer's post. Perhaps the thing brought
into the group must then be thrown out for the definition of community to  
be clarified, changed. I think this is what Jennifer is tending to. That   
the institution sterilizes the "community," or it acts as a kind of radon, 
seeping into the house, or in our case, the "shack," and we slowly mutate. 
Raise the windows, knock down a wall, air it out! 

Yet another facet. What happened with Ben's public post of a private tussle
should be examined in that light as well; that privately we do negotiate on
terms which often sound completely off-key in public; that the time and    
energy of talking "intimately" is quite different from this odd publicity  
both in its intention as well as to the attention it is given.   

As it turns out, the eaves on this shack accomodate a lot of people. They  
also accomodate, or produce a lot of apprehension and skepticism, which in 
turn breeds distrust. That the rain has eased up, or the shack remodelled a
bit, allowing a different accomodation, a different form, speaks to a 
determination and resilience that this forum may have, but that gets lost  
at times in the particular posts; a loss which can be and is recouped most 
times without animosity, or acrimony.   

In all this I have to say I was a little pissed that when I posted the
Diane Ward interview and tried to get something going around her remarkable
work there were no takers. That my taking an explicit approach to
EXPERIENCE in her work wasn't engaged, or challenged. Couple this with the 
fact that I'm a "boy" it becomes hard for me to see where in fact the 
wobble is and to what "you boys" refers. Although I see that the boys club 
metaphor is not just a metaphor, there are variables, soft edges which are 
accessible. Just to say that this forum has a form which is ultimately
arbitrated only by a very tenuous "we." That all constructs here are  
provisional. Jennifer has shown this. Thanks 

Patrick   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 24-FEB-1
994 16:54:47.08
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:

Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 10:06:06 -1000 (HST)  
From: susan <[email-masked]>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

To members of the poetics net:

The discussion of community that I've recently tapped into is interesting, 
from a mid-Pacific perspective, for what it leaves out--only proving, 
I suppose, that definitions of community are inevitably context driven,    
"community games," as it were.  In Hawaii, the term "local" is a racial    
as well as a regional tag; to be "local" here is to be Asian-American,
which distinguishes "locals" from native Hawaiians, and haoles (whites).   
It's possible, though not easy, to be a "local haole," if you grow up 
here.  Increasingly, that definition of "local" enters into local writing  
through the use of pidgin; Lois-Ann Yamanaka's SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE  
PAHALA THEATER (Bamboo Ridge Press, 1993) is written exclusively in   
pidgin (except for a moment of affected standard English, meant to be 
laughed off).  

A couple of weeks ago I went to a reading for the publication of Jessica   
Hagedorn's fascinating anthology, THE DEATH OF CHARLIE CHAN.  The first    
two readers, Yamanaka and a gay Filipino American writer, Zack Linmarck,   
read in a language so local (and so infused with particular cultural  
references) that I had a keen sense of living outside of it (I've
been in Hawaii for three and a half years now).  And yet I'm reminded 
of what Charles Bernstein said a few days ago about uncommunities--I  
feel myself a part of this community precisely because it is one that 
acknowledges a multitude of contexts; even though I'm not "local" I   
do have investments in the community.  I am both inside and out of    
the game, especially when I set about "teaching" local literature at UH.   
My feeling about this discussion group is similar; it strikes me that 
the community's self-definition will change often, according to the   
particular contexts of our musings.  Perhaps, to follow Gene Hult's   
comment, we should turn to poems--poems that contain within themselves
these shifts of context which are the community as it exists inside   
poems.  It also strikes me as a potentially productive exercise to    
examine poems that do not seem to welcome us into their community,    
since that exclusion (gender, class, or race-related) is part and parcel   
of our definition.  

As an aside on pidgin writing: I'm interested in the way in which local    
writing is (finally) catching on on the mainland.  Yamanaka is widely 
published, as are Eric Chock and Wing Tek Lum, to say nothing of Cathy
Song, though her work isn't generally considered to be local--her
audience, as she put it horribly in the pages of MANOA, is the   
workshop writer she was most jealous of.  Garrett Hongo's new anthology    
THE OPEN BOAT (a strange title for a collection of Asian American
poetry--what DOES Stephen Crane have to do with it?) includes several 
Hawaii writers, and should make them more popular to a larger audience.    
But, although the use of an exclusive, non-universal language, pidgin,
should attract the attention of "Language writers," the poems themselves   
are relentlessly conservative, more intent on mimesis than on any
challenge to it.  They buy into notions of "authenticity" that grate  
on literary critical ears.    

In what sense, then, will a discussion group like this one welcome in 
the "multicultural" literature of places like Hawaii?  How do we want 
to define multiculturalism?  We need to keep in mind that "experimental    
writing" is also a context-driven phenomenon.  What is experimental here   
isn't in Buffalo, and probably vice versa.  (Though Hagedorn's anthology   
puts the Heath in the dust on that score.)   

Anyway, I find myself piling on here.  I'll sign off for now.    

Susan M. Schultz    ([email-masked])  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 24-FEB-1
994 17:01:25.26
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: Institution? 

Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 14:31:29 -0500   
From: James Sherry <[email-masked]>  
Subject: RE: Institution?
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

When we get stuck defining community    
We are ignoring the rest we be.    
Community for me at least
is one logical view of our networking   
in a specific area of interest -- poetry.    

Other components are logical as well    
like this notion of institution    
which sends alarms to most    
but has impact as the sum
of our messages coheres. 

Physically we are nodes, 
and individuals, and poets,   
and other things which are not
all the same : some teachers, some computing professionals, 
and here we diverge like with gender.   

The community cannot define all we are, 
but our similar interests in coming together 
over this server: poetry.
But poetry is not one thing either:
and to define it for net purposes is essential to me.  

The form / forum of email and the net define 
much of what we can do best, read effectively,    
here and what can be saved for other forms   
like sonnets, hand written letters, books,   
phone calls, group discussion, readings...   

This form in its email suit is provisional.  
I would not attempt full-scale legalistic discussion.  
I might want to send an attachment, more carefully worked   
up on a word processor, but that is another form of the net.
In fact to do so requires a different program than email which is just a   
 carrier. 

Not only are these notes mostly provisional, 
hardly edited and off the top of our heads,  
they are often not sequential, are intersected    
by multiple other topics on any given session
and by well edited attachments like Levy's quotation.  

From this perspective the forum for our various missives    
has a curious impact, since we never know what form    
will appear inside a message: its contents.  
For one thing we have a change in the idea of form
and content. Form is forum and contents can be one of several forms.  

Also errors are so easy to make that like in our own brains 
we have to give a lot of room for alternatives.   
On a personal level that's forgiveness, on an ideational    
level the writers' different contexts are critical,    
on the level of subject we need to discuss these issues

of institutions, communities, nodes, persons, subjects,
and others as they apply to networking. Otherwise 
we get one person wanting to have a poetry discussion, 
another an exchange of sources on issues, another 
"what I think of this writer".

And all of these have their place here, although I have
said I think that some are effective here and others   
off putting or even scandalizing, since we are not
all the same on the net, simply equal.  
And here is where Bernstein's list of rules  

Is more vital to me than the subjects of poets,   
issues, and personal exchanges arising from  
misunderstanding that we are messaging  
to equals that are not the same.   
Any discussion must begin with recognition of the variety of components.   

The net is not only an institution and beginning with any one    
component risks forefronting it to valorize or criticise    
which is not the point. Here there is a method to apply.    
Yet the application of rules by an individual does raise    
an issue of polity that can be institutionalized. 

It must be questioned before it is institutionalized.  
That is why we must be glad to hear from CB about his  
rules and regs and we should all have input on the subject  
before we get so far down the road that they have become    
binding assumptions.

PLEASE READ THOSE RULES AND CHANGE THEM TO SUIT US.    
ANYONE WHO WILL NOT CONTRIBUTE WILL SUFFER   
FROM ALLOWING OTHERS TO MAKE THE DECISIONS.  
PLEASE CONSIDER ALL THE COMPONENTS AND EVEN  
LIST THEM TO AVOID MISSING AN IMPORTANT ONE. 

I for one cast a ballot for a clearly stated list of rules  
governing network management to be published and discussed  
and within the boundaries of the mechanics put into place   
with the consent of contributors. Here CBs rules and Ben    
Friedlander's problem of public and private can be addressed.    

Please, Charles simplify and complete your management rules 
indicating those which are in place and those which are contemplated. 
I'm not sure I understand or can sort them among all the prose.  
For those who think this a bad idea because it's not free,  
we can go back to that discussion, but it's probably not to the point.

Since it's not free now as Ben found and can only get to be so by defining 
boundaries within which we can be free, publishing will help.    
For those who think it's not poetry, remember poetic form.  
We are here defining a form within this forum which I hope  
I've convinced most is different enough from other forums torequire   
preconception. 

Too many forums I've been in have dissolved because some one
overstepped and the group disintegrated from a combination  
of boredom, anger, guilt, and irrelevance. Which of our problems 
in other forums can we avoid bringing to this one? 1. list of rules. 2.    
list of components of the net that are relevant to consider.

JS (provisionally)  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 25-FEB-1
994 05:36:00.29
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RULES  

Date: Fri, 25 Feb 1994 00:21:05 -0700   
From: "GENE E. HULT" <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RULES 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

ALL--

Gotta be rules, gotta be rules.... my only suggestion would be   
for everyone to drop our competative defenses... yes, we're all  
(all?  don't hesitate to challenge my words in your mouth) writers,   
we're all adrift on the seas of language, knowledge, learning, yes,   
we're all human.  But, as G.B Trudeau once wrote re: We are the World 
-- Welcome, and check your egos at the door.  Respect is rule #1,
perhaps personal honesty rule #2?  

Ah, the vultures circle... water, water!

Gene H.   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 25-FEB-1
994 21:04:45.85
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   RE: angry boys   

Date: Fri, 25 Feb 1994 21:04:22 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: RE: angry boys  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Kristen --

Yesterday I posted something which I hoped would help us to recognize 
that this space is provisional and the tone of that post was intended to   
be generous, or open, available. In addition to being projective, it also  
was reflexive, critical of the institutional form that this space sometimes
takes and sometimes this boy's a part of.    

I began to think about the "angry boys" post not really dealt with in my   
agreement in part with your "What is the point of all this  
talk about community..." and I again focused on tone; not as rhetoric, but 
as   
the personal and of a reflection of understanding.

I think it was clear that Jennifer's "institution" letter was not an  
invective 
intended to silence, or chastise, or to be critical of a person, but of an 
institution. I think that the debilitating facets of "the institution,"    
though more insidious, can be compared to a rhetoric intended to chasten,  
or publicly ridicule. That you chose to air your frustration at Ben   
publicly, not at the institution,  seems to me to ally you with forces of  
marginalization that you 
so refute. At least they speak to public frustrations that I don't see
comensurate with his private "anger."   

This note is not to chasten at all, but to bring into light and into focus 
the  
means of our discussions and the motivations behind them. This is not to   
soften rhetoric either, to marginalize through a modality. I know the tone 
of   
this post is self-conscious, but forthright. Thas tone is itself a    
contingency, provisional and by no means is used to set a tone for our
discussion, or for our heated debate. It so often happens that a mode, or a
tone sets up a kind of hegemony; but that hegemony by its very existence is
necessarily open to challenge, not necessarily is the person open to such a
challenge. I just can't help but wonder which was the focus of your quite  
public ire.    

Patrick   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 26-FEB-1
994 21:47:33.15
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   silence, gender, two horses in another world   

Date: Sat, 26 Feb 1994 21:46:39 -0500   
From: Juliana Spahr <[email-masked]>  
Subject: silence, gender, two horses in another world  
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Then the water seems to talk and I am Joan of
Arc or Jean Arthur hearing voices, I am nei- 
ther a woman nor a man but an ethereal person
leading two horses in another world; where my
sex is something I can't recognize, the face 
of a mandrill, a kind of football, the drama 
of wind blowing cold gray clouds past the    
sightless moon, you only see this figure on a
screen from the room of the other dream I    
would have told you like prayers if the rain 
hadn't made me so pale and winter was my only
memory, besides every time I say I dreamed   
the phone rings and the kind young man  
replaces the window and seals up the hole    
above the heaters, it's Triptolemus, pour    
holy water on his head this morning.    
 --Bernadette Mayer,  %The Desires of Mothers
  to Please Others in Letters%

Missent letters are always fascinating. The places
they end up--the garbage dump peopled with pick-  
ers, sifters, and its analog, the mailbox of the  
virtual community--are places where one wants to  
be. The space of what goes on underneath the veil 
of community-talk becomes suddenly exposed. Read- 
ing the missent letter one is trespasser and owner
of the sacred nature of "communication" and its   
pal "community." We know we never control our
words; this much is obvious. Or what I want to    
say, is Ben's letter, which showed us how our
words and signals to senders betray, and its 
replies should have opened things up, freed us    
from the belief that our thought must be clear and
level-headed at every moment, not closed them
down.

But lets face it--it closed things down. And the  
opposite of missent, the unsent letter, is just   
plain unsettling. I have been complaining about   
this discussion of community to a number of people
(gender: F) over the last couple of weeks. One    
writes: Are the woman just not hooked up tech-    
nologically? (I think the answer is no.) Another, 
hoping to find some angel therein...Feel a bit    
left off/out of the dis. And another, It is too   
horrible to talk about on e-mail.  

Discomforting or not, the issue of those identity 
centered social construct cliches (race, class,   
and gender) have been pointedly absent from the   
community discussion of community. The definition 
of community on this list has been as a con- 
sequence an uneasy one (after all, these con-
structs are dominant discussions in our culture,  
they compose almost every discussion of community.
I do not mean to indict those involved in this    
discussion but rather to point to how rigorous our
avoidance of them has been). So Jennifer's   
response, which I read (although she should cor-  
rect me if she feels I am softening it in some    
way) as one that does not attack the continual    
male presence on the list, attacks the noted 
absence of gender in the discussion. She notices  
"invigorated but shut down"; "at least I have dis-
hes"; "the house that shut the door." She wants a 
"keen eye." This eye she wants from all of us,    
every gender.  

A. L. Nielson came and gave a talk the other day  
on the social constructions of identity (his con- 
centration: race). This is something that is in   
vogue in the academy. I like this argument. Race, 
gender, class, all %are% social constructs. But   
always I am left wanting the next step. To apply  
to my experience, I am always trying to escape my 
gender. I want to be virtual. I want to be   
believed when I am in various forms of drag. But  
this argument about the social construct is one   
that always leaves me wanting. At the same time   
that part of me wants to celebrate, another part  
of me tells me to wake up. The word "drag" and    
"passing" speaks not of our ability to transcend  
these social structures, but rather that there is 
an institutionalized name (and thus definition    
with its limitations) of this transcendence. As we
are always filling out forms, we are always check-
ing off boxes. So--What do I do now that I recog- 
nize that this thing that I am told that I am dur-
ing a great part of my day is a construct?; Can I 
join a self-help group about escaping my construc-
tion?; Buy a manual for creating a new one?; Take 
riding lessons for Bernadette's two horses?  

I guess my question is where should this "keen    
eye" look? And more specifically to Ben, how do   
you reconfigure, review, whatever, the power, the 
overwhelming presence, of male discourse on this  
list?

Juliana Spahr  
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 27-FEB-1
994 14:36:42.80
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   the purloined    

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 1994 14:37:25 -0500   
From: Patrick Phillips <[email-masked]>    
Subject: the purloined   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

Spun from Julianna's idea of "missent" letter is that of the
"purloined" that too has a margin, but one which is much    
more motivated, less mis-taken; the purloined preceeds, "creates"
the unsent letter. I just wonder what sets up this area
of theft, of what goes unwritten, and how unsettling it
is, or where, as some kind of unmeasurable quanta of   
experience, this unsettling goes on in some kind of purloined    
sphere.   

So there is the purloined experience that goes unquantified.

But we know who is stolen and who steals.    

Yet, our aesthetic mix ellides the search and the letter sometimes    
to the point that we aren't sure who's the inspecter and who's   
the theif.

We often seem to remain in the hiatus of this discovery. This hiatus  
resembles the virtual, as some "secret drawer." But we all know  
that there is a "certain amount of bulk-of space-to be accounted for  
in every cabinet." It's purely physical.

"But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?"    

I'm not sure how we "sound" such spaces without attributing..... 

This is where characteristics come in, gender, the physiognomy of
"this space," the "tone" of the object sounded, the "institution"
of discovery.  

"I presume you looked into the mirrors, between the boards and   
the plates, and you probed the beds and the bedclothes...You
include[d] the "grounds" of the houses?"

In some ways I wish to remain stolen, but I steal which makes that    
somewhat impossible. Perhaps I'll never apprehend my thief, but I
will "examine [him] to better purpose in the dark." There too lies the
unseen and the unsent.   

Patrick   
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 27-FEB-1
994 16:33:38.13
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   sounding))) ) )  )   )    )

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 1994 16:30:22 -0500   
From: Martin Spinelli <[email-masked]>
Subject: sounding))) ) )  )   )    )    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Being a tender sort, I dwelt for hours over what I
read as Charles' dissatisfaction at what he sees and   
doesn't see here... and more hours still over Gene's   
suggestion that we "check our egos at the door."  But  
in the end I only found myself questioning their (very 
different) expectations. 

In Hans Enzensberger's  "Constituents of a theory of the    
media" (_NLR_ #64) I found these same anxieties over   
"response".    

the utopia in Enzensberger's article is made possible  
through "mass participation in the social and socialized    
productive process."  the Vision is this:  everyone a  
participant.  that is a participation in the media -- in    
its production.  he says at once that media can produce
the Social and production can control the media.  

more interestingly for us Enze says the social power is
in response.  *response is power*  shutting down response   
is domination. 

in spite of the optimistic rhetoric, Enze himself gives
us examples of media's failed potential (which he never
sufficiently recuperates).  in the hands of his "masses"    
short wave radio is pathetically impotent, badly  
imitating bad examples form commercial radio.  the goal
of his idealized liberated media is "mobilization" (vague   
throughout).  whatever it is, radio hams don't have it.
they are isolated and remain so.  somehow mobilization 
for Eze must be physical.  an intellectual mobilization,    
a mobilization of response seems possible both on radio
and on the Net.  Community needs dialog.

the Net, the medium with the potential for response,   
can't equal Eze's imagination.  initially and in places
there is a vocalization in unison at places if not an  
"organization" or "mobilization".  but looking further it   
is lacking:  there are only prolific and pervasive
fragments, all their own centers or all speaking equally    
comfortably from the margins.  can a greater Social exist   
without interaction tween the fragms, without impetus  
towards the improvement of the Whole?  (yet there is this   
impetus around the hardware -- everyone wants to improve    
the medium itself.) 

Where is the revolution? 

there is the opportunity to exercise power -- to say   
something.  like a baudrillard essay nothing is heard  
before [EOB] or after the last footnote.  containment. 
what would the virtual revolution look like? erev?
control cannot be taken of anything on the Inside -- for    
the first time the Inside is the place bereft of power 
and imagination, bereft of agency with the simulation of    
agency.... curiously supervised    
 scrutinized   
 Clippered
 surreptitiously ceansuored   
 evaluated
 categorized   
 and 
 fast
(it posits an new class.sys:  the techobourgeoisie over
the infobourgeoisie.)    

again Eze:  media's power is its mobilization of the   
masses.  but real mobilization coming from media would 
presume at most three channels (three access points,   
three meanings all referringtoeachother).  mobilization
is an anomaly on the Net because of the infinity of    
channels and the infinity of messages...is it enough to
be united around a medium?  to have a vested interest in    
the medium, to be dependent on it?  there is a kind of 
mobilization around this but it can only ever be mustered   
_in support_ of the medium.  with an infinity of  
channnels, consumption and production don't just get   
blurred.  production *becomes* consumption.  supporting
a right to production is only like good advertizing... 
teaching us we're not really happy.  we didn't know how
unhappy we were.  responding erodes.  the mic is too   
close to the amp.   

feedback... the repetition of what has already been    
transmitted  fading and distorted but essentially the  
same as what has already been said.  the difference    
between feedback and response is the difference between
a system of simulations and asystem of meaning?  Badrill    
is great on this in his "The Masses":  public opinion  
polls dictate the limits of public experience.    

in his media strategy which seeks to end isolation (read    
"alienation")   COMMUNITY IS MANDATORY  

Eze is aware that a sys in which everyone    
produces/expresses will yield only noise.  noise which 
does not hold one's interest like nonsense but is only 
irritating -- distressing.  here he says that the masses    
must be taught to be better producers if the utopian   
mobilization is to be realized.  in this way they could
record their daily experiences and learn from them.    
again organization is liberating not the tech that
provides it.   

on the net you can respond to the message, and only    
indirectly, inadvertently about the medium.  you use the    
Net yet you cannot have a dialog with the Net.    

there is a danger when the link between community and  
medium becomes too perfect (seemless, transparent as tech   
pretends it can make it)  *as obvious intrusions of the
media begin to disappear more completely the less there
will be to say*  the connection is the only viable issue,   
source and site of discourse.  as it evaporates so must
communication. 

the resistance of the medium, the time spent in the    
friction of translation/communication allows for  
rumination, for contemplation, for thought (even if it is   
only an examination of its deployment).  when this space    
disappears all we will be able to do is sit and stare. 

the eze short term solution:  authors and producers must    
work as agents for the masses and only when the masses 
learn to cut tape and mix music can the producer "lose 
himself".  This is how he ultimately solves the noise  
problem.  

as media are currently constituted (one-directionally),
*response* is anti-media.  the ideal response that Eze is   
after must go beyond the limits he sets for it.  it must    
be outside like spray paint on the monitor.  Badrill   
claims there exists "a possible subversion of the code of   
the media [in the] possibility of alternative speech and    
a radical reciprocity of symbolic exchange." 

exchange is the radical thing... but exchange of what...    
a change must happen in the exchange -- reworking it into   
what is an anti-aesthetic -- (anti- to the aesthetic of
the professional media and the OED) -- upset the  
hegemony, don't believe theauthorityandtwsit its  
structure with implied orthography.  Signify without   
rules.  ignore Expectations.  

the Net is not often used in  
the  way  say Bill or Ben or  
Jonathan (Howe, Freidlander,  
Fernandez, three that came    
first to mind) use language   
in  their  poetry.   the 
   materiality of the Net
   is  not often tinkered
   with --thought about --    
   addressed as  something    
   other than a transparent   
   medium of  representing    
   (thought or something).    
the hegemony of these lingos  
is not exposed  or disrupted  
by  toying   with,  or  even  
showing, the structure.   it  
is  believed in.    we  must  
lose/loose our faith.    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 28-FEB-1
994 12:17:02.62
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   two horses  

Date: Mon, 28 Feb 1994 11:58:38 -0500   
From: cynthia kimball <[email-masked]>
Subject: two horses 
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   
Organization: University at Buffalo

Ghost that I am--or is ghosting an act, so I 
"ghost" but AM not a ghost--I read these messages 
invisibly, until now silently.  I FEEL invisible  
and safe that way, to be perfectly honest.  I'm   
scared right now writing, don't even know if this 
post will post, don't want to expose my silence   
my silent reading presence.  Female that I am--or is   
female-ing an act, so that I can "check my gender at   
the door" (no double meaning intended), be a ghost
pass judgment and take sides and change my mind with   
every new side there is to take without exposing the   
vulnerable new sprouts of opinions to the frost   
while in the process of sprouting them....Is my silence
because I'm female and feel left out or am I leaving   
myself out because I'm female or am I a temporarily    
ungendered ghost because I haven't claimed my USERID   
in front of anyone yet for whatever fear-full reasons. 
I could choose a male pseudonym that would protect my  
silence a little longer.  I thought about it.  Anyway  
Im going back into the ether for a while.    
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 28-FEB-1
994 21:01:40.22
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   *Repair Work*    

Date: Mon, 28 Feb 1994 15:05:40 -0500 (EST)  
From: Steve Evans <[email-masked]>    
Subject: *Repair Work*   
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

In my experience as a young recruit from the post-no-fault-divorce-secretarial- 
working-class into the technobourgeoisie...  

But can a sentence really begin that way?    

I think a keen eye should be kept, as Charles has already indicated, on the
way our apparently *elective* affinities are underpinned by *selective* in-
stitutions. Cross out that  "s"  and the drainage pipe starts pumping inertial  
goo  (mystification) into the discursive stream...  We all go belly up.    

The question of how to generate maximum democracy in an institution that is
fundamentally anti-democratic obviously cannot be suspended until "the others"  
arrive.  Should we then call an constituent assembly, as James Sherry recom-    
mends?  Or would people on  this list see in that just another act of mysti-    
fication? 

The question of "how universal is the university" (to quote an analogous   
debate, cf. *transition* a few volumes back) is obviously *not very.*  But 
how convert that answer into a political project if not on the basis of    
a concept of real universality?    

Education is a generalizable interest; those of us who write, publish, teach,   
read, get all upset about, and sacrifice our sanity to, poetic practice are
also sometimes acting so as to *generalize* an interest in poetry.  Sometimes   
we're just making moves on one another for the sake of maximizing our own  
symbolic capital. No amount of individual saintliness will purify our acts 
of formation of this element (saints actually understand symbolic capital  
better than most sinners do), but rigorous and humorous techniques of de-  
flation are a resource we should never forget to renew and use.  

I think the theoreticians of ecstatic communication are of extremely limited    
relevance to our situation here.  However inappropriate the model of *com- 
municative action* advanced by Jurgen Habermas may be when it comes to
thinking through our aesthetics, a   sublimity-soaked aesthetics-pretending-to- 
be-politics is an even worse cognitive liability when it comes to thinking 
through the politics of this for(u)m.   

Nomads with newtons = monads with modems?    

I think we're in a situation where un-coerced agreement on how to proceed  
is possible.  I think we've done very little so far to identify and thematize   
resources and commitments that are shared and that might come in handy when
a little *repair work* is necessary...  

Finally, because Pierre Joris and Tom Mandel's joint-post a while ago brought   
up the issue of "outcomes" as something "communities" usually have at their
disposal for sanctioning the unruly, and because we have been trafficking in    
negative outcomes for long enough, I would like to tick down the list of out-   
comes experienced by this participant at least as positive. 

Because of this list, I have either read or re-read: Diane Ward's *Imaginary    
Movie,*   Reznikoff's *Testimony,* Erica Hunt's *Notes for an Oppositional 
Poetics,* Bernstein's *Reznikoff's Nearness,* Susan Stewart's article in *Pro-  
fession 93,* to mention just the ones I can remember here at work.  Because
of this list, and specifically the discussion of our failure to address    
gender until recently, I had an alternate context in which to place the    
gender politics of the Kootenay School Writers who just passed through Provi-   
dence to our great delight last week.  Likewise, when Susan Stewart gives a
lecture tomorrow on *Lyric History* I'll know a context in which what she says  
is apparently already known... I could go on...   

This list opens a dimension within social space. It is *not* a social space
unto itself (I would feel sad for anyone who found it so). Every contradiction  
that governs our social order will be visible at one time or another here in    
this dimension. That should not surprise us.  That should not shut us down.
At the minimum, the fact that postings do not cancel one another out--as   
monologues in real time conversations and seminars and public meetings do--
should be recognized and explored. The low opinion of how things are going 
so far (in the sent, the unsent, and the missent postings) reminds me a lot
of the "mood" that kept threatening to congeal at the *New Coast* festival 
last spring in Buffalo.  Now I know that complaint and gossip are vital signs   
("that's not a cross look it's a sign of life") that something is happening.    
I also know that most complaints are grounded: things are *that* bad. But given 
the relative scarcity of occasions when something can actually be done about    
what's bad, it seems almost lazy to keep on in those modes. 

A thought, like any other relationship, isn't real until you risk it. 

Steve
From:   IN%"[email-masked]"  "UB Poetics discussion group" 28-FEB-1
994 21:16:05.16
To:IN%"[email-masked]"  "Multiple recipients of list POETICS" 
CC:  
Subj:   community, gender

Date: Mon, 28 Feb 1994 18:42:20 -0500 (EST)  
From: Hans-Joachim Rieke <[email-masked]>  
Subject: community, gender    
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <[email-masked]> 
Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group <[email-masked]>   

I wanted to avoid raising the gender question, as the effect usually is, that   
women suddenly speak up, but are at the same time cornered, labelled, hemed in  
by the topic. Women talking/writing only to write about gender.  
Personally I don't feel excluded by the jargon of the discussions. Many of the  
books that are being talked about are not available, or not immedeately so,
for me, so I am content to "listen", read, and I don't feel like a peeping Tom  
for it. Not all of what is being discussed is interesting anyway, and I need a  
longer time forming my own ideas about e-mail effects on discourse, at the 
reading Flusser and Bolz and others on the topic. A lot of what is going on in  
this list seems the public continuation of private discourse of e-mailing, so   
that it is often difficult to cross the gaps.
What I do not quite understand though is, if I personally address people,  
asking simply for information, that I didn't get an answer more than once -
gender unrelated by the way. This is more than rudeness, it has to do with 
community. I was a little surprised anyway how little the various
investigations of the term community were touched by a Foucauldian    
understanding of how discourse funtions; if I understand him rightly, 
community is not only made by the collective of all speech acts, the absent
presence of all participants, but equally so by all speech acts that are   
silenced, excluded, treated as "gibberish", foolishness, etc.    
Only a "huh? for a critical letter by Arcadii is not much worry indeed.    
Finally I find amusing, the indignation (read emotional outburst) the "woman    
speak" (?) created by the private/public letter...