performative poetic mortification! the Broadside was appreciated

The broadside I produced for Charles Bernstein's reading was well-received by both him and the attendees. I will soon have it scanned, then post it here, as well as on my website. Though I was excited while at the event, it is always something of a disappointment, as most of my excitement occurs during the procedure, the act of production.  

I am thankful to Blake Butler, William Moor, Walter K. Lew, Dillon Westbrook & J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden for their contributions. I also am thankful for my wife's contribution, which involved acting on behalf of William Moor: using a yellow pencil to circle every word in the poem 150 times. 

Charles Bernstein genuinely expressed appreciation for the piece, both at the reading and in a subsequent email. I felt appreciated. In particular, I was most gratified upon witnessing his own fountain-pen produced typographia: notes, edits, sketches and E.D.-style word alternatives scrawled about the surface of the broadside while in the act of penning his signature. He also personalized a number of them. This was entirely in the spirit of this production, and more than I could have hoped for. He referred to this as his "own final collaboration as cancellation/holograph, fitting both to "Recantorium" and "Every True Religion.""

"Every True Religion is Bound To Fail" is the title of the poem printed in the broadside. "Recantorium" is the title of the poem he read that evening. In the latter poem, he repeatedly and repeatedly recants his poetic waywardness, his socio-poetically sinful swerve toward experimenting with language and context. He plays the straight man, long-faced and too genuine. It gets early and quick laughs. More laughs follow, but as the pattern of recantation, the flogging-like rhythm  of every apologetic synonym compounded, continues, the laughter becomes agitated, less unanimous, more sparse, like the last few kernels of corn surrendering inside the microwave. In the end, looking back on the form as it occurred in our ears, I see that he's guiltier than ever. The audience is left somewhat battered. Again, like having watched a catholic priest enacting corporal mortification, but this is performative poetic mortification enacted by a Jew. 

Getting back to the broadside, his own inscribed additions are also kind(s) of recantation(s), nixing previous lines and words for new ones, changing "fail" to "succeed," or to "win," even emphasizing a rhetorical recant of rhetoric. I'm left thinking that perhaps all apologies is equal to no apologies. It was exciting to hear this poem read aloud. Exciting to be battered this way. I thought about it as a broadside, & I think it would either be impossible or awful. 

Lastly, I've begun compiling a list of possible broadside collaborations & methods. In the meantime, I will take a break from printing. 

Paolo Javier read his poems on Saturday at Segue

Paolo Javier (editor of 2nd Avenue) & Samuel R. Delaney (renown lit critic & sci-fi writer) read yesterday at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the ongoing Segue Series facilitated by Tim Peterson. 

I've been wanting to go to the series for some time, but couldn't conjure up the initiative until Paolo invited me. Added incentive was Walter Lew being in town & all of us going out for drinks afterward. 

I arrived immediately after the reading began, just as Tim Peterson finished up his introduction of Paolo. Despite still having my bag slung over my shoulder, my jacket on, and not yet having found a seat, I felt comfortable and at east as Paolo's voice and presence filled the stage. He is speaks causally, not so differently than he does in person, but in both cases he manages to maintain an intelligent tone. His language is informal, but not colloquial; it is relaxed, but not unstructured. 

The work he presented was culled from a diverse set of projects, some in progress, some complete. He mentioned his regret that he wouldn't be able to share much of his recent work, as it involved multiple mediums (& presumably technology he did not currently have at his disposal). One such project I had the pleasure of experiencing in progress and completion, when several months ago he performed as part of shadoWord productions, a kind of improvised reworking of written text in response to real time drawings being produced by Ernest Concepcion and Mike Estabrook on overhead projectors. 

This kind of formalist dynamism is also present in Paolo's unaccompanied readings. After informing us that he'd become interested in the practice(s) of private languages, he read a long poem utilizing his adaptation of "baby talk." It sounds terribly obnoxious, and it would be if he chose not to stop short of complicating the possibilities of otherwise generally dismissed utterances. A later poem somehow brought together Bill Murray and Hans Arp, though I think Hans Arp was used primarily as some kind of adjective or verb.

He often addresses a kind of Beloved in his poem, which lends itself (as well as continues to define) his casual tone(s). He is also aware of his romantic  (i.e. Blake/Shelley &/or a dozen red roses) tendencies, but never sinks into smarmy sentiment or saccharine schmaltz. 

He does sometimes use profanity. Mainly shit, and the occasional fuck. They aren't excessive in quantity, but whether it's Paolo's work, or anyone else's, I still can't reconcile the use of profanity with its various poetic applications. I suppose the argument might follow, if you are a writer who adopts a conversational tone (or creates a conversation in your poem), it follows that the language of your conversations could ostensibly be sustainably practiced in your conversational renderings of thoughts and things. I understand the logic, I think. But never the less, whether I'm reading alone or being read to, I'm often disoriented by casual profanity. I sometimes miss the following three lines because I'm still trying to reconcile what that 'shit' means. I want to emphasize "casual" profanity. In cases where the poem itself addresses, or is in some spirit of, the profane, the 'rules' must be very different. 

That said, Paolo's reading wasn't at all disrupted by his minimal use of casual profanity, so perhaps my point is null. 

After the reading, I met Jill Magi, editor of Sona Books, who recently published a chapbook written and drawn by Paolo and Ernest Concepcion. I bought the book & have read it. The Cut-&-Paste poetry/imagery combo reminds me of the Bee & Bernstein books put out by Granary Books. As with Paolo & Ernest's shadoWord collaboration, it is difficult to determine which came first, the picture or the text. The text is minimal, never much more than 12 words on a page. They read more like captions, headlining or underlining Ernest's comically and sexually surreal urban aquatic line drawings. They are available at SonaWeb. 

Afterward, a group of us walked to whatever the name of the rather nondescript restaurant at 9 Stanton is. It was a fine group of people. All of them intelligent, but not pretending toward anything. Everyone was comfortable, each of us exchanging ideas and questions, occasionally toasting to health and Paolo's success. 

Anne Tardos, who a previous mentor of mine spoke highly of, sat to my left. I payed her end of the tab in exchange for a copy of the Dik-dik's Solitude, which she has promised to send me. It is a very large book and well worth a meal. 

Walter Lew, up from the University of Miami, broke his eyeglasses for the first time in his life. I fixed them. He's currently working on a unique and complicated project called The Ga-Guhm Poems. 

I also met Cecilia Wu who co-edits critiphoria, a new online journal with an ambitious statement of purpose. Their first issue is Very Big, and includes work by more than FIVE writers I've enjoyed reading. This is a good journal to watch (& read).  

This was an excellent night. My wife even thought so, & she is a fierce critic of gatherings with academic undertones (overtones). And we should all be, since they're generally intimidating and tense, all those inflated skulls smacking against each other. Such a racket.

I felt as if I'd stumbled into a community, though a reading series isn't necessarily a community. It is, at heart, a stage. Still, I intend to go to readings more often after a success like this one.  

film-telling vs. movietelling: (no subject)

Linh Dinh's recent post on Harriet Blog is about Movietelling. 

He shares his exchange with David Larsen, as well as excerpts of Vietnamese-American writer and critic Thuy Dinh conveying her thoughts on historical film narration in Vietnam.

See Linh Dinh's movietelling piece, A Smooth Life.

In other movietelling news...

Konrad Steiner goes Northwest with Neo-Benshi, along with David Larsen & other Bay Area poets. They're joining up with a group of Portland-based artists and writers to put on: The New Talkies: Portland-San Francisco Neo-Benshi Cabaret. (May 3rd)

Just when I was about to give up my regular google search for various film narration activities, this one comes along. Sadly, I won't be able to make it out to Portland this week, but perhaps someone will be kind enough to archive some of the event on-line. 

As excited as I am just to know this event is taking place, I was disappointed upon reading Konrad Steiner's "Curator's Statement." As I'm going to write about its specifics, I'll post it here:

The "benshi" is the name for the accomplished actor/writer who wrote scripts to narrate live to projected films in Japan, where the profession reached its commercial and popular apex in the 1920s, more than in any other country, mainly because of a prosperous and prolific Japanese film industry.

There have been many variations of talking during a movie over the global history of film. The long tradition behind this current wave of interest in the form includes hecklers in theaters, dads in living rooms with their home movies, professional narrators of silent documentaries, the reknowned film-tellers in Europe and Asia, right up to TV shows like Jay Ward's Fractured Flickers in the 1960s and Mystery Science 
Theater in the 1990s.

The task of accompanying silent film is usually left to musicians. It becomes the task of writers to silence the talkies and revive the image whose meaning has been controlled and even restricted by the corporate culture of mass entertainment and mass profit. The benshi can take back the cinema, and anyone with a DVD player and a remote can give it a shot.

First off, I appreciate his anyone-can-do-it conclusion, as well as mentioning that there are ways in which a kind of spectator film narration is frequently taking place as part of a casual practice (i.e. home movies, hecklers etc). But in general, these qualities are spliced with a contrary agenda, as he opens his statement with a "benshi" definition that spends more time qualifying its dominance as a practice than it does actually wrestling with its definition. 

In an attempt to diffuse the exclusifying effects of the previous paragraph, he begins the second paragraph with a statement that translates something like: Even though the "benshi" were the predominant and most popular of the film narrators, many other people have "talked during a movie." The humor is more insulting than insightful. He may as well have begun that first sentence, "Of course, there have been many variations..." 

Among those who talk during movies, he counts "film-tellers in Europe and Asia." 

"film-tellers" vs. "movietellers." Is this similar to the semantic implications implied by saying "I've just screened a film" vs. "We went to the movies?" Or is there some other distinction? As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference, but why the distinction?

As a side note, some of those early practitioners of film narration in Europe and Asia were the Gavrilov Translators in Russia (a tradition maintained even into the 1980's), the Pyonsa in Korea, the Benzi in Taiwan, the Lector in Poland, as well as orators in Vietnam, France, and the Southern United States. All of this was happening at the same time, prompted by the influx of new mediums and technology (films), and the necessity of translation. 

In his final paragraph, Steiner heralds the subversive nature of the benshi. "The benshi can take back the cinema..." This is preceded by "It becomes the task of the writers to silence the talkies and revive the image whose meaning has been controlled and even restricted by the corporate culture of mass entertainment and mass profit." Let me juxtapose this with a more constructive quote from Linh Dinh's recent post on Harriet Blog: "Pivoted on a film, a successful movie telling narration surprises and enlightens viewers with a series of verbal tangents that riff on, play with, subvert the shown image." 

Subversion is built into the function/form of movietelling. Subversion is there in the act of altering the script, reissuing personalities, and crossing over from one medium to the next, but it's not always done well. Sometimes the effect is weak as a result of literal depictions, & sometimes the entire experience is an unpleasant collision between the filmmakers directed images and the film narrators trying to erase the effects of those images. Steiner claims, without providing any exception, that the images used by film narrators are dead of meaning and constrained by corporate culture, there value being primarily entertainment and profit. Steiner works for the SF Cinemateque... are the films they sponsor also considered waste to be recycled by a film narrator? 

One mark of a good film narrator/ movieteller/ neo-benshi, what have you, is a respect for the material being used: the film. I understand that some films are used because of their accepted lack of value, and that is a fine form of subversion, but that does not define the intent of film narration in general. 

The (katsuben) benshi were not subversive. They were not against the predominant culture or mass sentiments. More often than not, they were exceptionally pro-mass sentiments, in that pro-imperialist "popular apex in the 1920's" kind of way. Their performances, more so than their international contemporaries, maintained a definitively traditional practice, and most of the modern Japanese benshi continue to do so.

Walter Lew who heads up shadoWord (a contemporary production of movietelling and cinepoetics) provides an alternative perspective:

A fascinating, oft-neglected fact of world film history is that nearly everywhere movies have been regularly shown there was an era in which they were screened with live speech by orators or voice actors. The katsuben of Japan and pyônsa of Korea were the most celebrated forms of this once-global practice. Sometimes praised during their heyday as “poets of the dark,” in Korea the most iconoclastic “movietellers” risked imprisonment or worse to share their interpretations of films with local communities.

Perhaps they would have approved of the wit and freedom with which [contemporary] poets have chosen to recast the 20th century’s most powerful and oppressive artistic form.

I continue to explore movietelling as a practice. I spend an equal amount of time in search of instances of live film narration or creative dubbing. Though sometimes treated as a fad, this practice has roots around the globe, and its continued practice has the potential to bring together the cultural nuances and practical techniques behind each. It has also begun to provide a creative space where filmmakers, poets, performance artists, and musicians collaborate and improvise. I don't want to take back the cinema. If it was lost to me, I don't think I'd feel compelled to practice film narration. I want to confront cinema. I want to subvert specifically, rather than demonstrating my capacity to subvert a medium in general. 

For more information on movietelling and related subjects, follow the Movieteling label of this post to several previous posts pertaining to the subject(s).

Teaching at the University of Miami (& writing again)

I've just returned from my trip to Miami, where I taught an undergraduate and a graduate course on self-publishing and book making, focusing on chapbooks, page layouts, and the politics of publishing within a specific community. 

I stayed with Walter Lew, who was also responsible for presenting me with the opportunity in the first place. Borrowing from the New York Center for Book Arts, as well as my own extensive collection, I hauled down with me a vast variety of chapbooks and book models. Several such models were constructed in class, and each was discussed. 

In short, it went quite well, and I hope to post some of my class notes in subsequent entries. Walter & I also took the opportunity to have several in depth discussions about movietelling, and, more specifically, potential directions for shadoWord productions. Thoughts concerning these discussion will also be present in soon-to-be posted subsequent entries. 

As a final note, I've begun working on a chapbook of my own. The working (& potentially permanent title) is "MIAMI Anxiety & SENSE." I haven't written anything new in more than a few months. This somewhat lengthy work has been and will continue to be a divergence from nearly all of my previous directions, with the exception of some of the themes I began to tamper with just prior to my no longer writing. If anything, I promise it to be very fresh and new. Stay tuned.