1-Year Plan
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Archive of posts

Synopses of posts:
Year 1 (2004–5)

Prospect: Horizon Work

I have been planning over the past year to develop a writing project that would take place in time, on a regular basis, and that would publish its findings on the internet. The writing would be a record of the time in which it was written, and would act on and change that time—if only as a matter of understanding. The writing would hope to change itself, as writing, within the time it was written. I wanted to specify a duration for the writing of one year, and a frequency of roughly one text per week. If all goes well, at the end of the year there would be an index of texts, posted once or twice a month, with commentary and links.

Post 1: The Turn to Language

A section of The Grand Piano, an on-going, multi-authored account of the San Francisco poetics community in the 1970s. The following excerpt from section 5 also appeared as the introduction to the new edition of Ron Silliman's Tjanting (Salt Press). I am re-presenting it here as an autonomous work. As Larry Eigner notably remarked, "Contexts, ah!"

Post 2: Oren Izenberg's Collective Poetics [to come]

"Language Poetry and Collective Life" is the most recent in a series of essays on the Language School in the flagship critical journal. . . . I want to test the prospects of Izenberg's position—which may only be proven by the degree to which it is taken up, not only by poets closer in their own view to the source, but to readers with other agendas. What will Izenberg's view of the Language School have been?

Post 3: Three Tests of Zukofsky

Three tests, then, for Zukofsky obtain this result: of the failed schism between expression and construction in his historical poetics; of the limited horizon of experience as a refunctioning of that divide; and of the need for a reading of the texts that have been "substituted" and "overwritten" in the construction of the work—toward a continuing poetics.

Links: "Tribute to Zukofsky" and "Zukofsky's Historicism"

Post 4: Ana Mendieta: Restaging Depth

Ana Mendieta's work is informed, before any claims to depth, by a generous and productive irony that makes the sequence of its occasions a form of noncoincidence, rather than hypertrophic reinforcement. In other words, her work accedes to further horizons precisely because it opens up a faultline between its inscription within a stabilizing form of interpretation (such as genre or feminism or poetry). 

Post 5: Defend Derrida!

Jacques Derrida's obituary in the New York Times is an index to the reactive jingoism that stands in place of intellectual debate in this country. It is a grand symptom of xenophobia, the "fear of the other" that has produced a series of scapegoats in the second half of the twentieth century, from communists under the bed to Freedom Fries and the Axis of Evil. Derrida must be defended as a site for questioning this fear of the other. 

Post 6: Left Modernism

In Right modernism, a hyper-realized, reconstituted authorship tries to equate political authority with the construction of a subject-centered formal order that fixes or stabilizes the aporias of modernity, while in Left modernism, an other-directed, self-reflexive authorship makes an intervention into situations or events occurring within and as modernity. If this analogy holds, modernism’s self-reflexive autonomy may be more a hypostatized ideal than a norm, only one among many along the way toward its further articulation—in which multiple, heteronomous modernisms “go to their encounter” with modernity.

A paper presented at a session of the October 2004 conference of the Modernist Studies Association in Vancouver, along with work by Carla Billiterri and Jonathan Flatley [to come].

Post 7: Blue States: Reading the Election with Kenneth Fearing

To be a political subject in the era we are in is to be defined by a series of defeats and still maintain one's politics. All else is the construction of norms, empty subject positions.

Post 8: Poetry as a Scene of Decision (On Larry Eigner)

Post 9: Diasporic Avant-Gardes

If there was an originating thought that gave rise to organizing a conference under the rubric of Diasporic Avant-Gardes, it was to promote the work of the "avant-garde" in our current conditions of cultural dislocation, and in so doing bring avant-gardes with differing assumptions and communities into contact, as an act of both creative possibility and aesthetic redefinition.

Post 10: Franco/Luambo Makiadi's Universalism

[To come.]

Post 11: Jackson Mac Low in Virtual Space

If there is a single poet who transforms the protocols of authorship into a decentered, multi-authorial, social/cultural framework, it is Jackson Mac Low. His works are important not just for their formal or procedural values, but for the kinds of enactment they initiate. In his work, the social formation that goes by the name of "avant-garde" is reconstituted by many procedures, as the basis for further acts.

Post 13: Paradigital Literature: A Symposium

On 23 March 2005, poets and digital littérateurs K. Silem Mohammad and Catherine Daly visited Wayne State University. A roundtable discussion on the possibilities of innovative poetry and digital media, attended by poets, the organizers, graduate students, and one peripatetic philosopher, took place in the morning, followed by a public reading that afternoon.

Post 14: Beneficent Eye: Reflections on Creeley

It is now a matter of grievous truth that the poet Robert Creeley died Wednesday 30 March 2005 at Odessa, Texas, of lung disease. The profundity of that loss, its absolute depth, has since been the experience of the many who knew him and read his work, in what had become a virtual condition of lifelong intimacy.

Post 15: Reading Celan in Costa Rica

But what is the howler monkey saying when it howls as it does? What would Paul Celan say to a howler monkey? How would he decode its sound, understand its syntax?

Post 16: Correlation of Paterson, book 1 (excerpts)

In this correlation, I have unlinked by means of random numbers the continuous argument of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, book 1, in order to access and reconstruct some of its underlying assumptions in the social space of present-day Detroit. Random numbers gave me, as well, guidelines for how many lines to write in response to the samples in a form of continuous reinterpretation. 

Post 17: A Paragraph of Jelinek's Wonderful, Wonderful Times [1980]

The tennis dress just is the elision of capital accumulation; the family is breaking down because the characters think it is; the war is the violence of class logics that are incompletely sutured in the present; and we are the inheritors of that history. Ideology is outside, the whiskey in the glasses—foregone conclusion—we drink. Jelinek's text offers a historical reflection on how this situation came to be. 

Post 18: Site-Specific Poetry: The Addison Street Project

On 2 July 2005 I visited the Addison Street Project, a one-block stretch of literary landscape in Berkeley, California, where some 126 quotations from poets who lived, prospered, died in, or just visited Berkeley are installed. [. . .] The selections range from early Californians to poets of the Silver Age of San Francisco to the high modernists, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Language School.

Post 19: Over There: An Episode of άλήθεια (Disclosure)

Now, a visualization of the war was being unfolded in a series of disconnected scenes: simulated fire fights as viewed through color-coded night-vision lenses; carefully staged monologues of isolated soldiers facing agonizing choices; random, dissociated images of blown-apart torsos or limbs; and hyperrealistic tableaux of soldiers behind the scenes— all trying to construct an affect-laden simulacrum of really being "over there."

Post 20: Mirror Play: Digital Stills from Carla Harryman's Performance

Mirror Play, a multi-media, cross-genre performance piece written by Carla Harryman and directed by Jim Cave, was given its second staging at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan, a few blocks north of 8 Mile Road in Detroit. [. . .] The performance took place in two sets; the following images are from the first, more constructed set, while the second continued to elaborate on its language, gestures, scenes, images, and sounds in a more improvisatory manner.

Year 2 (2005–)

Post 21: 1-Year Plan Continues

On 31 August 2005, the original duration of 1-Year Plan came to its end. I had thought that, during the year, it would be possible to post at a frequency of about once a week, and thus would have produced about fifty posts of varying lengths over the duration. In the actual process of writing, however, I tended to opt for longer posts, both critical and creative, involving substantial preparation and often revision. The result has been twenty posts to date, some completed, some in need of further work, some not yet launched. When all anticipated work has been done on them, there will have been twenty posts produced during the year.

Post 22: Notes from Berlin

A record of aesthetics and politics in Berlin from 3 September–4 October 2005, during which time Carla Harryman and I lived at 21 Chodowieckistraße, Prenzlauer Berg. The post will be updated and completed, with images and links, as time permits.

Post 23: Berlin Exhibitions: Fraktale IV

A review of Fraktale IV, "Tod—Kein Tod," staged in the condemned Palast der Republik in Berlin, in which the posthistorical and the postmodern find a common cause in arguing for difficult material and against historical denial. The lessons for art in Detroit, faced with similar problems of acknowledgment and the relation of genre to postmodernity, should be clear.

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