New Erasure 05/11/2012
 
Mary Ruefle has a new erasure I found online. An erasure is an interesting poetic form in that it feels more like carving to me, where the shape is already present, the poet just has to look for it in the grain of the story. Ruefle says it is like "writing with [her] eyes instead of [her] hands". More on erasure poetry here.
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Update 05/04/2012
 
I started a farming internship at the beginning of April at Amaranth Urban Farm on Beacon Hill. I haven't posted lately because I've been so tired and always busy, but I have a post germinating right now on the idea of empathy bolstered by two essays written by Jonathan Franzen/Lethem I recently read in The New Yorker. Soon!
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I just finished reading an essay on HD's book The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream) written by Cynthia Hogue. Besides being a fan of HD's poetry, I was fascinated by the ideas Cynthia addresses in the essay and how these ideas connect to Apocalypticism and the task of a writer/artist in general. 

Early on, Cynthia mentions HD's struggle to determine the function an artist can perform within a society currently at war. How she realizes that writing can be replenishing, restorative in nature. I want to take this idea further and argue that the task of an artist in a time of great destruction, chaos, and atrocious deeds is to create or manifest that which will replace what is lost. Or begin setting the groundwork for this creation. To be fertile and able to give birth to newness in an attempt to foster the possibility for a golden age or the satya-yuga. Without this groundwork, framework, spiritual/intuitive vibratory connections being forged, we would be left only with the complete devastation and nihilistic lack of connection that comes as a consequence of behaving as monsters, whether seen as necessary or not (an argument this essay will not address).
In the grand picture, this function is a necessity. The harm of nihilstic art is this, it actively prevents regeneration, in fact, destroys it and performs the same function as war on an intellectual and intangible level harder to pinpoint or logically determine.  As a response, it is understandable; however, the harm that spawns from the disconnection, the besmirching of MEANING and connections/rebirth as a goal is so disastrous as to be almost criminal. Aesthetically, in writing anyway, it has become popular and clever...it is appealing because it is sometimes funny in its alienation, its ability to highlight how disconnected we are. However, in focusing on this aspect of our current state in a way that seductively manipulates our consciousness to prefer it, we are forgetting that it is our duty to address and manifest the possibility of a better existence. 
In Cynthia's essay, she talks about HD's idea of the garden as a physical representation of a metaphysical regeneration. It is an old idea, to heal in the garden. It is contrasted with the garden as Eden or idealistic utopian vision which will protect us all from harm. It is less about healing and more about keeping out the enemy. In the former, we find Apocalypticism, a garden manifest and manifesting, not walled in but rather emanating out from the individual in the form of sowing connection and rebirth. In the latter, we find Nihilism, an idealogy that festers in its own murk of self-indulgent egotism, more about destroying everything in order to keep out everyone and everything. To preserve the ego by setting it apart and building its barriers up. 
It does not need to be said, but here it is, this method, the latter, will lead only to an ouroboros of more destruction and more alienation. To combat it, the answer is not in the wallowing of Nihilism. The solution is to climb out of your edens and into reality where we must accept that things are the way the are and address how we can begin connecting again and behaving as though we are not monsters but rather human beings, caretakers, beings who are powerful enough to destroy yet understand the responsibility that power requires enough to choose creation instead.
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1. Great interview with Wave Books poet, Eileen Myles, up at The Hairpin (one of my favorite femme blogs). Hotdogs, accents, and poetry are discussed, among other things.
2. Laurel Nakadate, an artist I first discovered years ago in The Believer, has a new film project entitled The Wolf Knife. The Rumpus talks about it here. Nakadate seems to challenge a lot of our ideas about shoulds and coulds in relation to the ways we interact as a society. Her first project (the one that hooked me) was set in love hotels in Japan. She would invite men to join her in a room and then film herself and the man throwing a birthday party. For example. She blurs the lines between what is appropriate and what isn't given a set of circumstances. Her work is surreal and uncomfortable and fascinating. 
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Issue #2 of Lightning'd Press is out! Read it! 
Contributors: Thomas Meyer, Michael Farrell, Lucy Burnett, Jeff Miller, Brooks Lampe, Erin Wilson, Bruce McRae, Lewis Gesner, Steven Manuel, Jamie Felton, Corey Wakeling, Patrick James Dunagan, John Colburn, Ric Carfagna, Whit Griffin, R.N. Horner  

And and a special ongoing interview with Peter O'Leary!

<3

I also blogged about APRIL (Authors, Publishers, and Readers of Independent Literature) Book Festival here.
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Christopher Higgs is a phenomenal writer. His blogs over at HTMLGIANT astound me, dazzle me. His use of media in order to draw everything in together, sound, images, words all lassoed in to show us AND tell us. I love it. 
His latest is about the loss of control while writing. And I was with him until the end. The very bitter. This is why I love writing. I never know what is going to happen/I don't try to know/I enjoy not knowing. I just write and words come out (even now), and sometimes they dazzle me and sometimes they do not. I do not plan my poems or stories. I have tried, and it comes to nothing I would care to share. My most beautiful creations have just flown out through my fingers, not once reaching air first, becoming sound. Some of my poems have never become sound. They are still ripe and swinging on the page. Their potentialities unreleased. That's how I like it. I do not write for sound heard, I write for sound unheard as echoes in the mind. The kind of sounds that only work quietly, unspoken. I am digressing. But that's how it is with writing. My control is very limited. I can fill my brain with ideas and words and things I notice and use later and the words of others that spark new words and ideas in me. These things all come out later. On their own in their own time. Sometimes, I think they are waiting for the right confluence of incoming data in order to connect to and create a larger creation, the exact right moment of me looking out the window and the wheelbarrow is tipped up carmine and rust against the rotted fence, and the sky is ever white, smothering in its density and longevity. This image becomes something greater once it hits the scurf of my imagination and bursts out from there. 
Where Christopher and I diverge is on the issue of convergence and divergence:

     "Is it fair to say that to read we recognize — or, become      aware of — control’s absence? Perhaps the benefit of writing is derived from the sublime experience of losing control — succumbing to the dueling impulses: dread and desire –, while the benefit of reading is derived from the recognition of our ubiquitous daily helplessness, our futility. We are all Gregor Samsa awaking on our backs, our little legs twitching. The tension between divergent sequences (i.e. the unpredictable) and convergent sequences (i.e. the predictable). I am thinking here of the work produced by the British scientist Gregory Bateson. By writing we may consider our construction convergent, but by releasing it into the world it transforms into the opposite, the divergent. A reader reads the construction, assuming convergence. At each end, the assumption is convergence. But as the writer writes and the reader reads the ontological metamorphosis takes place, converting convergence into divergence.An automatic disconnect.

The impossibility of language abutting the desire for language.

Proof that we want what we cannot have." 

I disagree with the idea of writing as convergent as well as with his mildly nihilistic tone towards the end. Perhaps the act of sitting down to write is convergent. But I would not carry that into the actual writing. The reader as a seeker of divergence makes sense to me. I read to lose control, to be given a story however it may come upon me. I am open and receiving of whatever words the author gives me. Whatever images he/she places before me. And I take them into my own mind and they mix with what's already there creating new words and new images. Both acts are divergent, beyond the reach of my ego and control (that is, once they've made it past my ego to begin with, but that's another story). 

Writing CAN be convergent, and you can smell it when it is. It is not automatically bad writing. Oftentimes, it's quite good. When a person very carefully constructs a story or essay or poem, it can be like architecture, breathtaking. The problem with this kind of writing is that it is made with the ego. Nothing has made it past the ego's granite walls without approval and contract. This contract would read if you could read it, "Every word I allow through, shall henceforth be a tribute to my immensity, power, all-encompassing greatness and longevity". You can smell this because it stinks of bravado and pseudo-intellectualism and with, those who are less-skilled at masking their ego's control, that acrid cloying of "trying too hard". It is the empty vase, the face of a model on a runaway so fucking elegant in her journey to nowhere, the lovely mansion with dark windows every night, that book you read where every word was an orgy of linguistic genius but what exactly did it leave you with in the end? A one night stand, lady gaga, probably the band Beach House (though I really do hate to say it), facebook most certainly, all of it empty empty aesthetics so carefully and consciously created they have lost any soul they may have once had.

The beauty of writing is its potential for mutual divergence. Both writer and reader opening up, reaching out their hands to whatever may come or be received, a connection made not between egos but between souls. This allowance of ego-erasure or the willingness to set one's ego aside to read or write, to create or receive another's creation, is the beauty of art, of what art is capable of (and what I would argue its purpose is). One unpredictability into another. When we write with our egos (convergently, that is), we do indeed want what we can't have. We maintain our separation, our superiority, our alienation from one another. 
When we write without, we can have it all.
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I love Su Blackwell's work. It is tiny and intricate and obviously, magical. 
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Some Links! 03/18/2012
 
1. One of my favorite animators, Luca di Pierro, just created an animation for CA Conrad's A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon out from Wave Books in April. I love confluences of awesome things.

2. Beautiful review of My Only Wife by Jac Jemc at HTMLGIANT by Christopher Higgs. 
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Berndnaut Smilde 03/17/2012
 
Berndnaut Smilde is an artist who creates clouds for just a tiny moment. 
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Just read a beautiful essay today entitled "Blue Like You" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio from the website This Recording. It is mainly, I think, about her use of literature throughout her life in dealing with sadness/depression. She goes so far as to temporarily conflate her own identification with that of Joan Didion in order to deal with life, mimicking one strategy for pain in order to deal with her own. It is so well-written and worth reading if you have a love of literature. 

     "I hoped that if she pressed her palm to my forehead, she’d find my sorrow sound." - from Blue Like You
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