Just uploaded audio from the 4th set of the Canyons reading tour. Enjoy!
CANYONS by James Belflower and Matthew Klane from Flimb Press. 7x9, 106 pages w/ 26 full-page color plates, $25
Canyons Tour Audio from PS1 Performance Available /
Canyons Tour @ PS1 in Iowa City 10.9.16 /
Performance Space One
The Canyons tour ended its first phase in Iowa City at Performance Space one, hosted by John Éngelbrecht. It was a lovely night. The performance artist Jillian Weise screened pointedly political videos of her alter ego Tipsy Tullivan, and poet Raj Chakrapani read from a new work that blended poetry with voice-overs of prominent public figures. Matthew and I played a longer set than previous readings and we enjoyed plugging into PS1's sound system for two reasons. One, we didn't have to lug all our equipment in and out! Two, it was vastly superior! I'll post audio of this performance over the weekend so check back soon! We are in Providence toward the end of October, so if you're in the area we hope to see you. The rest of our tour schedule is available here.
Canyons Tour @ Absinthe and Zygote in Chicago, 10.8.16 /
Photo courtesy of Matthew Klane
Another amazing evening on the Canyons tour! After a few too many coffees Matthew and I landed in Chicago for our 3rd performance at the Experimental Sound Studio. Anne Shaw and Toby Altman hosted us at Absinthe and Zygote an innovative performance series that changes locations for each event, from dark rooms, to crowded elevators, to hair salons. In front of the welcoming pink baffle backdrop of the Experimental Sound Studio it was a night of multimedia projections, polyvocality, and hilarious characters. We opened our set with "Welcome to Colorado" and sonically constructed an environment in which the "pure products of America go crazy." Little did we know how well that would resonate with the other performers. Poet and playwright Kate Morris read next, projecting maplike watercolor images in the corner of the room. She was followed by Olivia Lilley, whose comparisons of dating life to The Lord of the Rings had everyone cracking up. Olivia Cronk's reading of Louise and Louise and Louise ended the evening, quickly switching through the voices of a slew of characters, inhabiting each deftly. We read in Iowa City on the 10th, and will pick up the tour again on October 22nd in Providence. Hope to see you there!
We just arrived home yesterday so audio of the tour will be posted soon!
Kate Morris
Olivia Lilley
Olivia Cronk
Canyons Tour Continues @ Woodland Pattern 10.7.16 /
Photo courtesy of Matthew Klane
We had a great night at the exceptional Woodland Pattern bookstore in Milwaukee Friday night. Host, Michael Wendt, introduced the performance. We altered the Canyons set list starting with a prickly soundscape that descended into the haunting sequence "Welcome to Coloroado," interspersed with found sounds from a Buffalo reserve I toured in 2014, & finishing with the final disquieting sequence "The Vanishing Savages'." We had a great conversation over new music with poet Paul Vogel & spent the drive to Chicago the next day blasting Seapunk & Witchhouse. Really digging Blank Banshee & Salem.
I'll be posting audio of the show as soon as we return.
Canyons tour begins @ the Just Buffalo Literary Center 10.6.13 /
Just Buffalo Literary Center
The Canyons tour started last night at the beautiful Just Buffalo Literary Center reading series which is curated by Barbara Cole & Kevin Thurston. Matthew & I performed with the high energy Buffalo slam poet Eve Williams, & Donika Kelly who's debut collection Bestiary won the 2015 Cave Canem Prize. The crowd was lively, giggling & bantering with the poets. Our set was a blend of Matthew Klane's deep droning voice & my visceral electronics. Best of all, my fuzz pedal picked up Outkast's "Hey Ya" broadcast from the radio tower on the roof, & our set, which usually ends with thick moody feedback, tapered down to the bouncy chorus and the crowd rolled with the beat!
We recorded the event, and I'll be posting Canyons audio as soon as possible. Come see us at one of these stops if you missed last night.
Finding the Ell In Your Writing /
If you've never scaled your page size down in Microsoft Word when writing, give it a try. As I began a new manuscript a few years ago I happened to scale my pages down to where the words were only shapes. I was able to consider it from a distance. This experience was much more important than I realized at the time.
Read MoreOkkyung Lee and the Insistent Forms of Affect /
Music that resists my capacity to divide, to classify its parts. Music that grabs my ears by the shoulders and shakes them, blurring all its auditory patterns into novel seams. Music that recognizes that repetition, as Gertrude Stein believed, does not exist. What we hear instead, since music can never repeat the same emphasis, is insistence.
Last night at EMPAC in Troy, New York, I had this experience of insistence listening to the noise artist and cellist Okkyung Lee. After listening intently, I thought of Eugenie Brinkema's description of affect in her book The Forms of the Affects where she extrapolates a formalist reading of affect from the tear clinging to the face of Psycho's murdered heroine in the infamous shower scene. She argues that the resistance of the tear to frameworks of representation formalizes the l'informe historically attributed to affect. The tear, in all its "tearness," writes Brinkema, insists that it is "pure exteriority of the sign of emotionality" (22). Tearness, as insistent non-representation also applies to Okkyung's performance, particularly the way in which Lee's style resists uncomplicated emotional connection and the impulse to divide her textured noises into westernized notes, phrases, or rhythms. This is not to say that it is an emotionless music, but that it is an affective music rich with sonic particularities that provoke a precise dissident intensity that insists on a life of its own. The resin smoke cloud floating in the spotlight above her frenetic glissandi was a vivid example.
I started to consider it this way. To attend carefully to Lee's performance, to practice "reduced listening," by way of Michel Chion's Audio-Vision, is to recognize that Lee's achievement deforms emotional interpretation as opposed to inviting it and thereby affirming categorical feeling. Lee's music also refolds a listener's semantic ears by sustaining its difference from perceptual frameworks. It refuses to honor the implicit contract my perception brings to it. Think of trying to locate that lid in the Tupperware drawer that will fit the jar you are holding. Lee's music thus provokes questions: Why do I want to link frenetic string work with anger?; Why am I compelled to refer Lee's thick textures to a sound I've heard before that evoked an emotion? The powerful moment she incites shows what is in the event of listening, rather than reducing the listening experience to what I habitually remove from it to "properly" hear. Alfred North Whitehead's perspective on a proper relationship to nature relates to the listening act in this affective moment. In this quote from Isabelle Stengers's A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, I replace nature with music to approach the listening act Lee's music constructs. "The problem is not to polemicize but to accept the risk, to try the adventure, to explore what the rejection of a bifurcation of [music] obliges us to think" (40). To put it simply, I enjoyed the insistent "noiseness."
Sources
Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.
Stengers, Isabelle. A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011.
Richard Thorns Dissertation Fellowship Award /
I'm very pleased to have received a Richard Thorns Dissertation Fellowship from SUNY Albany this past summer.
The English Department awards one or more Richard Thorns Fellowships each year to doctoral students who are within one year of completing their dissertation projects. Supported by the estate of Richard Thorns, an Albany English alumnus, the fellowship offers a summer stipend that aims to give students the ability to concentrate on their research and writing.
With the financial help from the Thorns I was able to finish my project, "Making Thought Matter: Postmodern Models for Material Thinking," in early August and defend on September 4th. The defense went very well. I will be receiving my diploma in a week or so! Very thankful to be done with that part of the process. On to new things!
Louis Zukofsky and the Index of American Design /
I recently started planning a course which I'm tentatively naming "Poetry as Design." In this course I want students to consider poetic practice through the more pragmatic approaches often associated with commercial design. One of the first poets I turned to for material was Louis Zukofsky.
Read MoreWhen Life Gives You Lemons: Jack Spicer And Hollis Frampton /
Cuneiform Press hosts a full PDF of the original chapbook of After Lorca
I want to sketch some rough ideas about the threshold where virtuality becomes materiality by comparing the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer's discovery of a lemon, in one of his letters to the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in After Lorca (1957), with the slow unveiling of a lemon in Hollis Frampton's minimalist film, Lemon (1969). The film and poem (indeed all of After Lorca) are perfectly suited to each other in large part because they address how we translate an object's temporal dimension into concrete form. What I mean by this is that like Spicer's desire to "make poems out of real objects," his lemon emerges through a process of discovery (133).
"Things do not connect they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring them across time. That tree you saw in Spain is a tree I could never have seen in California, that lemon has a different smell and a different taste, BUT the answer is this--every place and every time has a real object correspond with your real object--that lemon may become this lemon, or it may even become this piece of seaweed, or this particular color gray in this ocean. One does not need to imagine that lemon; one needs to discover it" (Spicer 134).
The discovery is that this lemon is not equivalent to anything but itself at that moment in time. This is why objects for Spicer do not connect in the poem they co-respond. Frampton's film also "discovers" the lemon, makes it visible, not only by technically shadowing where its shape meets darkness, but by refusing to metaphoricize the lemon. His film fulfills Spicer's desire, to transport the object through time rather than translating its viscerality to a symbolic, timeless dimension. The lemon's material rudeness tingles the back of your tongue, and its stippled skin rubs across your eye as it slowly emerges from the shadows. In Lemon, the lemon is not a fruit we imagine, as much as its visceral presence is disclosed to us through its passage across our senses. This means that the lemon is not preserved (pun intended), but like taste, it arcs into and out of our awareness. Both Spicer and Frampton carefully negotiate how the lemon "is lead across time, not preserved against it," because too much light, whether visual or textual, would exceed perception's footholds in the rind and point the edges of its appearance elsewhere (Spicer 133). As Spicer put it, and Frampton's film visualizes, it is a different act than imagining, because "the imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it..." (133). Read the poems, enjoy the film, and make lemonade!