Montevidayo

In response to my last post (about the blurry CROW), Paul Cunningham sent me the following image by Pablo Gonzales Trejo:

[This remind me of The Ring's crossed-out faces and the "swarm media" of those movies: replication of pale bodies, of dying horses, with insects coming out of the video tape. But that will be the next post, about Brandi Wells' Poisonhorse.]

Paul has just published a wonderful Internet-book called Foamghast, which is teeming with swarmy, blurry bodies:

“…an x-rayed wound in an x-rayed mouth:
salted gasp, bloodestablished
a meat of violent plum

an x-rayed wound in an
an x-rayed cavernous mouth:
one of those tastes you’re
forced to taste”

The first thing I thought about when I read this was Francis Bacon’s paintings of his lover, George Dyer, one of which was based on X-rays of the lover’s skull (I don’t know if this is it):

(continue reading…)

[Here's more of my essay on concretism, surrealism, and kitsch in the work of Roberto Piva, with translations at the bottom.  Surrealists, Brazilianists, and Deleuzians chime in por favor!]

The second edition of Piva's first book, feat. photographs by Wesley Duke Lee.

Inspired by Piva’s experiences as a young man in what would only later become one of the world’s most populous megalopolises, Paranóia catalogues the frenetic pulse of São Paulo through a lyric as collisive as Benjamin’s dream kitsch.  If Saul Friendlander describes kitsch paradoxically as “an antimodern face of modernity” to which we might oppose concretism’s ‘hidden face’ (as per Perloff), Paranóia could be said to deploy the characteristics of kitsch precisely in order to unravel narratives of progress (30).  By engaging the deterritorializing strategies of accumulation, repetition, citation, and imitation, Piva’s poetry rejects more than the critical distance championed by concretists in the service of supposedly authentic innovation.  Read as a Deleuzian enactment of sensation rather than a self-reflexive critique of signification, the text also defies the left-wing Marxist utopianism that originally undergirded the poetics of concretism and its offshoots in praxism and neoconcretism.

Piva’s speaker, incidentally, embodies just the Benjaminian flâneur whom Greenberg associates with surrealism, and whose aimless roaming would become increasingly hampered by São Paulo’s densification and modernization.  As Paranóia forebodingly registers a rapid urban growth and development that would continue throughout the 60’s well into the present, its apocalyptic and homoerotic poems constitute queer assemblages of affects—or intensities—whose becomings are nothing if not spatially and temporally unstable.  In so doing, Paranóia presents us with a visionary kitsch that collapses the demarcations of art/life and self/other as well as those of past, present, and future.  The ontological reorderings of kitsch in Piva’s poetry thus materialize as a “cacophony of informational flows, energetic intensities, bodies, and practices that undermine coherent identity” (Puar 222). (continue reading…)

So I’m writing this memoir which is about emigration but it’s also a critical book about aesthetics and it’s also about the body, especially the body under duress, coming apart, being tortured, and the aesthetics and erotics of such images.

My recent writing about Thåström and Imperiet obviously comes out of my writing of this memoir. And I’m going to be even more embarrassing today and write about one of my favorite songs from childhood, Mikael Wiehe’s “The Girl and the Raven” (1981).

I sat the other day and read my newspaper
a day like so many before.
And I thought about all the dreams I’ve dreamt
that have all ended one after the other.

Then I saw an image of a girl
with a bullet-wounded raven in her arms
she runs through the forest
as fast as she can

She runs with fluttering locks of hair
she runs on scrawny (“taniga”) legs
and she begs and pleads and she hopes and believes
that it’s not too late

The girls is so small and her hair is so light
and her cheeks are so flickering red
the raven is clumsy and cawing (“kraxande”) black
and in a moment it will be totally dead
(continue reading…)

Hi. The following started out as a response to Johannes’s post “Take your goddamn class hatred and shove it up your ass”: DN attacks Johan Jönson. But mutated. Became big. An elephant.

“When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant.”

-George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant

“The elephant’s age had led to its adoption by our town a year earlier. When financial problems caused the little private zoo on the edge of town to close its doors, a wildlife dealer found places for other animals in the zoos throughout the country. But all the zoos had plenty of elephants, apparently, and not one of them was willing to take in a feeble old thing that looked as if it might die of a heart attack at any moment.”

-Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

Some time ago I happened upon Aase Berg’s DN article “Hatet mot teatern gnager i mig” (“The/My hatred for theater nags in me”, nags or bites or tears) by chance, through a response to the article, by Leif Zern, also in DN: “Hatet håller teatern vid liv” (“the hatred keeps theater alive”). The soundbite being that Aase Berg, apparently, hates theater.

She writes, in the beginning of the article:

“This is probably not the right forum to write something like this, but OK: I don’t understand theater. Yes, it has happened that I have used the word “hate”. I have said exactly this in conversations with decently culture-interested people: “I hate theater.””

I wanted to add a few comments to my own initial post about Johan Jönson’s “class hatred” and to Jiyoon’s comparison of Jönson and Bartleby the Scrivener.

One of main arguments of Liljestrand’s attack is that Jönson replicates in some way Leon Larsson’s heated Marxist rhetoric from the beginning of the 20th century, but as Liljestrand also notes there’s a big difference: While Larsson’s lyric seems a part of a revolution, Jönson’s poetry is most definitely defeated. Johan’s speaker is largely impotent, powerless. The flows of capital moves through his permeable body (“with.away.in” is the title of Jönson’s most recent book). His very physical body is coming apart (his penis is “herpes-bubbling”). The whole anxiety that Liljestrand ascribes to Jönson – that he’s part of a current version of the moment that generated all kinds of revolutions and military oppressions is thus undermined.

As Jiyoon notes, Jönson’s poetry is not an instrument, it’s something more like Bartleby the Scrivener in its refusal to participate. But that’s not all that different from Larsson: whose revolutionary fervor Liljestrand interprets as pathological (he’s a pyromaniac, not a true revolutionary). Larsson’s poems precisely did not cause any class warfare, something Liljestrand finds redeeming about him (Larsson grew up and worked more constructively toward a wonderful future.)

In difference to Bartleby, Jönson’s speaker does have to do the work. And does work. Carrying shit out of an old person’s home for example (in Collobert Orbital). So, he does to what he’s supposed to, but what this generates is a kind of hatred. And it’s this combination of unconstructive hatred that Liljestrand objects to the most. He wants to classify it as a destructive, bomb-throwing hatred because Johan imagines killing the prime minister; he can make sense of the hatred if he can classify it as old-fashion “class hatred” (and thus incriminate leftist politics). But as in Edelman’s “No Future,” this is the jouissance of not-future-thinking, the death drive that is not put to work for a better tomorrow. And it’s this uselessness of Jönson’s poetry that seems to scare Liljebrand the most.

Here’s the bit of med.bort.in that imagines the death of the prime minister:

can’t be helped.
really want. (continue reading…)

A Double Encountering with Forslar Fett (trans.fer fat Johannes Gorranson from the Aase Berg)

by the Yeasty Beasts ( Feng Carrie Sun Lorig Chen)

I
am
afraid

-Hal (5)

In this rear-view, a conversation without facing, a pain cattle lorig and I, an immigratingrendel, will grind our “human cylindars” (a la Danielle Pafunda) up to the transfer fat and descriptfat will transfer through our fear, Hal living inside all of us, afraid shapes, fear being the first.
Hal: hal has a face that has been grim maced. he is a robot with a bruise drink. dashes grip to wire and dare god. dare god with fat.

7. Fordon: ForsakenHal the beginning of ignorant psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis be gan primordial stew died soon after flow fat.
7. Fordon: white machines have tender beast feet.  they further chest me. out through my back drops an idle paw, an idle jaw.

9. Unborn Fat: Not personification equal feeling the calm/caul what shapes us. Hal has no mother. My bellybutton has Hal.
9. Unborn Fat: dead lava. dead red tunnels filled with hares startling each other by slowly erupting quiver.

11. In the Hare Cosmos: Being born the ear of the Rabbit am always velve-teen and pray.
11. In the Hare Cosmos: a fish covered in lucky hare feet knocks into the water.

13. Let Time Rock: calm time is nutting but agriculture of skull shard.
13. Let Time Rock: the fat gets into the rocks. it swells into yeastie beasts.

i’m your mommal

(continue reading…)

My essay from 2010′s American Poet is now up on The Academy of American Poets site. I talk about bodies, pregnancy, vulnerability, intimacy, nerves, shame, brutal lighting–my usual haunts. Via Dodie Bellamy (guest appearance by *Barf’s* Eileen Myles & piñata), Aase Berg, Maxine Chernoff, Tory Dent, Toi Derricotte, Lara Glenum, Susan Howe (Mary Rowlandson!), Hiromi Ito, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Alice Notley, D.A. Powell, Elaine Scarry (paired w/ Eugen Baer’s bizarre *Medical Semiotics*, I’ll never stop doing that!), Anne Sexton, Cathy Wagner, Rebecca Wolff (re: Not for Mothers Only), Rachel Zucker, etc.

Though pregnancy and motherhood are hardly synonymous (all modes of child-getting to become mother, all modes of identity in the wake of the body occupied), I think it’s been posted in time for the weekend. Happy Mama Day if it applies to you & yours in any fashion, Montevidayans! Happy Body Day is Everyday if you’ve got one! (Did anyone else read Hilary Mantel’s hospital Diary in the LRB?)

Here’s a bit of my essay where I survey some of our Action compadres:

Along with the image of the mother as empty vessel or compassionate servant, we find the gentle mother, the soft and nurturing hand, Mother Nature, the sheltering bosom. When a mother is cruel to a child, an innocent, a cute animal, the world turns inside out. In the popular imagination, mothers who commit acts of cruelty are “monsters.” Berg’s use of deer, foxes, squirrels, and guinea pigs, as Lara Glenum points out:

radically upends the notion that women…are free from sadistic compulsion and cruelty…The preoccupation…with all things cute, perhaps, speaks not to their attraction to things that mirror their own innocence but to things that mirror their own abjection and fear of further deformity; it reflects the degree to which they have already found themselves stripped of significant social agency.

Here are the adorable deformed animals in Berg’s “In the Heart of Guinea Pig Darkness”:

The gorge is swarming with guinea pigs. They crawl on each other like spiders…The guinea pigs are swarming and crawling around on the gigantic guinea-pig queen’s sensitive, swollen egg-white body. She gives birth and groans, she moans and bleeds. Everywhere the membranes, everywhere their bloated puff bellies. We run with the heart in the tunnel, you and I, while nervous systems break down behind us, while the amniotic fluid surges in the pumping, pulsing chasm.

Unsurprisingly, the spooky multiplicity of selves doesn’t disappear in the postpartum. Berg’s Transfer Fat fuses cute and massive animals in an effort to fathom the disturbingly illogical postpartum experience of being devoured by a darling creature:

the hare skindry the whale heavy of the bag’s fatmilk
watersick

Just as these humanoid animals disrupt our sense of body and boundary, the mangled and spliced language intensifies our sense of unheimlich.

Lara Glenum’s own Maximum Gaga takes on the pathology of heterosexual unions and their inevitable offspring with a ferocious grin:

Mino feeds at one end of me
The Normopath at the other…

I’m half-in
half-out
of my blubber suit

Two feeding tubes dangling from my chest…
The animals my skin could not contain
are clanging through the hospital.

In the portion of the book that reads as a play, “Meat Out of the Eater,” the character of Queen Naked Mole Rat is staged thusly:

[... The Queen sits on the couch, her ribcage cranked open to
display nine tea-cups dangling on hooks. In each tea-cup, baby rats are
continually born and tumble out of her body to scavenge on the floor.]

It is worth noting that in the real world of naked mole rats, a queen might have up to twenty-eight babies in a litter, and that one human baby can often feel like twenty-eight.

A new translation of Japanese radical feminist poet Ito Hiromi titled Killing Kanoko contains the poem by the same name, a blunt exploration of infanticide:

Kanoko eats my time
Kanoko pilfers my nutrients
Kanoko threatens my appetite
Kanoko pulls out my hair
Kanoko forces me to deal with all her shit
I want to get rid of Kanoko
I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko
I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples
I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko
Before she spills my blood
I have committed infanticide

Ito’s other works, transgressive and shamanistic, explore the dark, absurd, and glorious potentials of the female body, its sexuality and reproduction, resituating these, as Jerome Rothenberg says “somewhere between bliss & nightmare.”

I have read Collobert Orbital (too bad I don’t have the book with me at this moment; I have to rely on my memory) & I am re-reading Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville. This post prompts me to think about the oppressive presence of operative system(s) in these two works: the power of Conveyor’s Belt/Production Line.
In Collobert Orbital, there are production lines that cannot be disobeyed, despite the fact that bodies are piling up in its production, filling up the space of the book. The production lines also embody themselves through the dash “—” which prompts the readers’ eyes to move along(along with the bodies, becoming part of the line-up); you can’t stop. you have to keep moving. to the future. to the production. What was really interesting about the dashes is that not only they are embodiment of the Conveyor’s Belt, the all-too-powerful production logic, they also seem to be NOISE that disrupts the smoothness of the poetry and language. (at this moment I also think of Juan Gelman’s slashes “/”, its physical presence on the page and the disruptive nature; Is it trauma that produces these un-readable, grammatical-system-defying-use of physical lines?) (continue reading…)

It seems that the Swedish conservative press is increasingly assuming the culture-war tactics of US politics: going after artists and “the cultural elite” in order to smear the left as weirdos and fakers, and thus position themselves as the sensible middle ground. It happened before with this article accusing the art elite of being communists (just as the right is constantly attacking English Departments for being leftist), and it happened with the hysteria-mongering attacks on the anti-genital-mutilation cake performance. As in American instances, not only do these right-wing opinionators misread Art, they also misread history.

The other day, Dagens Nyheter (the equivalent of USA Today or something like that) published a really weird attack on Swedish poet Johan Jönson (whose book Collobert Orbital which I translated was published by Displaced Press a couple of years ago), accusing Johnson of re-igniting the “perverse temptations of massmurder.” It ends with the title of this post: “Take your goddamn class hatred and shove it up your ass.”
(continue reading…)