Rob Halpern's blog

On the weekend of October 2-4 2009, a gathering of activists and poets converged on the city of Portland for an event called EcoNvergence which focused on the current ecological / economic crises, and on responses to these crises among activists, and polticially committed writers and scholars.

In the weeks in advance of the event, one of EconVergence's organizers, Kaia Sand, and myself engaged in an exchange addressing the challenges of involving poet and artists in the various discussions planned for the event.

Kaia did an amazing job doing precisely this, and her efforts resulted in a number of poet led events, like a PACE action on the streets of Portland,  as well as the involvement of poets on a number of panels. But this was not without obstacle and frustration.

Because Nonsite shares the concerns of Kaia's efforts to work across the "disciplined" boundaries that too often keep poets and artists alienated from activist-oriented discussions--as if the work of poets and artists were irrelevant to the work of activism--I want to open a space to log various texts, reports, and exchanches around the EcoNvergence.

See below for an exchange between Kaia Sand, David Wolach, and myself.

You can find the "official" info on the econvergence here.

Look forward to comments and additional post around this discussion, including a conversation by CAConrad and Frank Sherlock.

 [for the correspondence, just click "Read More" below...]

What follows here are Miranda Mellis's presentation notes from the September 09 Nonsite Collective meeting. For the Bourdieu text, click here and scroll to the attachment at the bootom of the page.

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9/27 Nonsite meeting--Notes/minutes from a conversation on "Rites of Institution", Pierre Bourdieu

When I saw an email announcing that I would be facilitating a discussion at a Nonsite meeting of Bourdieu’s “Rites of Institution”, a text I had proposed for potential group reading but not imagined myself “facilitating”, I felt “assigned a competence”, I felt a “right imposed upon me” which was also an “obligation” signifying as to how I should “conduct myself as a consequence”. Within hours of feeling so interpellated, I was relieved of the surprise sensation of an unasked for duty, by a note from Rob, and all was well. But the experience provided an occasion and material for examining in miniature the dynamics Bourdieu describes in “Rites of Institution”. I was cued, but could neither fully accept nor resist the cue. Bourdieu doesn’t talk about it explicitly in the text, but between consecration (successful rite of institution) and desecration (for example, ‘class-traitor’) is a space of un-valiant, non-heroic doubt. I felt the Nonsite meeting was a space in which I could express ambivalence regarding the assigned facilitation.

But what of the promises of the text? How might we take it up reflexively? What of prophecies and exorcisms; making and destroying representations; heretical discourse; “arming with knowledge” in order to try and “neutralize” “well-founded delusions”; and using the text to prompt group reflection on these categories around which Nonsite ‘collates’ and collects: “the collective”, “the facilitator”, and “self-organized pedagogy”?  Could these terms be substituted/ re-articulated usefully (towards, among other operations, making their doxa visible)? What of linking this (or these) mode(s) of re-articulation, gathering and learning to others towards prophesying, or conjuring its/their ‘historical spirit’?

…and from here a lively discussion ensued which, according to my scanty notes touched upon calling community into being in contradistinction to documenting the already-extant; the motivations behind archiving and the notions of near (present-tense/bodily) and far (future-anterior/technological) archives; Nonsite as a dissipative structure and tempo-rary/emergent form of organization; sites framed and mobilized by actions rather than actions framed by sites; etc.etc…

Recursions in the conversation/key words:

Magic
Amulet
Use
Production
Facilitate [cf potential Emily Miller event “Facilitate This” in February]
Collective
Pedagogy

What follows here are my prefatory remarks from CA Conrad's and Frank Sherlock's Nonsite dialogue on September 12, 2009, co-sponsored by Small Press Traffic:

CAConrad’s and Frank Sherlock’s work provokes and manifests forms of aesthetic and social practice — aesthetic practice as social practice — forms that begin with friendship and collaboration as the most basic modes of composition, and which extend all the way to community activism (PACE, or Poet-Activist Community Extension).

 Thru their modes of practice, the poem becomes a form assumed by lived social relations under the pressure of so many forces conspiring against us. What’s more, the poem becomes not only a formal expression of dissent, but the insurgent means by which “dissensus”* might potentially and provisionally be organized within contested social spaces and public discourses. Following Sherlock's own reference to Hakim Bey's "Manifesto for Poetic Terrorism," this is the poem as a kind of “temporary autonomous zone”.

 CAConrad’s and Frank Sherlock’s work as collaborators, co-conspirators, and activist-artists corresponds with two ongoing Nonsite curricula: Aesthetics as Somatic Practice, which addresses the body as the living matter of art and poetry as it resists the often oppressive forces — social, political, environmental, discursive — that would normalize, domesticate, or poison it; and, Spatial Practices, which investigates strategies for interrupting the reproduction and smooth maintenance of social spaces in and around which lived bodies organize themselves.

 By bringing the lived body into consequential contact with the social worlds and forces that press against it, Conrad’s and Sherlock’s work surges within, against, and thru the forces conspiring against it, not only in order to register and transfigure  the political and discursive effects of those forces in the manner of a sensory organ (which is always crucial), but to raise to the level of a subjective demand an already objective need to undo those forces: to demand a disruption of the hardened structures of sense that ensure the reproduction of our grotesque and deadly order.

* for Jacques Rancière, “dissensus” refers to a political process that creates a fissure in what can normally be seen or sensed by confronting the established framework of perception, thought, and social action with something that can’t be admitted by so-called "commonsense". Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff activate this concept in the closing pages of their book Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space, which addresses PACE specifically among other poet-activist projects. Kaia also refers to “dissensus” in her Nonsite talk, with reference to Laura Elrick’s work.

What followed this introduction was a wide-ranging set of discussions touching on class, coming out, somatic magic, Philadelphia's history of police violence and resistance, gentrification, war, and neighborhood politics. Running through the discussion were a series of prompts and questions in search of a writing practice (and its examples) that could work as part of a strategy for mobilizing democratic bodies of collaboration, friendship, and creative remappings of flesh, city, nation, and world. Because these prompts and questions were directed toward furthering, intensifying and diversifying the practices they indicated, the Nonsite Collective would like to use this space as an ongoing repository of that elaboration. What questions did this discussion and its various follow-ups raise for you? What practices -- your own or others' -- are illuminated by, or help to illuminate, this occasion? What texts, visual works, performances, etc., are you, alone or in collaboration, producing, reflecting on, planning, or reworking based on the tactics, rituals, exercises, and collaborative methods considered during the discussion?

You can use this link to post these reflections, texts, images, and calls for further collaborative inquiry and work. If you're viewing this page in full-page mode (i.e., not in the stream of posts on the front page) you can also use the "Add child page link" at the bottom. Please note that for either option, you'll need to be signed in as a Nonsite web user. If you don't have a user account yet, you can take care of that with the block in the sidebar on the front page, or by following this registration link. We look forward to hearing from you, and to finding occasion in your contribution to further develop this discussion's questions, methods, and prompts for further work in common -- as poetry, art, politics, and friendship.
 

Anticipating this weekend's reading and workshop--together with CA Conrad, co-sponsored by Small Press Traffic and the Nonsite Collective--Frank Sherlock has sent the following:

PACE as poetics is a function of poet-activist community extension. It began thousands of years ago. It begins again and again as poets engage in guerrilla street actions, sharing with strangers in public space. These acts are “guerrilla” simply because these encounters have become unconventional methods of poetic exchange. Practitioners operate outside of the larger structures of universities, reading series, and publishing houses that function as museums of poetry. If it is to be seen as resistance today, the enemy is Mediated Life, the alienation assurance company that has flooded the culture with fraudulent policies that promise smiles through spending. 

Just as Pierre Joris refers to a nomad poetics as a hit & run war machine, PACE employs these strategies using improvised tools most suited for each situation.

                                                      The unflat

                              world somehow continues

                                                   to operate on

                                    a modular grid 

      Its architects

           are limited to reactionary

      responses despite their dominant claims 
 

It is not a group of member-poets to be nominated and/or expelled by committee, but a rhizomatic process that nominates and expels continually, when community extension starts and stops. At once inside and outside. States within a state. An Asger Jorn knot, appearing as “a devil's street map”, experienced with a consistency despite twisted turns. 

The poem's potential as a lo-fi economic production is what makes it an attractive form for generative community extension. While McKenzie Wark warns that “art finds itself recruited into the prototyping of fascinating consumables”, it's true that poetry is the least commodifiable of art forms. A certain  American talk-poet believes this is so because poetry is like gay marriage... no one knows what it really is. That's fine. The culturally fatigued could use a little sorcery.  

The old social order operates in secret locations and tyrannical states with almost no press (Press? What press?) since the days of '99. There are opportunities to communicate between Miami Models and Minneapolis Eights in creative ways, with human interactions that remain free of commercial interruption. There are poems, discussions, and drifts of random encounters that exist as a co-created experience. 

Anticipating CAConrad and Frank Sherlock's upcoming workshop, co-sponsored by the Nonsite Collective and Small Press Traffic on September 12, 2009 (as part of "Aesthetics as Somatic Practice", an ongoing Nonsite curriculum), I asked CAConrad for a provisional definition of "Somatics" with respect to his current practices and poetics. His response is posted below, and it includes an interview CAConrad conducted with himself.

For more information regarding the workshop, stay tuned to "events".

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MACRO (Soma)tics:  an introductory note toward freedom

by CAConrad

The last large wild beasts are being hunted, poisoned, asphyxiated in one way or another, and the transmission of their wildness is dying, taming.  A desert is rising with this falling pulse.  It is our duty as poets and others who have not lost our jagged, creative edges to FILL that gap, and RESIST the urge to subdue our spirits and lose ourselves in the hypnotic beep of machines, of war, and the banal need for power, and things.  With our poems and creative core, we must RETURN THIS WORLD to its seismic levels of wildness.

We must encourage -- now more than ever -- that everyone cease their quiet, and ignite, or reignite our collective creative force to bring the needed changes to our world.  Without being as creative as possible we will simply slump back toward the known models which have created our global crises of the day.  One form I have been working with, and sharing with others is (Soma)tic Poetics, a form of process which aids in breaking free from the stale whimper garnered out of demanding routines of work and modern life.  The exercises are updated monthly, and are available for free at http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com

One of my first deliberate explorations into (Soma)tics was working on the collection (Soma)tic Midge, a series of seven poems, each written after consuming a single color of food for a day.  This is the introductory note to that collection:

I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry. If I am an extension of this world then I am an extension of garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities, microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution, BUT ALSO the beauty of a patch of unspoiled sand, all that croaks from the mud, talons on the cliff that take rock and silt so seriously flying over the spectacle for a closer examination is nothing short of necessary. The most idle looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. Suddenly, and will be realized at no other speed than suddenly.

Since then I have been expanding the possibilities of (Soma)tics by including new forms to process, and collaborating with other poets, such as Thom Donovan.  Here is a self-conducted interview on the practice of (Soma)tic SOUNDWAVES:

(Soma)tic SOUNDWAVES:

CAConrad-1 interviews CAConrad-2

CAConrad-1:  Explain for us your idea of using music to generate language.

CAConrad-2:  It comes out of reading on Ernst Chladni's discovery that sound has ACTUAL form--

CAConrad-1:  --ACTUAL form?

CAConrad-2:  Yes, Chladni did an experiment where he put sand on a metal surface and ran a bow on the edge of the metal, causing the sand to form geometric shapes showing the nodal regions.  When I read this, the idea of sound's impact on the world suddenly became much clearer.  We've now seen images of sound traveling across the surface of water, for instance, right?  And since the human body is close to 75% water, how are we, as containers of moving water, affected by sound?  Then there're the bones and the metals and minerals in our body, and I wonder how they accept certain frequencies of sound as well.

CAConrad-1:  But you're a poet in this?

CAConrad-2:  I am a poet in this.  (Soma)tic poetry http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com is something I've been experimenting with for some time now, and in my first experiments I was eating a single color of food for a day, as well as having the color around me or on me before sitting down to write the poem.  It was when working on the BLUE poem http://www.coconutpoetry.org/conrad1.htm that I decided to attempt putting Chladni's information to the test, and I did so by playing Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" on a loop from 6am to midnight.

CAConrad-1:  Sounds awful!

CAConrad-2:  No, it wasn't awful at all.  In fact of the 7 poems in the series, the BLUE poem came out of me with such ease, and as corny as this sounds it was like love, real, love, the kind of love where you know the truth of the experience as a purely exceptional moment in your life.  When I think about great sex I've had, love I've had, I think writing that poem will always come to mind.  Chladni's discovery ran its fingers through my body of water and plucked at my bones until my brain unknotted a string of lines for the poem.  But all 7 of these (Soma)tic experiments with color were published by Jack Kimball's FAUX Press out of Boston, and the book is called (Soma)tic Midge http://caconrad.blogspot.com/index.html#3694398499929925151 .

CAConrad-1:  Oh.  Well what else have you done to experiment with sound?

CAConrad-2:  My good friend Thom Donovan and I recently completed editing a much longer experiment we're calling ARTHUR ECHO.  We were in a friend's large house in Philadelphia, and we had Arthur Russell's "World of Echo" playing on five different floors of the house from 9am to 9pm.  We had other various maneuvers we both brought to the experiment that we would perform at each station on the five floors in order to compound the structure for drawing the language out of us.  It was a tremendous success, and I'm very pleased with both of our poems, in fact I'm quite proud of what we did together, and feel it further proves Chladni's information to be true.

CAConrad-1:  How so?  What do you mean by further proves?

CAConrad-2:  In both our cases we never showed our separate poems to one another until they were finished, and in both cases the poems leapt beyond the regular margins we write in.  I can't speak for Thom, but I almost RESISTED the poem coming out of me the way in which it did.  And THAT was a good lesson for me, to TRUST THE MUSE in that She knows exactly how, when, what, and is always correct.  But when I finally gave into both the mode and form, it became itself in a most joyous way.

CAConrad-1:  (coughs) Um, OK, but--

CAConrad-2:  --but I'm working on the notes for a new project.  Notes meaning working on the groundwork for a new sound (Soma)tic poetry experiment.  This time it's with the song made famous by Diana Ross and The Supremes "I Hear a Symphony," which was my boyfriend Tommy's favorite song.  It's a tribute to Tommy in that I loved him, and he died of AIDS some years ago, and I miss him, BUT, it's not a weepy, sentimental project.  In fact it's much MUCH more than that, it's more about exorcising -- so to speak -- the disease out of him, even though he's been dead for many years.  It involves time travel, it involves intense meditation, and stamina, and most of all a most empathetic love.  But my idea is to listen to the song for 24 hours a day for 7 days without stopping.  Each day changing the treble and bass slightly, as well as ever-so-slightly increasing the volume each morning at a designated time.  I can't wait to see what poetry will come out of me.

CAConrad-1:  Sounds like torture!

CAConrad-2:  It's not torture, it's poetry!

CAConrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009).  He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a forthcoming collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED:  Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010).  CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.  He invites you to visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com and also with his friends at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com