Poetic Materials

Artifact Reading Series
in collaboration with Nonsite Collective
hosts an evening of improvization, performance, and reading

by

Michael Basinksi, David Larsen, and Jeanne Heuving
Saturday, May 24th
6PM doors/6:30PM reading starts

at

The Oakland Art Gallery at Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland CA 94612

Watch for related Nonsite events and curricular materials to be announced on this website soon!

Hello everyone,

As you can see from the Events listings, Michael Basinski, David Larsen, and Jeanne Heuving are coming to town (or rather I should say Larsen will be reading before leaving town, right david?) to read together in the Artifact Reading Series on May 24. And because I've been on the end of that collaboration that is bringing Mike in from Buffalo, I've been thinking hard about the urgency with which I have wanted him to come here. Personally, I love the man like family and feel a deep affinity for his work, but what is it about this affinity, within the social context of my 6 years here in our Bay area poetry communities, that I have felt pressed to share?

I think that my urgency has something to do with wanting to generate local discussion and poetic activity around the physical "stuff," or material, of poems: our physical bodies and senses and how they enter into making and performing poems; the physicality--or lack thereof--of the poems themselves; the physical tools we use to make poems on and off the page; and the subject matter of poems: what is or can or might be included in them. In short, what counts as poems and what do we use to make them?

So, I'd like to propose a new nonsite curriculum around Poetic Materials as a place to generate such a discussion. If this topic resonates with you, please continue this thread, and we will see where it goes! I'm also hoping (as time and pay/day job permit)to begin posting--and inviting others to post--related materials to accompany the May 24 reading (with poets' permission, of course. Then, maybe the curriculum will continue in the wake of the reading. I'm also curious about how this curriculum might relate to or tie in with the archives and translation curricula. I suspect there could be some rich connections.

That's all for now. Let me know what you think. thanks,

wendy

To get the ball rolling on the Poetic Materials curriculum and the May 24 reading, here are a few Basinksi links:

Michael Basinski's author page on Ubuweb
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/index.html

Michael Basinski interviewed by Doug Holder, Lucid Moon Interview #5
http://www.lucidmoonpoetry.com/interviews/basinski.shtml

A couple of essays/creative statements introducing his ways of thinking @ & making poems:

The New Concrete
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/concrete.html

The Sound Pome Today Must Come to Bum Impoemivsational
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/pome.html

and some examples of hand drawn visual pomes and Sound/performance material:

Vispo Guide Image Gallery
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~blc35/final/basinskiimagegallery1.html

BuffFluxus performance on Radio Radio
http://15-bufffluxus-radio-radio-ny-2003-mp3-download.kohit.net/_/588174

Watch for more stuff upcoming!

Sunday May 25th
7:00-9:00 p.m.

Please email Tanya Hollis for address
tanya@tanyahollis.com

Come meet Michael Basinksi, visual-performance-fluxus etc. poet and curator, in the wake of the May 24 Artifact reading.

Archival materials will be on display in Tanya's studio for your enjoyment--and you can touch them too! :)

Questions? Comment on this event!

Warmest greetings from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn,

I’m in no position to propose an agenda item, as I won’t be attending the May 4 meeting. On the other hand I do have some very initial reflections on Nonsite as 'medium' that could, from afar, feed into the growing Nonsite glossary. Having recently addressed the ‘homelessness of poetry’ in SF, my concern is of course conversion of nonsite to sites. (Perhaps a translation issue, after all—and as such, a complimentarity, not contrariety.)

My problem: I can’t help but read the Nonsite framework as direct architectural specification!

To be sharp enough to see the illegibility or erosion or degree of disaster or invisibility of a site, wouldn’t we need to be seeing its re-design? Short of that, aren’t we but varmints?

Purposive, proposive, propulsive, presumptive, preposterous prosperity.

(For example: not only criticizing the 'nonnegotioable american lifestyle' by overturning and stacking single-family homes in an artpark (think Acconci), but constructing a site free of one’s own rebuke.)

In the difference between nonsite (as abstraction, as freedom of movement, as freedom from location, as metaphor, as corrective) and site lies a re-specification. Read more

larsen material

Here are a few pieces from Tanya Hollis and Wendy Kramer's personal correspondences with Mike:

Images are clickable, if you'd like to see full-size versions. Come see more stuff on Sunday!

Apologies for cross-postings.

ARTIFACT & NONSITE COLLECTIVE present...

Saturday, May 24th

Michael BASINSKI
Jeanne HEUVING
David LARSEN

Please note our new earlier time:
6PM, Reading begins promptly at 6:30PM

$5 suggested donation

Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland CA 94612

BIOS

Michael Basinski is The Curator of The Poetry Collection State University of New York at Buffalo. He performs his work as a solo poet and in ensemble with BuffFluxus. Among his many books of poetry are Of Venus 93 (Little Scratch Pad); All My Eggs Are Broken (BlazeVox); Heka (Factory School); Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert (Burning Press); The Idyllic Book (Michel Letko, Houston, Texas); Mool, Mool3Ghosts and Shards of Shampoo (Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum); Cnyttan and Heebie-Jeebies (Meow Press); By and The Doors (House Press); Un-Nome, Red Rain Two, Abzu and Flight to the Moon (Run Away Spoon Press): Poemeserss (Structum Press) and many more. See (or hear): RadioRadio on UBUWEB (see Basinski and BuffFluxus). His poems and other works have appeared in Dandelion, BoxKite, Antennae, Unbearables Magazine, Open Letter, Torgue, Leopold Bloom, Wooden Head Review, Basta, Kiosk, Explosive Magazine, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, First Offense, Terrible Work, Juxta, Kenning, Witz, Lungfull, Lvng, Generator, Tinfish, Curicule Patterns, Score, Unarmed, Rampike, First Intensity, House Organ, Ferrum Wheel, End Note, Ur Vox, Damn the Caesars, Pilot, 1913, Filling Station, Public Illumination and in others. Read more

5.25

appearance fatigue.

antienter
(antient-er.

the durable --
that which survives beyond its intention,
as a residue.

"if the passions are the limbs of dishonor"
--Hamann, Cloverleaf...

At Canessa Park.
Tyrone Williams, Laura Moriarty &
Brenda.

Diverse dangers of local pits to fall into.

(here it's MEN, Spicer,
DE Oppen.)

The general intellect.
Fragment on Machines
(Notebook VII)

The blood clots enough to
shave a knot from it.
We're native speakers.+ +Native informants.

An openness in our libidinal life was all
that was required to breed out of
us technicity & all that follows.

Signals. Tethers. Hoards.
Anticipation, grief.

"We're mammals"

All right, to think it
politically, which means to think
politics down to its elements.

Ethics wont let me sleep at night,
unless I drink to excess.

The solid sphere of thinginess
which permits us at last to
forget everything human.

"Reification is also a kind of
forgetting" --Adorno

This comment seems very generative to me.

Knowing what money & the
commodity-form might actually be.

The politics of insufficiency -- of
vigilance -- diagnosis & awaitment --

I dont want to perish under the
burden of that name --

the name.

delimits, designates, separates.

"particular language wages" --Brenda

lifts & separates.

Also stultification.

I had got used to
losing you in advance of the loss, so that when I lost you it was
truly the case that I felt nothing.

True Convenience Delivered.
--Wells Fargo ATM
(reminds me of the title of 17th cent.
British religious tracts)

They take what ever
available ontology, they
dont know how to check the math.

Ourselves a site of some variety of
registration.

"We seek everywhere for the unconditioned
and find only conditioned things"
-Novalis

"I am not fit / to carry your name"
-Will Oldham

The ictus.
The major point is not
the question of appearance from a Read more

My BARGE project BURIED TREASURE ISLAND opens this Saturday at YBCA as part of the Ground Scores exhibition, an off-site section of the Bay Area Now 5 show. 411 below. They'll be an online map and podcast, along with a downloadable guidebook as well - the site will be up and announced later this week. - DB

Buried Treasure Island - BARGE (the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics)
Given Treasure Island's long and complex history as an artificial staging ground for world's fairs, military bases, television shoots, and real estate speculation, as well as being an enormous landfill of dangerous and toxic substances, "Buried Treasure Island" attempts to unearth the secret histories of the site, and explore how the landscape is transformed not only by its usage, but also by what is elided from public view. Home to some of the most stunning views in the bay (but only if you turn your back on the island itself), Treasure Island remains a site full of hidden histories, presents, and possible futures. The work is presented in several overlapping iterations: installation, guidebook, self-guided tour, audio podcast, songs, performative bus tour, staged actions and photographs, and online. That some possible Treasure Island “itself” may be buried somewhere within the constellation of these versionings, between site and non-site, realities and representations, is a question that the work attempts to confront.

more info, with downloads, at:
http://www.davidbuuck.com/barge/bti/index.html

Opening Night party Sat July 19, 8pm-midnight
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission @ 3rd St
San Francisco
http://ban5.org/