REMINDER: Nonsite Event - Landscapes of Dissent w/ Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff, 2/7/09

Join Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff for a discussion growing out of their recent book, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press, 2007).

"Poetic Intervention and Aesthetic Distance"

Saturday, February 7, 3:30 PM
935 Natoma, btwn 10th and 11th,
and btwn Mission and Howard
Close to Van Ness and Market (Muni)
or Civic Center BART

Excerpts from Landscapes of Dissent are available as a PDF below.

About this event, Sand and Boykoff write: "In this session, 'Poetic Intervention and Aesthetic Distance', we'll use some ideas from our book, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space as a springboard for exploring some of our current intellectual preoccupations: resistance to neoliberalism, use of public space for politico-poetic intervention, and the tactical question of aesthetic distance.

"Kristin Palm--in an introduction to a previous non-site event involving David Buuck and Amy Balkin--alluded to "the absolute essentiality of invisible spaces." This spatial orientation has an important corollary: the invisibility of ideology. Echoing Althusser’s famous aphorism that ideology “never says, I am ideological,” Kanishka Goonewardena, notes, ideology’s “mode of presence is absence." Sure enough, neoliberalism has become the naturalized ideology humming at an inaudible octave in our quotidian victuals. Media scholar Robert McChesney asserts that this “market-worship rhetoric” has inflected the political sphere in negative ways, trending the populace toward depoliticization.

"The question then becomes: how can artists, writers, and poets with an activist bent operate effectively in the face of neoliberal ideology's depoliticism? In this session we will angle in on this question in numerous ways, starting off with a description of what a collective of poets--called PACE--are doing in Philadelphia and what poet Sidewalk Blogger (Susan M. Schultz) is cooking up in Hawai'i. How do their efforts further conversations about whether an action maintains or sheds the aesthetic distance of a "poem" in public space, considering both tactically? From there we'll turn out attention to recent efforts to re-politicize spaces of dissent from the past that have been neglected or buried under ideology. We will discuss some of our recent projects, including Kaia's 'Remember to Wave' poetry walks in Portland and Jules's collaborations with Kent Ford on Black Panther Party (Portland Chapter) hidden-history tours. Both projects are in conversation with David Buuck's work with BARGE. We will also allude to Laura Elrick's recent project, 'Stalk,' which she will be presenting at 21 Grand in Oakland on 15 February."

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Kaia Sand authored the poetry collection interval (Edge Books 2004), selected as a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year, and with Jules Boykoff she coauthored the just-released Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press 2008). Jim Dine created two books from her poems "lotto" and "tiny arctic ice" for his series, Hot Dreams (Steidl Editions 2008). Sand recently performed poetry collaged entirely from the North American Free Trade Agreement at the Positions Colloquium of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her investigations of Pacific Northwest geographies will be published as Remember to Wave through Tinfish Press (Hawaii 2009), and an essay from this project is included in Citadel of the Spirit (Nestucca Spit Press). She lives in Portland.

Jules Boykoff is the author of Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007), The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge, 2006) and Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (co-authored with Kaia Sand) (Palm Press, 2008). Boykoff's critical writing has appeared in scholarly journals like Antipode, Social Movement Studies, and New Political Science as well as popular publications like the Guardian, Common Dreams, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. In November 2006 he was an invited speaker at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, where he presented research he carried out on U.S. media coverage of global warming. Boykoff teaches political science and writing at Pacific University in Oregon