More on EconVergence

After Noam we made our way over the the Sea Change Gallery for the reading, running into Allison Cobb & Jen Coleman along the way, then David Wolach & Elizabeth Williamson & Aaron Vidaver, along with Alicia Cohen, Rodney Koeneke, CE Putnam, etc. The reading was great - certainly 'political' given the context & the readings, but more celebratory in tone than pious or pedantic or whatever. Wine, beer, margueritas. 

Saturday

The next afternoon was the BARGE/PACE panel. Again, Kaia's work to push the panel into the street, to really get away from the panelist/audience convention and think of the conversation as a moveable workshop in practice, was exemplary. So after Frank & Conrad spoke about PACE we headed out to read from & pass out poems & broadsides.

I must admit I had reservations about this action/exercise - not because I have some critique of the motivations or participants, but more because I personally have a hard time approaching strangers and engaging them in conversation, much less asking them if I can read or give them something I wrote. Additionally, I also didn't feel comfortable coming to someone else's city and bringing 'my news', without knowing much if anything about the conditions on the ground here - I simply don't think site-specific work can occur without a fairly deep (research-based and participatory) engagement with those places & spaces before the 'work' can really begin. Still, I don't think that we or PACE were really making any grand claims for this experiment, and indeed it felt both investigatory (more like, let's see what happens when we do this, or that, and compare notes, see what we think about it as fellow-practitioners) and celebratory at times (especially considering how per Kaia's leadership, we were able to successfully morph the panel from the conventional classroom-table-chairs set-up to an outdoor mobile participatory demonstration, where we were *doing* instead of just *talking about*). Nonetheless, even as I enjoyed watching Frank, Conrad, Kaia, Jonathan & others read & share their broadsides, I felt more like an observer than a participant. So I decided to do what made the most sense for me, which was to 'research' and 'collect' language, as a way of provisionally mapping the parts of the city we were moving through, pulling language from the sites rather than putting my own into it, as it were. So I made some simple PORTLAND acrostics, collecting language from street signs, adverts, etc., as well as asking passersby to give me words that described Portland for them. Some results:

Per hour

One Way ->

Reserved Parking Space

Transparent

Lease Office Space

Available 503-274-0211

Nordstrom

Don't Cross 

 

(SW 11th Ave @ SW Salmon)

 

Putting Portland Back to Work

Overhead

Radio Cab

Take the City

Looking for the Library

Art Media

No Exit Oct 15-Nov 15

Dough (or D'oh!?)

 

Power

Over

Ragtime

Trendy Place

Lilac

Art Media

Nuance

Defensive

 

(collected in front of the Public Library)

 

Pioneer Square

Open

Rules of Conduct

Thanks for Giving me Hope

Level 4 Stairwell

All Pedestrians Must use Sidewalk

Low Leasing Capacity Commecial Group

Dispensing Opticians

 

(Park Ave West Towers, Yamhill @ SW 9th)

 

I don't necessarily think of these as poems, as much as initial experiments in possible documentary culling, for research or composting or whatever.

Finally, since it was mentioned by David & Elizabeth, I took to the parking garage impulsively, initially because I am interested in how such structures function in downtown urban space (the relationship between the car & the street, hiding the car so we can pretend the urban space and air is clean, the gridded stacks of mobile private property, the architecture of such structures, etc...) but also (I now realize) perhaps I felt more comfortable reading my work aloud in public space *only* from a vantage point *above*, as if turning folks on the street into audience members who might look up to see/hear me, vs the more democratic spatial relations if I had remained on the street. *Avoiding* those more difficult relations by putting myself in a position from which I might shout my work from the 'rooftops' etc. Problematic, but there I was. I also chose to read from the 'anti-war poetry' section of The Shunt, which is all appropriated text about antiwar poetry, culled during National Poetry Month in April 2003, as a means of self-critique and interrogation of an emerging genre that had become increasingly problematic for me, even as I was (am?) "not not an anti-war poet" (paraphrasing Taylor or Rob, I think). Anyways. End of day, I realized that what I 'got out of' the PACE action were real-time tests of my own practice, the success or failure of which was not dependent solely on audience reaction or, I dunno, number of broadsides distributed, etc., but rather how such work transforms the poet/activist herself. 

Then it was onto the bar for food & drink & more conversation (which for many of us can be where the most important work of these kinds of conferences actually occurs, with more unregulated debate and affinity-building), & then several of us continued on well into the night, into further psychogeographic drifts through Portland and forms of poetic distribution that I will leave out of this account...

Sunday

The next morning was the panel “Poetry Encouraging Activism” – Jonathan Skinner, Alicia Cohen, Dan Raphael, Allison Cobb, Jim Grabill" which really focused on eco/environmental activism as its horizon, though in the most open sense, while looking at poetry (both the panelists' and others') as not some efficacious or heroic mode of address but a deeply entangled mode of discursive work, often pushing up against boundaries of what 'counts' as activism. Rather than waste time bemoaning the exclusion of avant-garde poetries from mainstream political discourse or over-worrying about how 'we' can get the poems to 'them' (the audience questions), the panelists (all working poets also involved in various environmentalist and/or activist fields) instead shared their own practices and initiated conversations that felt fruitful. 

There were not only a variety of perspectives on ecopoetics and the broader relations between poetry, poetics, ecology, and environmental activism/organizations, but some challenging discussions about the disconnect that often can happen between more deconstructive, avant-garde (eco)poetics and more mainstream environmentalist institutions and generational thinking (ie Mother Earth, virgin forests, etc). In particular, both Allison and (from the audience) Jen Coleman spoke to how environmental organizations often fall back on oversimplified rhetoric about 'nature' in order to reach certain target audiences and donors, and how those working in such areas often end up being language mediators between donors/members and some other target audience (policy makers in state & national government, for example), where the kinds of nuanced interrogation of the terms at play (nature, wilderness, etc.) gets left out. (This made me think of similar situations in non-profit political and arts organizations, where in the US the increased reliance on private donors and foundations has increasingly stifled discussion about what 'diversity' or 'educational programming' might actually manifest itself in culture-work, instead putting orgs into language-frames wherein granting institutions more or less frame 'what counts'). Jonathan pointed out that in his experience, within many environmentalist & activist communities, many of the 'deconstructive' (sorry, not the best word, but I hope you know what I mean here) critiques of terms such as 'nature' have found purchase, and we all agreed with his related assertion that poets can lead this work to move beyond the mere critique of binaries or romanticized language to more positive, if radically complex, vistas of imagination ('cyclical and radiant verb tenses' - JS, quoting from ecopoetics?). Further, JS also raised the question of time & duration, specifically how poets might begin to think time on different scales (those of the species, or the planet perhaps?): "forever in front, forever in back, & all around" - a mode of seeing our choices as bound up in time-spans beyond the human-horizon?

Some other brief notes I find in my notebook: Jim Grabill: "forest brain / everything's vibrations" - what points of view might poetry afford, looking towards the disaster ahead - poetry as a mode of "grief for the future" / Dan Rafael: "We don't just live here / we re-decorate." 

The next panel I went to was “Art & Poetry in Action: Crises of Housing” – Andrea Murray, Kristen Sheeran, Friends of Woodwards Squats (Aaron Vidaver), Kaia Sand, Marcia Klotz, with Kaia holding forth as the 'chair'/organizer. 

I thought that this was a very successful model of putting folks from different disciplines & modalities together in fruitful ways. The panel began with a video put together by Kaia, Kristen (an economist) and Andrea (who works in public radio). The video, a playful 'PSA' on how to profit from buying up foreclosed real estate, mixed in information and statistics about the current economic & housing crises to great effect, turning what could have simply been an exercise in lefty irony into something pedagogical, political, & rigorously engaged, as well as getting away from the panel=paper format. Marcia Klotz followed with a great talk on debt & its relation to shame & guilt, in both religious discourse as well as leftist discourses. Again the notion of debt-baiting came up, along with the ways in which debt-shame & frugality have been re-purposed into a 'born-again' discourse (viz Suzie Orman, etc), and how on the left the guilt or shame associated with simply have consumer desire beyond one's 'needs' also limits the possibility for the radical imagination. (Anyone who was there may want to add their take on this, as this is from memory so I may be over-simplifying &or misremembering...) Finally, Aaron Vidaver spoke about the Woodland Squat that took place in Vancouver in 2002. Among the many interesting things from AV's talk that stood out for me was his contextualization of how the squat began as what was imagined as a short-term action directed at municipal policy makers and politicians (specifically around housing & gentrification issues), but then as locals from the neighborhood moved in, the terms of debate & stakes of the action rapidly & radically changed, such that the initial leadership of (my words, AV please correct me if I'm missing the nuances here) the more 'educated' activists was challenged and replaced by the folks who actually live day to day in these transitional neighborhoods (of SRO hotels, marginal/sublegal economic activities, etc), thus changing the negotiations, demands, horizons of action, etc. Further, AV also talked about how he produced a daily paper (the squat lasted for 92 days) that also forced him to re-think his own poetics & editorial practice, becoming an on-the-fly documentarian & mediator of the experiences of fellow squatters. He also talked about how he & fellow squatters were able to request & gather all sorts of police surveillance records after the action, which could become part of the archive as well---

(Here is the PDF of Aaron's incredible Woodsquat publication, which was a special edition of the amazing West Coast Line. Check it out for models of archival practice...)

http://www.econvergence.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/AaronVidaver-WestCoastLine.pdf

Someone from the audience asked Aaron how it ended. AV answered something along the lines like "it was real ugly" and then took a deep breath, bent over, stood back up and said "I really don't want to talk about it. It's just too painful." He then went on to talk about the broader political aftermath, including a very interesting narrative about how liberal Canadian politics and non-profits working 'on behalf of' such marginalized communities end up playing a kind of middle-management role for capital, functioning as 'caretakers' of the marginal without actually addressing the structural conditions that produce such marginality (what here we call the nonprofit industrial complex). 

Aaron also spoke about how these issues play out in Vancouver as they prepare to host the Olympics next year, and how you will not be allowed to have any political placards or language within camera-range during the events - that any language within camera-range 'can only be celebratory' (which led to later discussions about how poets might create some celebratory dissensus in our public language work, etc). 

But I want to return to AV's desire to NOT talk about the end of the Woodland Squat. The way his polite refusal to discuss it did a kind of archival work in itself, as if registering a gap in the record as a kind of wound, an as-yet too-painful space that marks the experience of those memories without yet carving them into stone. Others commented on this afterwards, and I thought this was a very intense moment and possibility to think archivally (sp?) and historically about success and failure (& how we might emotionally mediate either of those terms) without concretizing them in some kind of heroic or tragic narrative closure...

The panel ended with Kaia ably stage-managing some great cross-disciplinary discussions around debt, poetry, economic theory, history, etc., among the panelist & audience members. Really great. 

Walks, naps, dinner, drinks, goodbyes...

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I'd also like to add a few words about my visit to Evergreen State in Olympia two days after Portland, where I was graciously hosted by David & Elizabeth, if only to point to further models of the talk/performance/demo/interrogation models that might push these artist/activist questions beyond contestation without glorifying some kind of 'political poetry' as sufficiently 'activist'--- 

Since D & E had brought some (current and former) students down from Oly, there'd already been some discussions coming out of EconV as to what kinds of things I might do with the expected E-State audiences, particularly their stated desire to be pushed, challenged, etc., with something other than a straightforward 'poetry reading' or 'lecture.' Credit to D & E for having built a pedagogical and activist context that among other things has primed students to develop their own critical demands for what kinds of non-academic pedagogy & practice might be productively challenging and inter-active. At least this was my sense of things when I arrived, and this feeling really challenged me to think about, respond to, and experiment with both the conditions of the (physical & social) space of the event & the terms by which I might engage my real-time relations with it/us. The opening of such spaces, and clear invitation to experiment with the forms of the reading/talk/demo/performance, allowed me to (and demanded of me) play & improvise within a context that was both receptive and critically engaged. I can't say whether in the end my part in this was interesting or productive, but it was one of the most rewarding experiences I've had as an 'artist', in particular due to the critical, & helpfully skeptical & challenging audience. To be able to create a space *within* the talk (ie not after during the regulated & genred Q&A sessions) for questions like "What counts as an intervention?" or "How is this work actually 'political'?" (I'm paraphrasing here, but these were the kinds of questions posed directly to my work, if not my claims for it), really pushed me in a way that was generative, & left me with questions for my own practice that are still resonating, which is much more rewarding than, say, feeling like I gave a 'really good' talk or reading (which really doesn't push the work forward, at the end of the day.). 

Anyways, hats off again to D & E & the audience at E-State (& the bar afterwards, where the discussions & exchanges continued...) - 

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cheers--

David Buuck