A Moving Object
March 18, 2008 File under: Alabama , America , Civil Rights , Denver , Editing , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Labwork , Language , Listening , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South
For my RSS readers, I am radically redesigning my entire site, so the blog root and RSS feeds are changing. Please visit me at www.jakeadamyork.com and let's go from there. It will probably be another 2-3 weeks before all the RSS feeds are in place, but maybe you can take a gander and let me know what you think of the new look and function until then.
Seriously Mixed Up
August 29, 2007 File under: Denver , Labwork
And then there's this:
I don't know what to say except that the Marxism Lecture will be offered by the incomparable Gillian Silverman.
I'll miss it because my brother's book With Signs Following: Photographs From the Southern Religious Roadside is being published tomorrow and I'm off to Oxford, Mississippi, to help celebrate and maybe spill some whiskey on Faulkner's grave.
Upcoming
August 26, 2007 File under: Denver , Intake , Labwork
I've been quiet, I know.
Here's what's in the works that's been keeping me quiet:
- Working with colleagues to complete the launch of the Colorado Center for Public Humanities. We're hosting heavy-weights Michael Berube (9/6), Stephen Prothero (10/4), and Patricia Limerick (11/1) to start it off.
- Copper Nickel 8 is almost done and will be released on Friday, September 28th at Matter Studio here in Denver (2132 Market Street). Party begins at 7pm.
- Same night (9/28) Copper Nickel will publish a book, in addition to its eighth issue. It's called & (that's right) and it features scads of double-exposure super-saturated Lomotography and double-exposure poems by Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson and by Jules Cohen & Mathias Svalina. In publishing this book, Copper Nickel will found Counterfeit Press, on which more soon.
- Copper Nickel/Counterfeit Press and friends will present the Denver Mint Poetry Festival, October 18-19, featuring readings by Hadara Bar-Nadav, Adam Clay, John Gallaher, Kate Greenstreet, Janet Holmes, Joshua Kryah, Alex Lemon, Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer, Zachary Schomburg, Mathias Svalina, and Eliot Khalil Wilson, and the opening of an exhibition of artifacts and poetry at The Lab.
I'll check in with you all very very soon.
Whole Hog...
July 14, 2007 File under: America , Denver , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Self-promotion
July 10, 2007 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake
And again...
Go
June 21, 2007 File under: Denver
Who can pass this one up?
Mixed Nuts
June 13, 2007 File under: Denver
There aren't really enough good things to say about this:
If you're in Denver and are a thinking person and you're not going to this, I'm not sure you're interested in having fun. This is where it all comes together.
Look, I spent my 21 years in school, got my PhD, got my job, set up my little post in the Academy, but not so I could have some sense intellectual authority fend off questions the way the shields on the Starship Enterprise deflect asteroids and phaser blasts. I got into the business, like most people, because I wanted to keep talking about things, which is also why I've gone to academic conferences. There, however, too often the frenzy to get one's c.v. into shape, to get the number of conference appearances you need before the upcoming personnel review, tends to short out the exchange, not to mention failing to bring you into contact with very many people who might not share most of your institutional assumptions.
For that, you've got to step outside. That shouldn't, however, mean abandoning the Academy altogether.
There should be a middle ground.
And there is.
This is it.
Seriously, you should be going. All the time.
Mixed Tastes
May 24, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology
This summer's MIXED TASTE schedule is out now. Clear off your Thursdays, once again:
Swiss Typography & TV Theme Songs
Thursday June 7, 2007
with Joel Swanson & Scott Kinnamon
Kurt Cobain & Solar Eclipses
Thursday June 14, 2007
with Patrick Brown & Jim Downing
Practical Democracy & Deadly Jellyfish
Thursday June 21, 2007
with David Hildebrand & Alyce Todd
Carnivorous Plants & Color-Field Painting
Thursday June 28, 2007
with John Bayard & Dean Sobel
Earth Art & Goat Cheese
Thursday July 5, 2007
with Elissa Auther & Michele Wells
Capoeira & Le Corbusier
Thursday July 12, 2007
with Canto de Galo & Bob Nauman
Chinese Opera & Alfred Hitchcock
Thursday July 19, 2007
with Joanna Lee & Thomas Delapa
Walt Whitman & Whole Hog Cooking
Thursday July 26, 2007
with Jake Adam York & Joe York
Tequila & Dark Energy in the Universe
Thursday August 2, 2007
with Matt Ortiz & Ka Chun Yu
Soul Food & Existentialism
Thursday, August 9, 2007
with Adrian Miller & Maria Talero
Prairie Dogs & Gertrude Stein
Thursday, August 16, 2007
with Jonathon Proctor & Julie Carr
Japanese Anime & Zora Neale Hurston
Thursday, August 23, 2007
with Alexandre O. Philippe & Philip Joseph
Marxism & Kittens, Kittens, Kittens
Thursday, August 30, 2007
with Gillian Silverman & The Denver Dumb Friends League
Migration
May 16, 2007 File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South
This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...
I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.
If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.
You're Invited
April 17, 2007 File under: Denver
The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar invites you to
FANG LIJUN HEADS
OPENING RECEPTION
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 6-9PM
Please join us for the opening reception of Fang Lijun's Heads at The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar. Artist Fang Lijun will be in attendance. This event is free and open to the public.
The largest work on view in Heads, Fang Lijun's first solo museum exhibition in the United States, is a large-scale installation consisting of 15,000 sculpted heads, cast in bronze and covered in gold leaf. Mounted on slender steel rods and installed in a grid-like formation at heights between twelve and fourteen inches, the diminutive heads sway with any change in air current, reinforcing the feeling of a unified throng of individuals. A second, related piece features life-sized sculptures of important individuals involved in China following the Cultural Revolution. A large-scale oil painting, comprised of 36 separate panels closely related to the sculptural works in the exhibition, is also on view.
Born in 1963 in Hebei province in China, Fang Lijun came of age in the years following the Cultural Revolution, during China's transition into a global economic power. He studied printmaking at China's prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Bejing. Still a student when his work was included in the influential No U-turn exhibition at the China Art Gallery in Bejing in 1989, Fang is now one of the most well-known contemporary artists working in China, and is represented in major collections worldwide.
Exhibition Open April 18-August 26, 2007
Tryin' Hard Not To Lose My Head
File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Lomography / Photography
We finished installing the 15,000 heads that are part of the Fang Lijun exhibition that will open tomorrow at The Lab
I've got a brace of photos up here.
Check them & it out.
Blabbermouth
April 15, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology
The author with a few of the several thousand miniature busts in Fang Lijun's Heads, which I helped install at The Lab all day yesterday.
I've been helping The Lab in several capacities, but I'm most happy to tell you, I've been developing a blog for the institution, which I invite you to visit at www.belmarblab.org, where you'll find more dealings with the tiny heads.
...
Photo by Sarah Skeen
Dear Allison, Dear Joshua,
March 29, 2007 File under: Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics
You left just in time. This morning we woke to five, maybe six inches of snow. I am told the Farmers Almanac predicted this, but this is the first I've heard of it. Its almanac size to quote Allison.
Perhaps this is the appropriate afterward. Your visit was one of the best I can remember. The time you spent talking to our students was wonderfully instructive, even inspiring, if I may pull the raggedy term from the cedar chest again. Your readings were captivating, and the balance was perfect. What more is there to say? This silence, enforced in ice and water, seems right.
I wasn't as aggressive as Mathias in capturing your visit photographically, but I got a few shots for the record.
Joshua listening:
And Allison, I made the mistake of shooting you in digital. I think analog, or analogue, would have been better.
I'm told the control booth sustained a power failure about 3/4 of the way through your reading, Allison, and so much of the sound recording was lost, though we're combing the computer caches to discover what we can. I'm going to tell those who were hoping to hear it as a podcast that this is testament to the power of the reading. Josh, I've got most of your reading, and I'll be working on a broadcast version in the coming weeks.
Please tell everyone about the broadside. We'll have it up for sell next week on the Copper Nickel site.
And, in the meantime, please rest. I hope your memories of Denver are good ones, and I hope we'll see you both again before too long.
All my best,
Jake
You Should Already Know
March 26, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus are reading tomorrow (Tuesday) on campus (7pm King Center). Think what it would be like it Whitman and Dickinson were married and wrote poems in the same house.
Quit your job and be there.
A special surprise for those with loose bills: Copper Nickel will publish a limited-edition broadside of Allison Titus's poem "The Nineteenth Century" as part of this event. Only 57 copies. A free one to the first person who can tell me why only 57.
&
Noah Eli Gordon reads from A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of A Sparrow and a selection of his other 24 books this Saturday, 4pm, Cameron Church, corner of S. Pearl and Iowa. Reception to follow.
Renounce all other gods.
&&
Next week in Denver: Danielle Dutton + Stephanie Young on Monday; Daniel Alarcón on Wednesday.
&&&
And I'm told I can say it now, Southern Illinois University Press will publish A Murmuration of Starlings next Spring as part of its Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. My manuscript was chosen for the second prize in this year's Open Competition. More details to come.
A Map of Denver
January 16, 2007 File under: Denver
Those of you who are lost will want to check this out.
Under the Weather
October 17, 2006 File under: Denver , Intake
I drizzle through the hardwood rooms and drift from kitchen to study, stand in the shower and melt. Then I'm mixed—I'll go in today, I won't go in today—drifting once again. I am the cloudy brood behind the mailslot door, just waiting for something to fall. I am the piling light shaped by wind and pressure and cold. I am a tube slowly filling with disconnection's snow.
This Little Piggie...
October 10, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
... is very tired. Copper Nickel 6 is out, in the wild. Should be arriving on the usual newsstands soon, but we're also happy to export this fine metal to your neck of the body politic (won't you please put one of these around your neck, a little literary pendant for you, maybe?). I bartended like a crack-head monkey last Thursday for tips for the journal after the incomparable Anne Boyer read to get it all started. Anne's reading was one of the true pleasures of my last few years, and there's more to say about that, when this little piggie's let to lie in the slop a day or two.
But before the rest, this little piggie's got to go wee wee wee all the way to Tucson, Arizona, where, among other things (RMMLA, a little carne saca, sunburn, hotel html, cellphone sigh) I'll be reading at Casa Libre, this Friday, October 13th, at 8pm (Flier, anyone?). Come on by if you're in town. Or send someone over in your stead. And maybe then, in true American fashion, this little piggie will have some little piggie barbecue there. Then some downtime, I hope. I pray.
Dear reader, take care.
Fresh
October 2, 2006 File under: Denver
Copper Nickel 6 has just landed. Now my office smells, wonderfully, of cut paper and the deep clay perfume of ink. I want to eat these Nickels they smell so good.
Contributors, your issues are on their ways to you.
Please, everyone, join us for a little noise later this week as Anne Boyer drops her sweet science on Thursday and we celebrate this newly minted mag.
And please visit my friend and colleague Teague von Bohlen's new website, and dream about his book, The Pull of the Earth due out later this season.
Bus Route
September 12, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics
The Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour's Denver stop was fantastic. The poets were amazing, the space was wonderful, and there were a million books. It's hard to find a better show than this, so if it comes to your town—GO!
Quickly, here are some photos of Joshua Beckman demonstrating proper smoking techniques for the Jim Lehrer News Hour crew:
Get On the Bus
September 7, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Folks, this Sunday the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour pulls into town for a reading at the Tivoli Student Union on our own Auraria Higher Education Campus. Come on down Sunday at 5pm to hear Matthea Harvey, Chelsey Minnis, Eleni Sikelianos, Kristen Prevallet, Matthew Zapruder, Anthony McCann, Joshua Beckman, Bhanu Kapil, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Noah Eli Gordon, Erin Belieu, and yours truly.
This is one you don't want to miss.
Dead Letter Office, Part 3
September 1, 2006 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
This morning, I found two copies of Murder Ballads, also so recently de-contender-ized in the Colorado Book Award consideration, in the bargain books section at The Tattered Cover. I picked them up for $4 each, less than I pay my publisher for copies. Anyone want one? I'll pick this one up.
I also found a $4 copy of David Keplinger's The Clearing, which is a contender for the Colorado Book Award. The book's magnificent and certainly a must-read.
David's book has been out just a little more than a year, mine not even a full year. How quickly do these books get moved to the clearance rack?
Meanwhile, what's allowed to sit indefinitely?
I know a bookstore has to make space, has to move books that persist too long, but it takes a while to move a book of poems. I'm just now starting to see some notice of Murder Ballads here and there. The Blackbird review is just four months out, and the H_NGM_N feature Nathan Pritts kindly edited, with a review of the book, has been up just a month.
And I notice with my compatriots the same. Noah Eli Gordon has recently posted a link to a new review of his book The Area of Sound Called the Subtone that's been out for two years.
It takes a while.
I've taken some advice from Noah: with some grant money, I just bought a bunch of copies and am going to send them out.
So I think, from this blog, I will begin giving away a copy a week for the next ten weeks. I'll pick up the postage and everything. Alls you have to do is leave a comment or send me an e-mail with either the lyrics to an obscure country song or a good idea for a poem that includes a bizarre historical fact. Be sure to give me your address in case you win.
Meanwhile, I remain. Denver's cooling a bit, but still clear and blue. The next issue of Copper Nickel should go to the printer next week. Look for some subscription and pre-order options there soon.
Good weekend, dear reader.
Congratulations...
August 29, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics
... go to Aaron Anstett, Jane Hilberry, David Keplinger, and Sheryl Luna for being named finalists for the 2005 Colorado Book Award in Poetry.
On Community
July 31, 2006 File under: Alabama , Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South
For no good reason I looked at my stats for July. The month is ending, but I haven't looked at my stats in maybe five or six months. Probably because I thought I was going to give up the blog. Also because I had much else on my mind, a lot of life changes, a new book, &c. I see today I'm averaging about 120 visitors a day.
I suppose this is good news. At one time, I would have smiled at this. And perhaps I will, tomorrow, but at present I'm mostly confused, because I haven't the faintest idea who reads this.
...
How do you know your community? How do you know what your community is, your place in it, what community to which you belong?
I used to think the answers were fairly straightforward. I used to think direct reciprocity was the best sign. You approach someone. They approach you back. In the face to face lay a recognition in which mutuality could be registered and in which community could begin. But when I think this way, I sometimes get depressed, as I am reminded again and again what gestures I've made that have not been answered, and I'm not sure if that means my gestures failed, if the lack of answer means I'm not welcomed in some conversations, if I am asked to remain apart, if I am persona non grata.
I've been counselled recently against making stuff up, assuming that the reasons are negative, against imagining the motives or the thoughts of others.
And I've entered two conversations lately that have me thinking reciprocity may be a misdirection.
I was reading today another blog, which I found through yet another blog, in which our writer discussed the feeling we can have that we need to have or are supposed to have a spiritual experience after trying to push toward one and how frustrating it is when the experience doesn't happen. We work toward the spiritual but don't arrive. The writer suggested that the sense of work must be abandoned. You can't invest yourself toward the spiritual. But you can make yourself receptive. This struck me as true, recalling how, even in my most serious religious disciplines, I felt not the transforming encounter with spirit I imagined but the structure of discpline, and the comfort a community in which reciprocity situated me. My transforming encounters occurred when I stopped asking, stopped insisting, when I just shut up.
I'm thinking, too, about an exchange I had recently in the context of a salon discussion about writing and the senses.
I was advocating for what I called a transsubstantial writing, in which one commits to putting everything into the poem, all the sensory information that can be gathered, so the poem would become not the report of the experience that might evoke response, but instead the form of the experience, such that it might be replicable in someone else. I said you put your concentration into the poem, and a reader taking the poem for the substance of the world for a moment might enter into that concentration. The poet does not withhold but provides and a serious reader, entering fully into the poem, enters what's provided, what experience. The poem is like messenger RNA, providing the ends to which a reader's knowledge might be joined, allowing for some replication. The poet doesn't endeavor to become immortal, but the poet makes way into places and lives and states neither he nor she could imagine. Through the poem, experience has a wider ken, and it can draw us together in an ethical relationship.
Someone in the audience asked what I meant by a relationship, how I would call it a relationship especially if I never knew who read my poem, if they never wrote me or told me. How is literature a medium for relation?
I was thinking of Whitman, of the seventh and eigth sections of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":
7Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
8Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?We understand then do we not?
What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach-what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?
Whitman was fond of thinking the book, the form he'd chosen for the poems, into his texts. Knowing the reader would hold the book, he imagined the reader holding it, and began using that book, that thing in the reader's hand, as a meeting place. For Whitman, the book was a structure for delay of relational attention, for holding his curiosity and later delivering it to a reader (if anyone's interested, I did the scholarship on this in an article that appeared in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review back in 2001). He knew the relationship would be asymmetrical, that he might never have the return gesture, but he trusted that his hand — his physical hand, yes, but more to the point his writing, his handwriting that then became translated into the type in the book, which was designed for the hand (why he shrunk the 1856 and 1860 editions to better fit the traveling hand)— went out, open, and that it would find some hand.
So, too, I need to enter a renewed trust.
...
I do wonder, however, who reads my ladder, in part because, as a poet, I wonder where I fit, where I operate. My teachers, I would say, were what would be considered conservative, and I believe that I write poems that others would consider conservative. Richard Greenfield once described my work that way, meaning that I still held useful old concepts of line and poetic genre. And I think anyone who'd read Murder Ballads might agree: I wrote the book, most often, in song lines. Yet, I don't feel entirely comfortable understanding my self and my work situated in a community defined by poetic conservatism of one kind or another, for I value the conversation of Richard Greenfield, of Noah Eli Gordon, of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, of Hadara Bar-Nadav, of Major Jackson, of Natasha Tretheway, of Dan Albergotti, of Simmons Buntin, of Zachary Schomburg, of Adam Clay, of Tony Tost, of Joshua Poteat, of Shanna Compton, of Aaron Anstett, of Steve Mueske, of Stephen Schroeder, of Craig Arnold, of Larissa Szporluk, of Diann Blakely, of Gina Franco, and the less direct exchange I find in reading the books and blogs of Joshua Corey, Joshua Clover, Richard Siken, Gabriel Gudding, Elizabeth Robinson, and so many others. I find myself moving between two kinds of communities that have long been thought of as separate, opposed, and I have no idea what this means.
At times I'm a ghost, at others a distant greeting. Most often an open hand that, I hope, doesn't look like a slap about to happen.
...
Reader, who are you?
Where are you, so I might know, between you, where I am today?
4th
July 4, 2006 File under: America , Denver
Science
July 3, 2006 File under: America , Denver
7.7.6
File under: Denver , Lomography / Photography
Get a glimpse of one photographer's struggle toward perfection this Friday at The Other Side Arts on Platte Street here in Denver. My friend Kedran Kraich, whose photos appear here from time to time, shares a show with two other photographers in a set called "Glass Life."
Linger
June 30, 2006 File under: Denver , Intake , Self-promotion
Last night's Mixed Taste was a success, I think. Certainly it was a lot of fun.
Again, I found myself mesmerized by Janie Geiser's images as Melinda Barlow showed them against some Joseph Cornell boxes as modern examples of wonder cabinets. Now I have to plot a trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
My talk on American whiskey seemed to be well-received, though, sadly, not all the samples were consumed. I stayed on afterward to take some of it in. To my own surprise, I found that after some Knob Creek and Wild Turkey rye Jack Daniel's was actually enjoyable, almost peachy, though I suspect if I address it directly again I'll find it brutal, as I usual do. I had, too, some shine received through several hands from Tennessee/Mississippi borderlands, but not too many takers on that one.
It was good to see so many friends and students and colleagues there and to make some new acquaintances, including one Kentuckian whose appreciation for rye has fostered a salivating catalogue of favorites.
To those of you who missed it, we'll make up for it somewhere. Matt, I am looking forward to the bourbon bar. Come September, we'll all be happy folks.
Now it's back to work on my own murmuration. I've got about 40 solid pages, and I'm working steadily. The book's structure shifts slightly every day as I think about it, which I think is a good sign. I'm looking forward to the next month of writing and hope to have a MS completed by the middle of August.
Meanwhile, many good books are keeping me company, including Adam Clay's Canoe and Nate Pritts's Winter Constellations and (a tardy discovery for me) Nicole Cuddeback's The Saint of Burning Down.
And there's tons of Sun Ra on pod.
See you out there a minute.
100 Proof
June 28, 2006 File under: America , Denver , Self-promotion
Tomorrow night, Thursday, June 29th, I will be speaking on the history, form, and culture of American whiskey at The Lab's Mixed Taste: Tag-Team Lectures on Unrelated Topics, while Melinda Barlow will teach us about wonder cabinets.
The lecture begins at 6.30pm at 6999 W. Alaska Drive in Lakewood, with a reception at 6. Reservations (303-742-1520) are recommended.
Home Deposition
June 25, 2006 File under: Denver
To the Man Who Stands at the Head of the Checkout Line With Paint-Laden Sandals in Hand Calling Out Loudly For All to Hear For the Names of the Manager(s), Now:
Allow me to suggest sir, first of all, that a hardware store, regardless of the era, is, perforce, a dirty place, filled with all sorts of soilers and defilers — paint, stain, solvents, charcoal, even soil itself — such that it may not be wise under any circumstances, regardless of one's own intentions, to wear one's Sunday best into the hardware store, even if it is Sunday, for the preponderance of potential soil renders it highly likely if not inevitable that one will get dirty.
And allow me to suggest that, as the purpose of the hardware store is to make wares available to various persons who, having paid for them, will remove them from the store and traverse at least a portion of the parking lot as a first and second step toward applying them to their own homes, the dirtiness of the hardware store extends into the parking lot at least a little ways and that, therefore, it would also not be a good policy to wear one's Sunday best in the parking lot that, even as your present complaint recognizes, must be considered part of the hardware store, and allow me to suggest, therefore, that if one were, for whatever reason, to approach a hardware store in what one might term "good clothes," one might think to be watchful, even beyond the typical watchfulness one might employ in a parking lot where thousands of vehicles come and go each day with their leaks large and small of various substances of various colors and viscosities, including antifreeze, brake-fluid, and motor oil, to determine to avoid any staining agent.
And allow me to suggest that even though, while the relative lack of incidents involving the complete soiling of one or more garments of the casual and even the frequent visitor may tempt one into believing oneself safe in wearing clean clothes into the store or even into the lot, your belief, however ill-conceived that the wearing of good clothes to the hardware store is not risky witnesses the general neatness of the store and that, given this, the presence of a stain of paint in the parking lot, is aberrant rather than typical and that, therefore, your stentorian complaint against the hardware store at large is illogical by your own suggestion.
Furthermore, it is clear to those of us who have to suffer in the arc of your voice that your sandals, which you so loudly lament, are quite worn and are perhaps in need of replacement anyway, however comfortable they may be under your weight, so I hope that, even now, even as you yell out again that you want the name of that lady manager, too, even as she approaches with a cautious smile into the bluster that is you, if in your self-absorption you have the gall to ask for the replacement of your sandals, thus proving what we already suspect of you, the lady manager of this fine hardware establishment will have this deposition to abet her in refusing your demands, and that you ask now, and prove yourself now, and that she refuses so we may cheer the denial of the demanded remedy for what was not only predictable but avoidable, and that she makes you, finally, predictable but avoidable, too, by walking you out of the parking lot through the very paint that stained you in the first place (was it yours to begin with?) so that we may see where you have been, where you go, and go the other way.
Your Chocolate's In My Peanut Butter...
June 21, 2006 File under: Denver
This year's Mixed Taste Series (Tag Team Lectures on Unrelated Topics) kicked off last week at The Lab in Belmar. Tomorrow night, the series features Blue Jays and European Witchcraft. Look out, next week, for American Whiskey and Wonder Cabinets.
Go there. You won't be sorry.
Tenurable?
April 26, 2006 File under: Denver
Yesterday, the University of Colorado released a report on its dual reviews of the tenure process, a report that concludes, essentially, that the process is standard, in line with that of other peer institutions, that tenure is necessary to ensure quality education, and that there are only minor irregularities with the way tenure policies have been implemented.
The Rocky Mountain News, however, was disappointed, writing in an editorial:
We hoped that a thorough evaluation of the policies, spurred by the public outrage at the ravings of Ward Churchill, would have concluded that some structural shifts were in order....
Unfortunately, the panel's final, 116-page report disappoints. The committee did not question whether tenure, which has changed little since the 19th century, continues to make sense in its present form....
Maybe the editorial is an indictment of university education, as I would presume that the writer has some sort of college degree and yet, like so many others involved in the public fervor, assumes prima facie that tenure is outdated or broken. Give a 116-page report synthesizing the largely congruent findings of both an internal and an independent external audit, a report prepared by someone who does not and has not worked for the university, the Rocky says essentially that the report doesn't go far enough beacuse it doesn't recommend the abolishment of tenure at CU.
The editorial also suggests:
A more entrepreneurial approach toward hiring and retention - for instance, putting tenured professors on renewable three- or five-year contracts - could have made CU a true innovator among major research institutions, and enhanced accountability.
I'd like to see this suggestion intersect with the dialogue about the cost of higher education in Colorado.
While I doubt that very many professors in the system would be unable to renew their contracts under such a system, I do believe that such a scenario would encourage a great deal more discretionary departure. If one could get tenure elsewhere, which would provide the freedom for research that takes more risks, why wouldn't one want to be elsewhere? One might even discover that producing and teaching so as to put contract renewall out of question will also make one a very attractive candidate to any of the nation's universities. The turnover rate would increase dramatically, retention rates would plummet.
And then the cost of higher education would rise drastically. To search for and hire a single professor can cost anywhere from $2500 to $10,000 — this includes the cost of running advertisements that are required by law, clerical costs of receiving and vetting applications, flying interview teams to professional conferences, and bringing candidates for campus visits. Salaries in the open market rise more quickly than salaries inside the institution — that is, a new hire will almost always make more than a recent, not just more than the recent hire did make but more than the recent hire does make now. I'd guess that a department's budget would have to increase anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000 a year, estimating one to three hires a year.
And with even a small school, like the University of Colorado at Denver, having somewhere between 30 and 50 academic departments, the increased cost could range from $300,000 to $2,500,000 per school.
Would Coloradans pay this?
This seems especially ridiculous given that, as the CU Tenure Report shows, irregularities are few and far between. Over 96% of the cases studied were by the book and in line with academic standards, nationwide.
And the fact of the matter is there are very few problems anyone can point to. Ward Churchill? Give me some more.
And tell me what you're willing to pay to get rid of one man. I'm sure if you collect it and give it to him, he'd be glad to step out. After all, he's on television more now than he was before. He can probably go it solo thanks to all the attention he's been getting.
Maybe then the rest of us could get back to work, to our real work as conscientious teachers and writers and servants of the university and the community, something we do even when we don't get a raise.
Bested
March 23, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
And now, Yours Truly has been named Best Prose Pro in Westword's Best of Denver 2006 edition.
Fortified with 9 Vitamins and Iron
March 21, 2006 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Some shots from the show at Ironton
Entering
A glance at my 32-linear-foot poem (over 90 cubic feet in all).
The actual beginning....
I don't know if you can see it clearly, but the poem rolls in three horizontal columns.
The rolling's interrupted by this collection of photos (which I'll post again later) and a second poem that acts as a kind of a legend.
Some close-ups on the panels.
Shots of Emily's arrangements later.
We had a good opening. Maybe 100 or so folks showed. Most stayed to read some of it. Which was nice, if unexpected. I'm accustomed to folks buzzing in and out of the galleries, maybe deciding to come back later.
And a lot of folks asked for text to take away.
I was planning to turn this into a book, but not for another year or so. I may, however, go ahead and work on it, so I can offer it when the exhibit closes.
Hope you all enjoy these few shots, which partially explain my recent silences, on which more later.
Iron Supplement (3)
March 2, 2006 File under: Denver , Self-promotion
Coming soon:
Image. Word. Motion.
This show will open at Ironton Studios and Gallery on Friday, March 17th and will run through April 15th.
Mark Your Calendars
January 29, 2006 File under: Denver
Copper Nickel 5 strikes out February 9th.
November 24, 2005 File under: Denver
Voting Irregularities (2)
November 3, 2005 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Teaching
Tuesday after voting, I went on a eight-mile bike ride. It was nice to clear my head and forget about how underpopulated my polling place was. I rode past rows and rows and rows of signs for Referenda C & D. But I saw barely more people on my ride than I did around the voting booths. I ventured later onto campus, from which I'd taken an election holiday, and the place was crawling, yet few people were talking about the election, and there were scant evidence that anyone cared.
Two students wrote that day — one to say that he just didn't vote, and one to say that when he asked people if they voted they got offended — and while I didn't exactly get depressed, I was again disappointed by these signs of the health, or the lack of health, of our civic discussions.
It always baffles me that people don't vote. It isn't hard. And it's one of the few ways in which the common citizen can act directly on the shape of the government. I'd never think that protest or discussion of any sort were not political acts, but voting is a special act, one that's provided for in our history, one for which many people struggled and died — and I'm not primarily thinking about our military but about the Civil Rights Martyrs, many of whom died in protests specifically designed to expand voting rights and voting practice, activists of whom I've thought often in the days following Rosa Parks' death. I think each of us has a citizenly duty to vote. But we have an even more powerful ethical obligtion to vote in order to sanctify the deaths of those who fought for this.
I made my memorial.
And then I began thinking about why people don't vote.
I've been personally frustrated by our university administration's official discouragement of our (professors') involvement in political discussion or political action. I know there's a state law that makes it illegal for state employees (of which I am supposedly one) to engage in political campaigns, electioneering, or generally to advocate any policy or political position that might benefit them directly or conflict with the performance of their duties (is this a sedition law?) so that it cannot be said that the taxpayers have been forced to finance their own opposition, but we, the university, is in the business of dialogue, and I find it ludicrous that the professors have been officially asked not to engage in this dialogue. So I can't do any thing more, they say, than encourage my students to vote. So I cannot motivate them toward action through dialogue; I can only suggest that it's a good idea. And since people generally avoid discussions of politics in their daily lives, this means that one of the few places in which one should be able to have an open and spirited discussion is now no longer one of those places. As far as the citizenly conversation about the direction and health of our polity is concerned, it's almost as deserted as my polling place.
And then I see that the opponents of Referendum C, having lost the election, are considering suing to stop expenditure of the money retained under this provision, effectively working to void the election, and I wonder how much effect this has on voter participation.
Last year, I took my LCA with me to the polling place. I had some black-and-white film in it I was planning to double over. This is one of the frames that came up, one I find very appropriate at present. It's hard to see, but my ballot, my actual ballot, is just below the sign, almost wiped out by it.
I wish for a day when I won't think of this picture, but I don't know when it's going to happen.
And in the meantime, both the willfull ignorance and the horrible silence of our political exchanges make me wish again for greater conversational sympathy, more careful listening.
Voting Irregularities
November 1, 2005 File under: Denver
Depressingly, I was the only one in my polling place. It took exactly 3 minutes.
Special to the Denver Post
October 26, 2005 File under: America , Denver
Two items in today's Post:
- a short history of barbecue by yours truly
- an article on Denver barbeculture for which I was a source (see the very end)
In/somnia
October 22, 2005 File under: Denver
"So tired."
Nail Biter
October 21, 2005 File under: Denver , Lomography / Photography , Self-promotion
Please come see us tonight if you are in town.
Double Struck
October 20, 2005 File under: Denver
Working on the show for tomorrow night...
Come down if you're in the area. We'll show off the art for Copper Nickel tomorrow after 7.
Music Reform
September 25, 2005 File under: Denver
For those in Denver or with an interest in coming to Denver, I am curating and speaking as part of an evening dedicated to Charles Mingus this Thursday, September 29th, at 6.30pm at Belmar. Come on out if you get the chance.
September 20, 2005 File under: Denver
Presst
September 9, 2005 File under: Denver
Last night's Copper Nickel release was a huge success, and there are many many people to thank for coming out. I'm sure more than one enjoyed the spectacle of my behind-the-bar high-wire act, which turned from a single hour into an all-night gig. That, however, is not thanks enough, so we hope to see you all again in October when we're helping program a show at Quetzalli gallery.
Now that the journal is making its way into the world, I can go back to my other preoccupations. This weekend, I have to make some progress on my barbecue history — I've a lot of notes that need to be brought together — but I hope to return early next week to the questions of poetry that drove me through the summer. I've been doing a great deal of thinking about what I'm doing, and I think I'm close to articulating a few key ideas. Perhaps such articulations will be unimpressive or unimportant, but people continue to read this blog, which is simply amazing to me but gratifying and hope-producing.
So thanks to all you readers. And thanks to all those who've supported Copper Nickel. Those who are elsewhere, I hope you will soon find our coin in circulation near you.
Copper Nickel Release
September 7, 2005 File under: Denver
Tomorrow night, Thursday, 8 September, we will celebrate the publication of the fourth isue of Copper Nickel with a party at the Denver Press Club (1330 Glenarm) here in downtown Denver. If you're in town or anywhere near town, you must come: I will be tending bar for an hour during which tips go the journal's operating fund. I promise pictures for those out of town.
We're still all quite shaken by recent events, so we'll also be collecting donations for Red Cross relief efforts at the release, as are many artistic events of late.
We do hope to see so many there.
If we miss you, look for my report (in which faculty meetings will figure prominently) on Friday or Saturday.
August 23, 2005 File under: Denver
Pardon the recent silence. Classes have begun. I hope to survive this week and return to something like normal again.
A Literary Community and a Literary Public
July 31, 2005 File under: America , Denver , Poetry & Poetics
Last week I wrote, in response to specific and to general frustrations and with specific and general hopes, that Denver's literary community would emerge through what I see as a critical period.
I am glad that every few months someone decides to draw attention to these scenes, but at the same time, I am frustrated (beyond my capacity to articulate) that such efforts rarely recognize the similar desires or attempts of others, the relatively weak attempts to cooperate with one another and to coordinate information.I have often observed that Denver's literary communities — numerous, aboundnig — like Denver's gold lie scattered about, rarely concentrated in veins or lodes. Perhaps we (in the aggregate) who read and enjoy poetry are spread like gold-panners, each protecting a little spill, unwilling to observe someone else's careful precipitation or to combine their flecks into mint-able metal.
Several questions and challenges have been extended, as you will have seen, reading the comments on that entry. Dee Casalaina (who may as well be considered a local correspondent for this blog) wrote severally to ask just what I would propose to improve the scene, and JSR (Jason Stuart Ratcliff) wrote to challenge the very idea of local literary community, proposing instead a telecommunity, defined by shared interest. Both sets of comments push me to detail my interest in, my frustrations with, and my hopes for Denver's literary community.
First, I'd like to expose some of my often implied belief in and ideas about the local and the local community, in its importance and role in public, specifically American, life.
This will take a few paragraphs.
The United States is founded on democratic principles, but our democracy is representative not direct, which means that — though in theory we have many occasions to make our individual interests known and by them to influence the direction of civic, state, or national life — we rarely have the opportunity to act directly and in our own terms, being forced more often than not to act through someone.
We have to accommodate ourselves to this again and again, but I find that, in talking to my fellow citizens, the frustration at rarely being able to act directly fuels both voter disaffection and the growing interest in the representative's (indeed, in all public figures') identity and the citizen's need to identify as completely as possible with their representatives and governors. If I cannot act myself, I want to choose an actor who is like me, who will act as I would act even without having to ask me, and if I cannot find such an actor, I choose to choose no one.
This is an unfortunate present, for two reasons.
One is that this exercise of a desire for direct action misses one of the important points of representative democracy, which is that though the system generally destroys nuance in favor of binary relation (majority to minority), we enforce simple binarism when we don't vote because we withdraw from the mechanism by which we can demand more nuanced and therefore more direct representation.
Tocqueville wrote:
In America, the people choose those who make the law and those who carry it out. They constitute the juries that punish infractions of that law. Institutions are democratic not only in principle but in all their ramifications. For example, the people choose their representatives directly, and in general they do so every year, the better to ensure their subsurvience. Hence it is really the people who rule, and even thouh the form of government is representative, it is clear that there can be no durable obstacles capable of preventing the opinions, prejudices, interests, and even passions of the people from making their influence felt on the daily direction of society.
I suppose this is still true enough, that there are "no durable obstacles" to direct democratic action, but when we don't vote, when we don't enter into this system that, even in the Frencham Tocqueville's eyes was clearly the instrument for ensuring that "the opinions, prejudices, interests and even passions of the people" could "mak[e] their influence felt on the daily direction of society," I don't think that we can expect our voices to be heard directly, however indirectly our cries may travel to our governors.
As I say, this secession, which seems motivated by or responsive to our sense of the impossibility of, and our resultant sense of the greater need for, direct representation — as I say, this secession enforces the simple binarisms our two-party system tends toward, and such enforcement only diminishes the chances for direct democratic action, for it makes the debate that must occur in the representative chambers not a matter of the articulating skill (literally, the ability to combine and coordinate) of our legislators but more often a matter of numbers. Debate is not engaged as a search for truth but as a means to consolidate power until a majority can overwhelm. Then try to assert your "opinions, prejudices, interests, and even passions." If you're not directly represented by the majority, you are out of luck and out of power.
(I am mindful of deTocqueville's sense of those institutions that counterbalance the tyranny of the majority, specifically the courts — a reason to value balance on and in all courts rather than representation — but the courts present both a quicker and more evanescent chance for influence and a more glacial pace of change, compared to election cycles. Besides, as adversarial conversation is prosecuted in the courts, it is not as a matter of representation, though the contest often exposes the excesses of a tyrannical majority's actions; minority interest may be preserved, but errors are uncovered and undone more than it can be said that a suppressed position is brought to political representation.)
I say all this simply to expose the relative lack of opportunity for direct action, specifically for direct representation. And I say that to say that I hold local community so important because it represents for me one of the few arenas that provides the chance for, the mechanisms for, and that presents few if any barriers to direct democratic action and interaction.
The local community is where dialogue can occur, because here powers are equal, politically speaking. Citizen to citizen, we are left to the power of our words and ideas. If we are interested in dominance or self-preservation, the best or worst we can do is withdraw from a conversation without resolution. If we are interested in understanding or rapprochement, the worst we can do is fail, while the typical end is an agreement to try again, and the best we can achieve is an actual articulation, an inter-informing and -connecting exchange, that accommodates both views or creates the synthetic view that will accommodate both to the greatest extent possible. We may also arrive at the extent of coordination and find we can live with partial agreement without pushing too hard for accommodation where it will not come. We can develop an understanding that will allow equal if disagreeing views without having to promote one over another.
The local scene is the scene where most often we have to deal with those who hold view different from our own and where we can know one another with reference to the place itself instead of with reference to our rank or achievement, which become more important if not supremely dominant in hierarchical organizations, such as professional societies.
The local scene is not perfect, nor is it the bottom level. There are sub-local communities that are essentially communities of interest or are gatherings of those whose sameness insulates them from the necessary confrontation with difference — and there are those historical communities that managed to suppress and subjugate the different to the degree that the proper confrontation was improbable if not impossible (the segregated South, for example), though I would argue that such communities were also sub-local and represented a mutant domination of one sub-locality over the whole.
The local is the proper liminal zone in which our private and intimate lives are brought into conversation with other lives without becoming so generalized that the confrontations put nothing at stake and draw so little passion it is easier to dissociate than to associate, and the zone in which we can be and present our selves and lives without inviting everyone into contagious intimacy with ourselves.
It is both an ideal and a contested place. It is an ideal place beacuse it is a contested and contestable place.
. . .
When I speak of literary community, I may as well be speaking of a literary location, and this is much of what I have in mind when I praise Denver for its abundance. Denver has both enough writers and enough good writers that, when they come in contact with one another intensely and extensively enough the conversation about the good, about what is or what can be good, can occur in such a way that, for the writers, artistic ideas and horizons can be stretched, extended, and articulated in a more detailed fashion — ideas can, through conversation and contest, achieve more specific forms that will (such breakthroughs always do) abet and beget more and better writing.
JSR writes, in response to my suggestion that our local universities (including Naropa University, Regis University, the University of Colorado, the University of Colorado at Denver, and the University of Denver) are themselves the center of some very interesting activity, that he'd "been through the university workshop thing" and that he found "the suggestions/opinions of those folks to be about as good as their writing. No need to let incompetent college students vivisect your stuff into a corpse."
I'll agree that a workshop, improperly taught, can quickly become a social mechanism by which difference is not only policed by eroded. If we work for consensus, we will enforce work that appeals to consensus, not work that excels. It's important, in an entry level workshop to use consensus as a means by which to draw out into light the hackneyed and the merely sensational, but the aim of this should not be so much to eradicate the different but to encourage an investigation of the reasons for specific formations, to begin thinking of one's craf by one's own principles. Unfortunately, we are sometimes guided by the lessons of our own democratic political order to drive toward the strong and governing consensus and we run over the different, the minority, even before it can represent itself.
Internet community can provide the antidote, for in the larger arena you always find more of those who will agree with and support you. This is one of the reasons I blog, for I get to interface with people who do care about poetry and poetics much more than the people I work with on a regular basis.
But one cannot let telecommunity displace local community altogether, for telecommunity tends to develop along lines of interest and solidarity. Though it can split and differentiate, telecommunity spends most of its energy enforcing lines of similarity. Difference can be ignored or left to develop its own communal space. In the city, the areas for contingency are numerous and recurrent, and once you've become accustomed to someone's presence, their absence must be understood not only as a witness of frustration but also potentially an instrument of rebuke. Withdrawals, in the local arena, are a different kind of invitation, a different kind of provocation — not secessions or removals to another community. In the local scene there exists in visible organization the fiction of a single community, the fiction, the story that keeps us coming back to one another.
I understand Dee's and JSR's praise of the private space in which writing occurs. I am jealous of my own time, spending each morning in my study, from 8 till noon just writing, and when I am disturbed by a neighbor or the phone I can become angry as if threatened. Composition occurs in solitude.
But the solitude needs a ground of contingency against which it becomes a kind of concentration. A conversation precedes a monologue. Writing is the precipitate and the product of and the offering of ideas, which develop as much if not more so in conversation with other ideas as in conversation with the ideas of the lone genius.
Ron Silliman writes recently of his own blog:
To date, writing here has caused the following things to happen:1. I’ve been able to sharpen some vague thinking into much clearer concepts...
2. I’ve had to become more rigorous in my reading, to actually think a little about what to read next & why
3, My mental map of contemporary poetry has changed profoundly
4. I’ve had to acknowledge the presence of an entirely new generation of poets & recognize that they really are the “poets of today,” however you might care to define that. Their concerns are quite different from those that preoccupied me & my friends when we were in our 20s & 30s. ...
5. I’ve met, online & sometimes later in person, a huge number of interesting new people & gotten to know several folks I’d already met quite a bit better
6. My correspondence has gone up dramatically
7. So has the arrival of books in the mail...
...
10. I’ve become much more conscious of how many different modes of English there are – not that I didn’t know this already, but I didn’t have to see it & think it & read it every day. One trip down the blogroll to the left will cure anyone of any fantasies concerning homogeneity.
11. I’ve been able to spread the word about some poetry I care about a lot.
12. I sometimes come up against other people’s expectations in ways I hadn’t expected...
...
15. Writing here has pushed my own poetry forward in ways I would not have expected & which I don’t think (yet) I can fully articulate. ...
As Silliman testifies, conversation and exchange quicken one, not only as a citizen, but as a poet, as a writer.
With 400,000 hits over two years, Silliman's blog has provided something like local community in the blogosphere. He witnesses the best aspects of contingent existence, even though many of his discussions tend, as is the nature of blogs, toward one set of possibilities rather than another.
My hope for Denver is that the same extent and level of exchange will occur and that we will further benefit from being present to one another in ways that make it harder not to consider the challenging position.
Good poetry will survive, and even be improved or effected by, such challenge.
. . .
But I am also speaking of a literary public, not just a literary community, and I have to fight against my inherited laconicism and ellipticality to say that I mean two things by the phrase "literary public."
One the one hand, I mean the local arena in which literary producers and literary consumers interact with one another directly and extensively, a scene that is produced and maintained in trust. Slavoj Zizek discusses, in The Ticklish Subject (thanks Josh), Alain Badiou's "attempt to reassert the dimension of universality as the true opposite of capitalist globalism" — an idea that comes home to me as Emerson said his did, familiar because I'd thought it before I read this and now I find it articulated in a better way. A literary public — that is, the community we comprise, the community we maintain, and the community we continue to address — will provide us all with the universality that can prevent the aesthetic bullying that drives us most often into our smaller spheres of action and involvement.
What frustrates me about Denver (and perhaps I'm just being selfish here) is that we seem always capable of creating the intellectual density that will produce an incredible, almost geometric progression of our thinking as a public and thereby such a progression in our individual thinking as well. (This is always the benefit of public education and contingent society, that contact produced complexity and complexity amplifies radially, pushing us well beyond the destinations we could have attained alone.) But we often retreat to our own smaller communities instead, and in doing so we don't only duplicate each other's efforts, we perforate them as well.
On my mind lately has been the proliferation of literary calendars, and I'll admit I have a personal, not just a public, stake in this. Almost eighteen months ago, I started denverpoetry.org. The Denver Poetry Festival was about to enter its fourth year, the Copper Nickel was developing finely as well, and two things happened very quickly. First, I received an e-mail from the founders of Syntax that declared their effort a response to the genral vacancy of the literary scene, which was clearly not vacant by any stretch of the imagination. Second, Bryan Roth of the Colorado Poets Association wrote just a few months later to say that he was starting a calendar service, very similar to the one I developed at denverpoetry.org. To Syntax I said that the city wasn't vacant, which at first was received as a gesture of threat, though we soon enough cleared that up and came to mutual recognition. To Bryan Roth, I said "Why don't we work together?" To which he replied maybe. This is about the same response I've received from everyone I've contacted, both about the calendar and bout the poetry festival, which is supposed to be a public event created by public effort. Now my dream of starting a clearinghouse for literary information in Denver has generally decayed, and I am also unsure whether the poetry festival will ever establish itself firmly in the city's culture. Maybe it's me people don't like — if it is, I will gladly give these projects over to someone who will see them through — but it seems more and more that these disconnects result from ongoing general suspicion and the desire to live in a smaller sub-local community of interest.
In general, I'd like to see more cooperative effort, more joint events, and more mutual recognition, so that we can move toward having such a literary public.
. . .
But that's only half of what I mean by "literary public." I also mean a public, a civic society, that is in-formed by the literary. Not merely the artistic, but the excellent.
Dee asks me:
I'm also curious about what you mean when you say Denver is "so close to a community that benefits writers artistically and enriches a greater public." I assume that gifts come with responsibilities, even the responsibility to plow fallow ground, which is hard work requiring a sharp object and patience.
I don't just mean that the artist, that the writer, has a responsibility to work to maintain a service in the larger social system. I also mean that the writer has to present ot the community at large, not just the more circumscribed literary public I described in the previous section, that which is excellent, especially excellent language, for excellent and exacting language can slowly, if not completely, inform, improve, sustain, and enhance our public discourse and exchange, enabling the local political exchanges I described, in a purely political and conversational (not literary) manner in the first large section of this post.
As I noted in response to JSR, the benefits of strong literary community are not only to artists or only to artists and their audiences, but to the city, to the local community at large.
This is, surely, an idealistic prescription. Some will say that this is just a matter of wishing more power for words. And perhaps it is. But since so much of our public life is led in language, such power must be recognized and grasped and stewarded.
It's probably been two months since I first said I wanted to articulate the necessity of the ideal. And this is what I mean: it is necessary to preserve the ideal, as opposed to the abstract, so we can prevent those who would erase and de-represent our positions (those positions that we present in direct or indirect democratic action) cannot be allowed to specify the ideal, as if it were merely an abstraction, and leave us without a linguistic or intellectual ground from which to begin levering again. This, generally, is the failure of the Democratic Party in the national scene: it has failed to prevent its ideals from being specified in ways that erase or obscure the ideal that motivates policy, so much so I'm not even sure the Democratic Party knows what it wants any more. Clinton did this to the Republicans years back, confusing them. Strange that he should have also confused his own party so completely that they can't catch up or even resist without looking so crybaby all the time, which is a shame because Americans deserve a better discussion and generally deserve better than everything we have. Our ideals, if they are to be substantiated, deserve better subtance.
And this is part of what I say here, that Denver's people and its writers deserve better, generally, than the substantiation they have, something finer and more lustrous. Something that doesn't break when beaten. That spreads.
Mixed Tastes
July 28, 2005 File under: Denver
The previous post requires some follow up, as maybe you'll see from the comments. I wanted some dialogue, and I got it, and I mean to extend it (Dee, don't feel bad about your comments: I appreciate your thoughtful responses; JSR: it wasn't a contest, and I didn't mean to shut you down, but to answer the claims) — but that will have to wait for tomorrow.
Today I am cooking dinner for 140 people as a part of the Mixed Taste lecture series. Tonight: Clifford Still and Cajun Food, followed by reception. On the plate: jambalaya, crawfish etouffee, muffalettas. Come by if you get the itch.
Literary Community in Denver
July 26, 2005 File under: Denver
I want to express both hopes and frustrations here.
I am glad to see some praising recognition of Denver's contemporary literary wealth, but I am disheartened (even as I am not surprised) to see no mention of Denver's poetry scenes.
I am glad that every few months someone decides to draw attention to these scenes, but at the same time, I am frustrated (beyond my capacity to articulate) that such efforts rarely recognize the similar desires or attempts of others, the relatively weak attempts to cooperate with one another and to coordinate information.
I have often observed that Denver's literary communities — numerous, aboundnig — like Denver's gold lie scattered about, rarely concentrated in veins or lodes. Perhaps we (in the aggregate) who read and enjoy poetry are spread like gold-panners, each protecting a little spill, unwilling to observe someone else's careful precipitation or to combine their flecks into mint-able metal.
Monsoon
July 24, 2005 File under: Denver
This is how it begins.
It has been hot a long time. Over 100 degrees for nearly a week.
It has not rained. No one can quite remember when. And they are so tired all investigation stalls as soon as it begins.
Clouds mass on the horizons. Sometimes curtains of rain descend and evaporate before they make ground. They call it virga.
And then it breaks.
Smell of rain. A few drops on the window. Spiderwebs of lightning across the sky.
And rain. Sheets. Winds. Torrents.
Our windows are open.
Everyone is cheering.
The monsoons have begun.
July 22, 2005 File under: Denver
On one thermometer I saw 106F. F does not stand for Fahrenheit.
Hot
July 21, 2005 File under: Denver
If you're in Denver now, I don't need to tell you, it's brutal. 105F yesterday. 104F today. Records both. Too hot to do anything at all. At all.
July 17, 2005 File under: Denver
July 15, 2005 File under: Denver , Information Technology
Sunset, Denver
July 14, 2005 File under: Denver
Let Us Go Then
July 8, 2005 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics
Last night's Mixed Taste lecture — "Meat Sausage and T. S. Eliot — was wonderful. Pete Marczyk of Marczyk's Fine Foods introduced us to some wonderful fresh sausages and amazing European country wines, after which I rose to give my crash course in T. S. Eliot.
Among the questions were the inevitable: "What kind of bangers and mash would T. S. Eliot have liked?" To which we both responded that if he would condescend to such probably he wouldn't have had much taste for them. Interesting also: "As far as I know there is no mention of sausage in Eliot, or Shakespeare for that matter?" To which we responded that Eliot's Prufrock, while not necessarily biographical, had thin arms and legs and may have reflected a rather shallow draw in Eliot — there's not much food in the poems. As for Shakespeare, Pete remarked that "Big Billy had a known love for sausage" and then speculated that the omission of such from the plays was surely the result of bowdlerization.
Also asked to composed a poem to sausage spontaneously, we engaged in a quick stychomythia:
P: O sausage, O sausage, how I love thee!
J: "Let us go then, you and I
when the casings are spread out across the sky...
We came together at the end to promote slow foods and poetry at the same time. It was very fine indeed.
If anyone is interested, you can catch me lecturing (and serving) Cajun Food as part of the series on July 28th (b/w a lecture on Clifford Still) and again lecturing on the history and form of the Murder Ballad on August 18th (b/w a lecture on Contemporary Opera). This is the right kind of intellectual spectacle for Denver, I think. If you're in the area, you must come.
Today: sleeping, writing, reading, resting.
Mixed Taste
July 7, 2005 File under: Denver , Intake , Poetry & Poetics
If you're in Denver tonight (Thursday), I've just picked up a lecture on T. S. Eliot as part of Belmar's Mixed Taste leture series: 30 minutes on one topic, 30 minutes on another completely unrelated topic, then Q&A for both at the end. I'll be giving a talk on Cajun Food (distinguishing features and history) and on Murder Ballads later in the summer's series.
I haven't posted here since Monday, mostly because I've been writing and reading a lot this week. Here are some recommendations:
Denver Announces Poet Laureate Program
June 30, 2005 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics
The Denver Office of Cultural Affairs announces the inauguration of the city's poet laureate program..
Dine and Discuss
June 29, 2005 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake
Old information technology: have lunch with a friend.
Today: St. Louis-style ribs at Big Papa's BBQ with Rafael Fajardo. Topics discussed: barbecue, blogs, broadsides, cinnamon, collaboration, cumin, Denver, digital art, DRM, echolalia, faceted categorization, fair use, file sharing, fine press books, 4th of July, grafitti, grants administration, Grokster Decision, Kansas City, letterpress printing, moist towelettes, molasses, Movable Type, NPR, open source, podcasting, property rights (intellectual and real), RSS Feeds, Space Invaders, teaching, today's date.
On Alabama
On America
On Civil Rights
On Denver
On Editing
On Food
On Information Technology
On Intake
On Interior Monologue
On Labwork
On Language
On Listening
On Lomography / Photography
On Memory & Memorial
On Poetry & Poetics
On Postcards
On Self-promotion
On Steganography
On Tapeworm
On Teaching
On The South
MY BOOK
MY POEMS
Blackbird
Campbell Corner
Colorado Poets Center
DIAGRAM
DIAGRAM
H_NGM_N
Octopus
Shampoo
Terrain.org
Typo
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JMWW
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H_NGM_N
Terrain.org
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Bear Parade
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Born Magazine
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Copper Nickel
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Double Room
The Duplications
Fascicle
H_NGM_N
No Tell Motel
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Poetry Daily
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32 Poems / Deborah Ager
Almost I Rushed...
American Aquarium Drinker
Avoiding the Muse