Week Six: Renee Gladman
Introduction to Renee Gladman’s reading
Renee Gladman lives in Providence, RI, where she is the publisher of Leon Works, a press for experimental fiction and cross-genre writing. She also teaches in the Program for Literary Arts at Brown University. She is the author of four collections of prose (Juice, The Activist, Newcomer Can't Swim, and most recently TOAF) and one book of poetry (A Picture-Feeling).
In her newest work, Gladman examines the somewhat illusory categories of life and fiction. She asks what accumulates, beyond thought to create a narrative about another very elusive narrative, that being the narrative of writing the narrative in question. It is telling that this book was published by Atelos press, edited by Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz, in which each text is specifically commissioned for publication and deals in some way with crossing traditional genre boundaries. The book back text reads: “Though she has been exploring multi-genres and hybrid spaces for almost fifteen years, she has no idea how to categorize this book.” And of course, nor do I, except to say that there is something to articulate here about the uncategorizable. For Gladman, fiction, life, and place (in this case more specifically the urban street), are related processes that are demonstrated in her work. The project of writing is not separate from a body walking down a street, or a sensibility struggling with say, the common cultural conundrum of a cell phone. What does it mean that an object we once lived in utter harmony without now dramatically absorbs public space to the extent that we now find navigation unimaginable without it?
She writes in her newest book, TOAF:
“My work is easy, it seems to say, walk along here happily, but what I’m attempting to do is to make the reader suspect this progression. . . .That’s what I want, to move and go nowhere.”
“In this kind of writing it is hard to know how much you want to say about a thing that you are calling a failure.”
In the recent publication Notes on Conceptualism, Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman write the following:
“Failure is the goal of conceptual writing.
Note: failure in this sense acts as an assassination of mastery.
Note: failure in this sense serves to irrupt the work, violating it from within.
Note: this invites the reader to redress failure, hallucinate repair.”
Gladman is one of the few writers of her generation clearly carving out a new space for fiction, for others to newly approach the “novel” as a form in flight, a form to be examined and reimagined. A form for which to hallucinate and execute repair. Gladman works with a delicacy and a deceptively smooth surface which penetrates assumptions always just beneath the veneer of the daily.
And that is perhaps why her work is such a reassuring combination of enjoyable reading and provocative sifting of thought which gently though persistently prods and uncomfortably probes. While reading Gladman’s work I’ve found myself asking: What is an activist? What is a victim? What is public space? Where does one body end and another begin? What is the responsibility/responsiveness of the witness? What is the responsibility of the writer? Her work swims between descriptive and emotive. She creates fictive portraits, like captioned pictures, cinematic scenes, in which the culmination of action is always coupled with calamitous thought, and leaves the reader free to interpret her rendered scenes. She offers photographic exposures, seemingly untouched landscapes of language. We are invited to tint, light, zoom, develop, compose and ask as we read.
Renee Gladman reading at The Drawing Studio, Tucson, Feb 2009
Mini Portraits of Writers Week 6
Sustainable Aircraft 3
The latest issue of the online poetry review magazine Sustainable Aircraft is now up, with reviews of Marie Buck's Life & Style, Brad Flis' Peasants, Jenny Holzer's PROTECT PROTECT (the site is mostly poetry-oriented, but not entirely), Gert Jonke's Homage to Czerny, two books by Brian Kim Stefans, and Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater. In addition to the reviews, there is also an "SA Press" edition of "Autoportraits", by Michael Scharf.
Sustainable Aircraft comes out on a somewhat unpredictable schedule and has a relatively small body of content for a web-based operation, but the books it reviews merit the attention, and I recommend looking through the archives of the last two issues if you haven't read them yet.
Full disclosure: the Buck review is by me. Both her book and Flis' are out now from PatrickLovelaceEditions, in beautiful copies designed by Dirk Rowntree. They aren't yet in bookstores, as far as I know, but you can pick up copies via paypal on the website for Flis and Buck's magazine, Model Homes.
Mini Portraits of Writers Week 5
Week Five: Renee Angle
1. Tell about a book that you have loved for at least a decade.
I think I am too young to have loved a book for at least a decade. I’m currently on the hunt for books in which part of the reading experience ends up being a lucid dream. I don’t have lucid dreams much, but when I do the dreams are picture-less, and are comprised of some kind of extended conversation with the text. I’ve only had this happen with two books: Dan Beachy-Quick’s Mulberry and Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire. Though I like these books a good deal, they aren’t ones I have extended relationships with in my waking life. Ten years from now, I hope Moby Dick is still a part of my waking and dreaming life.
2. What circumstances are most conducive to your creative work?
Marathon running. See below.
3. What is the biggest myth about being a writer? Something you’ve unlearned through your work.
I was always taught that you should never wait for inspiration, that you should always make opportunity/time for it in your life. But, I have always done my best writing (or had the most fun) while doing other things, like composing in my head while running or very quick sessions on my lunch break. I am not necessarily seeking out inspiration. And, often I won’t write for extended periods of time. I’m interested in poets who have given up poetry in one way or another throughout history: Laura (Riding) Jackson, George Oppen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud, Coleridge. All the writers listed above write with a violence, force, and relentlessness that make such silences great reprieves and at times great despairs. I’ve come to understand that silence is the most important part of writing for me.
4. What is the writer’s responsibility — in relation to the world, the current
state of events? How do you experience the daily news? Does this process enter your writing?
I don’t know the answer to this question. But I do think irresponsibility is an overlooked opportunity for artists. Which is to say, I’m really only interested in approaching these kinds of questions indirectly. I wonder how much “responsibility” is linked to notions of the afterlife. I wonder how much “responsibility” we can really articulate without falling into the genre of manifesto. I’m hungry for writers that do rather than say. I’m looking for doggedness, not authenticity, not honesty, not responsibility, and certainly not salvation.
5. Talk about the role of place in your work. Or, where are you, when you are working (physically, mentally, etc). What is your residence of word-ing?
I hate traveling distances greater than 10 miles unless on foot. When I’m writing, I’m usually at home or within 10 miles from home.
6. What questions would you like to explore through your work at the moment? Talk about a work in process, or your most recent work.
I have another found lyric essay called "Favor". It is an inquiry into the lexicon and etymology of “suicide” and takes as one of its models John Donne’s "Biathanatos", an essay on suicide published posthumously (and against Donne’s wishes). Tropes, syllogisms, and the fugue form are things I’m playing with here; however, I wrote very little of the text. I think of all my poems as BORGs (if you know the Star Trek allusion) or half-humans-half-machines because they often utilize large amounts of found text or exist as a result of common software program functions. Through the use of these techniques, I seek to undermine the authorship of a text. I’m not a computer programmer, if I was I’d create a robot. I discovered the easiest, low-fi way for me to play with issues of authorship, agency, and authority is to use found text. These fragments have a haunted, reverberating vocal quality that I love to manipulate. I keep vigil by the idea of the work unwritten.
7. On method, provide a writing assignment, tactic or process that you’ve found useful.
Sentence diagramming, sort and summary functions in Word, spellcheck, Alta Vista translator, typewriters, and graph paper.
9. What is the most pleasurable aspect of your writing life?
At the moment, it’s not writing.
Introduction to Renee Angle’s reading
Renée Angle, is the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Program Coordinator. She holds an MFA from George Mason University, where she was editor of the journal So to Speak. She taught at Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, Kore Press Literary Activism Classes, and for a charter school in South Tucson. Her poems have appeared in Practice: New Writing + Art , Diagram, and The Sonora Review.
In her manuscript “WoO”, Angle explores the history and legacy of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, in a manner never previously attempted.
She creates a faux encyclopedic view, complete with illustrations and bifurcated text
She writes:
"a word. my word. our word. thy word. your word. his word. her word. their word."
In other words, varying perspectives are taken. Riffs on the power of the word, whose is the word, whose word against whose? To whom does “the word” belong? Possession history, and authorial vision are central to this unveiling or excavation.
Reading Angle’s “WoO”, I have the sense that I’m trying to read or decode another language. English with baubles, a different dialect, or a secret membrane has been placed atop words I once thought I knew. It’s like looking through a peep hole into a world which completely baffles. We get a whiff or an inkling and then are left to drift, within her adept prose. Who is wooing who?
We are given instructions, we are told where to go, historically speaking to follow this scavenger history lesson
She writes:
“You, the aspiring detective and psychic investigator, caught off guard (which, even to the acute visual organs of heavenly beings, may appear only as a small lucid speck in the sky”
I can’t say enough good about Angle’s work, except to say, it is your duty, dear listener to bring the overly modest talents of this writer to light.
Angle’s prose presents a dense and tangled landscape and a rare concrete complexity which is at once vivid and abstract, lush with psychological composure and ruin, with doubt and the formative potential of faith.
The text is flanked with line drawings, diagrams, and tonal omnipotence at once convincing and determined to erupt itself. The text requires one to penetrate beyond the surface, which lies ironically placid, as if clasping within its covers the uncontainable. Here borders admire breech. History is a form of question and reproach. The codifiable is a lesson in undoing.
Reading "WoO" is like becoming an initiate into the world where as she writes “farce, farce, farce farce farce” and “belief is a cramp”.
Listeners beware, this is a book with which to reckon. A long awaited symphony of elegantly culled woes.
Renee Angle reading at The Drawing Studio, Tucson, Feb 2009
Mini Portraits of Writers Week 4
Week Four: Robert Mittenthal
Reading his work, downtown Seattle, February 2009
Robert Mittenthal is a curator of the subtext reading series (SubtextReadingSeries.blogspot.com) in Seattle. His most recent books are Value Unmapped (Nomados) and Wax World, which is forthcoming from Chax. He believes (after Blaser) that the poetic is the language of the mapless.
1. Tell about a book that you have loved for at least a decade.
I can tell of an "event" resembling a one night stand. It was an experience I'll always remember, even though it's been distorted in my memory. I haven't reread the book since the event, and I'm unlikely to go back to it. Anyway, more than ten years ago, I had an encounter with Maurice Blanchot's Thomas The Obscure, translated by Robert Lamberton. It was a book I'd had around and tried to read a number of times with no success. One evening I tried again, and suddenly the book had me and I was riveted, paralysed, unable to stop reading. In fact, I was scared to get up for fear that I'd interrupt the spell that I was under. I read it in one sitting, or rather it read me. That's the sensation I remember. It was as if the book had read me. When finished I was left confused, stunned – I wasn't sure what had happened. In retrospect, I remember only the experience and almost nothing about the story. JG Ballard's Crash or Burrough's Naked Lunch or Bataille's Story of the Eye are other examples of books that leave you with the feeling of being read, of being repulsed and attracted at the same time, but their stories are more easily retold.
2. What circumstances are most conducive to your creative work?
To name another title of a book: Space, Time & Spacetime. A diet of adventurous ideas. The adjectives: double, nonfat, extra hot.
3. What is the biggest myth about being a writer? Something you’ve unlearned through your work.
“These are my words.” Reverse (or stop rehearsing) the unlearning, that is, stop worrying about influence and begin to influence yourself.
4. What is the writer’s responsibility — in relation to the world, the current state of events? How do you experience the daily news? Does this process enter your writing?
Duty is in a way a very unhappy concept. Not all constraints should be happily embraced.
My work is informed by politics, economics, and aesthetics. But whether a literary text works subversively or not depends less on one’s intent than on the so-called political forces that seize upon a description of the world. That said, I do remain as interested in how words use me as how I appear to be using them.
As a consumer of information, the daily news is a staple of my diet, though it often tastes pre-processed and artificial.
5. What is the role of place in your writing? Or, where are you, when you are working (physically, mentally, etc). What is your residence of word-ing?
To quote David Bromige, "I draw a blank." Maybe it is a habit that holds me back. I fear Place as a limitation or constraint.
6. What questions would you like to explore through your work at the moment? Talk about a work in process, or your most recent work.
All writing and reading as translation or in translation. I’ve been doing a translation or rewriting of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall – using a randomized version of the text as vocabulary. But this question of translation is really so broad as to effect anything one reads or writes.
In "Diseconomy of Scale", which appears in Wax World, forthcoming from Chax, I tried to write something that would mimic a structure that’s so big that it collapses under its own weight. It seems impossible to even imagine how capitalism could come to an end. A diseconomy of scale is one notion of how this could happen. The piece itself seems destined to fail, but I’m afraid it does not fail for being too enormous. Amazingly enough, the concept seems very timely, with all the talk now of protecting these behemoth financial entities that are allegedly “too big to fail.”
I continue to work on how to collaborate more effectively with myself and others. Lately I’ve been working on thumb poems. It’s a relatively new technological form, that subsumes the hand and has the allure of a more immediate communiqué.
7. On method, provide a writing assignment, tactic or process that you’ve found useful.
With Nico Vassilakis, I did collaborative work which came out of attending the same concerts. We work in very different ways, so I think the collaboration proved useful for both of us. The tactic – Nico’s really – is a way to keep moving by inverting a text that isn't quite right, reversing it to shake it loose and get it to breathe again.
8. Talk about the relationship between your creative work and any other work you do.
I thought the provocative idea these days was non-creative writing. The drudgery of translation, moving text from one box to another.
I don’t see much direct relationship. I work as a so-called knowledge worker in a lawfirm. I consider it a no collar job. It does ground me in the world and it exposes me to interesting disfunctions in the economy. There is a distinct class structure, but it’s like a university where there are plateaus of power – most everything is run by committee. Unavoidably, some of this bleeds into the work.
9. What is the most pleasurable aspect of your writing life?
The actual flash (or is it flesh?) – moving into and through the motion. The forgetting. The not looking back. It’s this allure which calls one back for more punishment.
That’s the retrograde answer, very un-non-creative writing.
Poetry Lives at the Video Inn
by Robert Mittenthal
Where a critic fears to say "I hate poetry"
A program of iron instruments – faking a move down a vulgar path
A reign of disappointments next to the occasional
Explosion and missed chance
Failure befriends one's other half
We she he that once pronounced
Airspace of the other
White walls and chain link
Bound to resist ideals (it’s true!)
The market prefers itself
Prepurchased contracts where language
Is bought and sold. I hedged what will be will be
Doris Day’s simple repetition built to an uproar
Lost time as a forge of memory
Platoons march thru an image
All three of them re-enacting
First question then argument
Interrogation as the excavation of the adjacent walls
Pixels the size of sand
We met at Blackhat
Three paces to the right
Swarms of flies in our wake
Carnage is for the rest of us
The bot-farm or army
Used to deploy information
The plasma hooks up
Who wagers to halt right there
Cowboys blue in the face
Backdrop where pixel density was
Never so immune to the eyes
Rev’d up end to end
Prayer for the Only Pig
You created the pigs to serve my needs and to lead them to You. By my own fault I have lost the beautiful relationship which I once had with your pigs.
By restoring my relationship with you, I will also restore it with pigs.
Give me the glasses to see the pigs in bows:
Pigs are like us, even-toed ungulates, and they rebel against dinner by going to parties. One has a nose for a laugh, is a cartoon, is a pig, with parts described like hair.
Now a good way off from them there was a herd of many swine feeding.
Help us to see that pigs use their toes for walking.
It is known that a swine is a filthy animal both in its behavior and in how it chooses to marry.
May the order you originally established be restored.
A pig’s hard work permits us to let it out. Travel to the North and South, where the pig is free. The dirt is unused to this. I am not native. I have lost the beautiful relationship with a lovely woman who lacks discretion.
I am Horus, Adone, Adonis and Atis. I need a bath.
It has been decided to slaughter all 350,000 pigs in the country immediately.
Give me the grace to apply mud as sunscreen.
My pearls cast, in pieces, I want to be a doctor someday.
The pig is how I remain
independent of government.
The bottom line is pigs are not welcome.
You want our remaining 330?
You will have to compensate.
There are not enough goats to eat us, that used to be fed to the pigs.
It is a dangerous and difficult time to get a new pig for our pig.
Deer and Goats, Khanzir was moved by
the Director into isolation. The Director says Khanzir is
of the zoo, says the pig, whose name is Khanzir.
The director, strong and healthy, is the only reason we are moved. We are worried we will get ill. We are a gift from China, in a large space with windows and fresh air.
We are the only one left. We want a new pig. A typical pig is allowed to play games, have sex all year if on vacation, even as babies, they are employees. If you cast us out, permit us to go away into the herd of swine.
The pig you see dangling here is only a baby
as I pray for all pigs
who live in rain with you.
Never brush your teeth and never fight.
Amen.
Mini Portraits of Writers Week 3
Week Three: David Abel
Reads from his work in Portland, February 2009
His poems and texts have been published as artists' books and objects -- including Rose, Selected Durations, Threnos (Salient Seedling Press/Katherine Kuehn), and Let Us Repair and While You Were In (Disposable Books/Leo & Anna Daedalus). He has also been published in several chapbooks, including Black Valentine (Chax), Twenty- (Crane's Bill), and fresh off the press Commonly (airfoil). He makes his living as a freelance editor and bookdealer, and often collaborates on intermedia and performance projects in Portland. There he is also a founding organizer of the Spare Room reading series.
1. Tell about a book that you have loved for at least a decade.
I’ve cherished Stanley Lombardo’s slender volume Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation since at least the late 1980s. It’s one of a handful of books to which I’ve been able to turn for genuine consolation in times of despair — most notably, after the death of my father in 1989. I’m not certain when or how I first encountered it, but I was already familiar with it by the time I stocked it at The Bridge, my little bookshop in the East Village, in 1987–89.
Over the years, I’ve often given the book as a gift. About a decade ago, I gave a copy to a composer friend in New York, John Allen, who was fighting AIDS. Equally taken with the book, John wrote to Stanley Lombardo for permission to set his version of fragment 84 of the Empedocles. John spoke to me several times of his excitement about the project; sadly, he didn’t live to complete the music.
This past December, Judith Roitman and Stanley (who are married, and teach mathematics and classics, respectively, at Kansas University) read in the Spare Room series here in Portland. I took the opportunity of my introduction to Stan’s reading (in which he performed excerpts from his own versions of his “favorite epics”: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Inferno) to recite two fragments of the Empedocles: number 8, which I take as a sort of anthem, and number 84. So, with Stan’s permission, I’d like to share them here.
Happily, the book is still available, from SPD (http://www.spdbooks.org/) and elsewhere.
8
And I will tell you this:
There is no self-nature
in anything mortal
nor any finality
in death’s deconstruction
There is only
the merging, change
and exchange
of things that have merged
and their self-nature is only
a matter of words.
84
A man about to go out on a stormy night
prepares a lantern, a bright fire enclosed
in linen panels to keep out the wind:
the panels disperse every gust of air
but transmit the fire because it’s so much finer
and the beams of light dance and shine on the threshold.
In just this way the primordial fire,
enclosed in gauzy tissue, was lodged in the pupil,
and perforations in the tissue, divinely minute,
blocked the well of water that surrounded the pupil
but transmitted the fire because it was so much finer.
from Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation, Stanley Lombardo (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1982)
6. What questions would you like to explore through your work at the moment? Talk about a work in process, or your most recent work.
For the past four and a half years, I’ve been working on a long, open-ended series provisionally titled Sweep. Encouraged by examples such as Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading and Charles Stein’s theforestforthetrees, I set out to explore an arena in which the whole of a work could not be viewed (nor even proposed, perhaps) from any single vantage.
I’ve found that the theoretical priority of “process” over “product,” so often affirmed as a platitude, becomes experiential as I’m reading certain texts, and I’m attempting a commitment to that experience as I proceed with Sweep.
Since beginning the work (on the winter solstice, 2004), everything that I write that doesn’t in some sense insist on its autonomy (or on a connection to another project) ends up in the draft of Sweep. So far, it is a motley collection of poems and fragments, aphorisms, and quotations, following the principle of collage both within and between entries. Perhaps, in the end, it will simply be a commonplace book — I’m incapable of keeping a diary, and this seems to have become my substitute. By numbering the days, I give a nod to the importance of the gaps.
from Sweep:
976
3:50 a.m.
The eclipse
is obscured.
Impossible to know
the extent of the hidden —
no amount of disclosure
diminishes it
Near here she lived
Near here she died
I first came to this rim
twenty-five years ago
Will I come again
twenty-five years from now?
5:34 a.m.
Watching totality
on a dirt road near Rio Puerco,
two shooting stars:
one for Mary, one for Gene
Back at the house the edge of the moon
beginning to catch light again
and a third shooting — no,
falling
star
for me
_________
What follows is the text of the Eclipse read in the video (all of the poems in the series have that generic title). The source is a sentence from the first chapter of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain.
this book has only a single subject, that
book has only a single subject, that subject
has only a single subject, that subject can
only a single subject, that subject can itself
a single subject, that subject can itself be
single subject, that subject can itself be divided
subject, that subject can itself be divided into
that subject can itself be divided into three
subject can itself be divided into three different
can itself be divided into three different subjects:
itself be divided into three different subjects: first,
be divided into three different subjects: first, the
divided into three different subjects: first, the difficulty
into three different subjects: first, the difficulty of
three different subjects: first, the difficulty of expressing
different subjects: first, the difficulty of expressing physical
subjects: first, the difficulty of expressing physical pain;
first, the difficulty of expressing physical pain; second,
the difficulty of expressing physical pain; second, the
difficulty of expressing physical pain; second, the political
of expressing physical pain; second, the political and
expressing physical pain; second, the political and perceptual
physical pain; second, the political and perceptual complications
pain; second, the political and perceptual complications that
second, the political and perceptual complications that arise
the political and perceptual complications that arise as
political and perceptual complications that arise as a
and perceptual complications that arise as a result
perceptual complications that arise as a result of
complications that arise as a result of that
that arise as a result of that difficulty;
arise as a result of that difficulty; and
as a result of that difficulty; and third,
a result of that difficulty; and third, the
result of that difficulty; and third, the nature
of that difficulty; and third, the nature of
that difficulty; and third, the nature of both
difficulty; and third, the nature of both material
and third, the nature of both material and
third, the nature of both material and verbal
the nature of both material and verbal expressibility
nature of both material and verbal expressibility or,
of both material and verbal expressibility or, more
both material and verbal expressibility or, more simply,
material and verbal expressibility or, more simply, the
and verbal expressibility or, more simply, the nature
verbal expressibility or, more simply, the nature of
expressibility or, more simply, the nature of human
or, more simply, the nature of human creation.
