Saturday, April 11, 2009

from a concerned poet with whom I collaborate

Poet:

I think I understand what you mean when you say that "writing often gets in the way of poetry." That we often confuse poetry with writing.  But how does this relate to the poem (on the page, like, the poem you read in a book) immediately becoming a "eulogy of itself"?  What's died once the thing is written? And what do you mean when you write that "the poem-as-written needs to be resuscitated--this we call reading, or action"?   And WHY DO YOU WRITE UNDER SO MANY PSEUDONYMS?  Are you afraid that your critical writing will be, er, criticized?. . . Today I wanted to make finite, classically precise pen and ink etching of bodies with their eyes gouged out and limbs torn off, but beyond the naughtiness of it, how is this useful? What can your playing with expectations be used for, artistically, politically?  What's the point? 

DW:

Interested in playing out the tensions we feel  - desires to both hide in the book and rid ourselves of it, to be, in a word, unwritten into motion/action.  

Exposing lament as insufficient for our purposes.

Exposing our work as often brutally thin, often brutally old

but potentially activating.

Each poem is in conversation with poems that move me.  Move, as in from A to B.  This conversation.  

Can it be the beginning of imagining new social relationships btw you & I?

Consider this an organizing meeting where the room is shifting, the group not autonomous, no one singular address.  Where Whitman's multitudes are unhoused.

And "politics" and "poetry" are staged

differently -- restaged

If we are meeting cum diaspora, are we planning a political action?

tho, what is the point of having a point? don't things usually have a point?

and: bringing into contact/to surface the tensions we often feel about the poem about embodiment that is not, not anyhow acknowledging itself to be, embodied.. so, like, here:

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