from a concerned poet with whom I collaborate

2009-04-11T21:06:00.000-07:00

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:

Welcome, Don't Push

2009-04-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

Prefab

1932, from pre- + fabricate (q.v.). Shortened form prefab is attested from 1937. Meaning "prefabricated housing" is recorded from 1942.

Eulogy

mid-15c., from Gk. eulogia "praise," from eu- "well" + -logia "speaking," from logos "discourse, word," from legein "speak". Eu legein meant "speak well of." Cont., often interchangeable with "elegy."

Prefab Eulogies

1) An advance eulogy or elegy, often referring to an obituary that is written prior to the subject's death.

"For advance obits, we often inquire whether the subject would like to participate. I've only written a handful of advances and no one has yet agreed to talk, so for me, I'd have to say the toughest question has been: Would you like to be interviewed for your obituary?"

--Bruce Weber, New York Times staff obituary writer

2) The title of an intermedia work (ongoing) by David Wolach. Text includes "Post-Avant Poetries, Inc., " a subsidiary of Wheelhouse Press; book arts-digital interface; super 8 mm film; audio booklet; and, of course, old fashioned poetry, i.e., the oft-thought-of obsolete tekne for world-viewing, used in Prefab Eulogies as a crucial slowdown and look scaffold for what has yet to come.

Aside from the Power Point Poetics workshops, which have been run on both coasts since late 2008, Prefab Eulogies seeks to celebrate, critique, converse with, organize (in the political action sense), and extend the monadic planes of contemporary poems/poetic cycles it is moved by, and, thru various means, to essay leaving the page behind--to collaboratively make use of such gifts. Prefab Eulogies will be finished when a) there is no longer use for the graven practice of writing poetry, or b) someone organizes a well-executed art strike.

"Things arrive in the forms they are given" -- Rae Armantrout

Prefab Eulogies also seeks by submission to critique capital, militarism, and neo-liberalism, the prefabricated power structures from which the poems brought under the microscope in Volume 1 have emerged. In this way, Prefab Eulogies is also a critique of pure celebration (on the one hand) and pure lament (on the other) of our contemporary poetic lives--the gift economy that is our defaulted situation. Infected by the power structures into which these poems are born, the gifts that make up the poetic gift economy are very often attempts to overcome tropes of "fitness" (Kocik) that confront them. Insofar as this is true, the poems that Volume 1 is in conversation with, as inversely analogous to the prefabricated news loops on our televisions, are therefore, also, evidence.

Prefab Eulogies Vol. 1: Nothings Houses, is forthcoming from BlazeVOX [books] in late 2009. Excerpts of Prefab Eulogies have appeared in or are forthcoming from journals and anthologies such as 5_Trope, Dusie, No Tell Motel, Fact-Simile, CRIT, Aufgabe, Blue Fifth Review, Elective Affinities: An Anthology of New Poetry, Cannot Exist, Counterfactual Poetry & Poetics, and Bird Dog. The work has also been performed or will be performed in 2009 at such venues as The Buffalo Poetics Series, Bard College, The American Cybernetics Conference, and The Stain of Poetry Series (Amy King and Ana Bozicevic).

Thank you to the wonderful poets, editors, curators mentioned, who, like the works Prefab Eulogies 1 is engaged with, do seek to live poetically, and in so doing, are constantly pushing us to re-imagine and re-narrate social relationships.

Prefab Notes

from a concerned poet with whom I collaborate

Welcome, Don't Push