To first begin to write a critical introduction to my own work thus far, I had to remind myself that A. This is not an obituary and B. I am taking my time. I have an ongoing project and it was, for the purpose of this paper, up to me to reflect on my earlier inter disciplinary influences as well as to consider my own ongoing engagements with philosophy and art. I continue to appreciate the project of Elizabeth Grosz and corporeal feminist thought as a commitment to deconstructing the patriarchal philosophical tradition of the concept of “equality”. I have also decided to continue to seek other issues of concepts of masculinity and femininity in language and to destabilize gender and challenge personal identification devices. I am intellectually curious about the start of life from the micro-organism as it shapes and follows its own evolutionary biological process and is confronted with social constructs in coming into being and must negotiate itself to that which it must adapt to. Ecocriticsm is an imperative discourse, but rather than following a didactic paradigm, I employ poem objects into focus such as epigenetic failure to thrive. Industry is often deadly to life force. Art can rely on locating this negativity as a site for interrogating its own thwarted agency in the affirmative aggressive culture of commerce without conscience where art is not a perceived threat. If my work is
perceived as evidence of moral indifference, I take it upon myself to assert that it is meant to be without prejudice and to come into being in itself from the loci of the experiential.
“Like a butterfly nailed to sheet metal lying on asphalt” is a line that my own peers from Poetry Mission readings (Las Hermanas Poetry Collective) have made remarks on as “embodying the intense symbolism of misogyny and violence of the feminine experience” from my own piece that I presented during a Vagina Monologues event and also at a feminist themed evening at Poetry Mission.
II
Poeme-Objet
“Aesthetics necessarily involve objects, or reflected experience.” (Vanessa Place) My engagement in language is entwined with a struggle for coherence of relationship to object. I also like to play word games. There is an inherent freedom that poetry gives poet to discover signifiers that transpire in foreign (that which is not mine) random syntax. I am influenced by the writer Vanessa Place and her critique of modern and postmodern literary history. As Wittgenstein claims, “Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.” (“Philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetry.”) Place poses the question,“of what?” to what she participates in known as Conceptual Criticism.
The value of syntax and artful sentences after the invention of the typewriter and computer keyboards [Marinetti; The industrial age and the invention of machines demanded new aesthetic sensibilities] and to communicate with the language of my subconscious mind with the use of the mechanical excites me. Some of my best writing involves the allowance of the flow of thought and the arrest of the inner editor and critic by distances from the organic by the imposition of technology. I also enjoy the written word on page from pen to paper. I have taught myself to scribble words onto the pages and sort through them later.
I work with words as found objects as a commitment to defiance of commodity fetishism. TV makes me depressed by showing me hyper-consumptive fake excitements. I attack boob tube commercials and weapons of mass distraction with my work in the political spheres. “Moisturizers tested on animals SPF30” speaks to the agency of skin (corporeality) and is the poem object of Portraying the Damp Pages.
As a sculptor, I began collecting found objects. From garage sales to industrial factories where I was able to procure pieces of scrap metal to be assembled and refashioned to odd pieces of scraps from flea market finds. I began thinking about the political ecology of things very much the same way that Jane Bennett’s writ on Thing Theory. By assembling found things and imposing found text onto my work, I had begun to continue to investigate Andre Breton’s aesthetic sensibilities. Sometimes brilliant ideas are worth emulating. We need not always strive to be original. Originality is the strife of the narcissist. Everything has already been done before, as I was always told as an art studio student. Recycling, regeneration and metamorphosis, however, somehow negates this disempowerment. Constructs and personal identification devices can be deconstructed and reinvented all of the time. I find random words, combinations of words that I will collect and use later, often.
I once saw a sign on the highway at a general store, a poster really, that said “Free Bat Boxes” and I saved a copy of the paper flier. It has a hand drawn bat. Moments like that in language experiences are key to my sense of what I find significant about working on validating those tokens and bringing them into focus. I have been tempted to steal signs in China Town many times but have refrained from doing so because I didn’t want to create bad “Art Karma”. I am deluding myself if I assume that I am the only one who will find the quirky beauty in a sign in Chinese and American English in poorly thought out grammar. So, there is a pleasure in the object itself and I seek to engage with it. Yet, I am not a conceptualist in any pure form. I think that poetry is still interesting. The relationships between poetry and objects are a metaphor of the social disconnect, of fetishism, of idolatry and this is a delight. I do not wish to write an obituary for poetry.
III
Intersections of Genres
The internet is an evolving and changing system of communication and is a media that few Western poets live without. Hardly a day goes by when I am not on the internet. When one reads poetry in text online, there is an absentia of the tonality of tone of voice as well as limited space for text,so social media, with the limited characters in the posts, forces an expedited economy of language. “Free Bat Boxes”, “Free Dirt”, “Be Cautious of Small Children around Nursery Dogs”, etc. become words as “things” that I collect as found objects to be reused and up cycled later. Taking from the Flarf movement, a natural process that occurred to me was Google search engines. I will sometimes randomly search for what interests me using a search engine and use an item from my search and begin an erasure process of eliminating whole sentences, paragraphs and selecting words, sentences and paragraphs that I will use to play around with later. I have constructed several poems in this fashion. It is a fun exercise in playing with syntax. I find certain awe in how economical with words that this practice enables me to be. I have often taken a favorite philosophy book from a shelf and cherry picked words and sentences that liked. I love philosophical language. It uses new words and terms constantly. Not knowing exactly what the philosopher means isn’t a problem for a poet. For example, finding word combination such as objet petite a on a page has given me moments to pause and find wonder in the signifiers of language and the power that the signified has according to what symbolic collective meaning is placed upon it and the cognitive dissonance that occurs when language is not all inclusive. Breaking up the signifier/signified relationship occurs in a Flarf experiment. It is not as nihilistic as Conceptualism. It does not impose a death of poetry. It is playful and uses the innovation of technology. It is exhilarating to find ways to deconstruct the value of rational process of linear thought lines. K. Silem Mohammad has had a strong influence on me. We have known each other since kids. His ideas of seeking meanings and challenging those meanings by recreating them with his own invention have origins that run deep. I remember sitting on the couch of the apartment that I shared with Katy Graves, who is also a poet, and listening to Kasey read his poems from a little chap book that he had made while we were in junior college. We were all Punks and artists who had miraculously found each other congregated at the Surf Kitchen and Leonard’s Art Space.
The line, “and I can find no kind words for your puffy chin” lingers in memory.
My poetry is permeated with tensions between the fluidity of the chaos of mind and imposed order of social construct, the matrix of cyber space in the age of technology and rapid exchanges of information and social interactions, the plight of the biological imperatives of micro-organisms and the imposition of concrete and asphalt. I use descriptions marked with hopefully, poignant symbols and definitively expressive imagery and oneiric visions. My earlier studio projects in sculpture were multi-media assemblages that dealt with experiments in poeme-objet and my written works still anticipates the surrealist experiment. I adore Syntax/artful sentences became a focal point of my projects. I want to use enough adjectives to interpret human perceptions of nature. I take a perfect sentence and discombobulate it; remove articles leave a sentence hanging without a final word leaving the reader to complete the sentence. The word is now imaginary and it forces the imagination to define its presence by its absence and leaves the signifier/signified open to the interpretation of the reader, giving the reader a participatory space and creative license to have that moment of continuum of thought forms independently of the written word.
I would like to believe that aesthetics can be reborn after a cruel death. If it has died and been reborn, risen from the ashes like the immortal phoenix, then maybe it is undead. In coming into my own writing in the post moot era, it is easy to feel invalidated and overwhelmed by technology and its ability to replace the writer. It puts voice into question. Technology can manufacture a simulated poem, killing off the experiential. Binary numbers are transmitted at warp speed and Flarf’s method of generating words from search engines to implement language games enforces a disconnect between the poet and the momentums that come into our immediate experiences. A thin branch draped in textured leaves like veils, the vibrations of color that our eyes gather and are transmitted through synapsis via the corpus coliseum have to travel through the brain waves to locate language to translate thoughts. We give in to distorted images in TV. Shows impose upon us prescribed images and symbols. The fight is on to continue to stay in touch with sensory perception and to make the human experience readable on the page. Technology, for the poet, challenges traditional perceptions of how we define ourselves as poets, as writers and directly puts into question how we define our place in the universe.
The days of the courtier wooing his cruel Mistress by delighting and pleasing the courts with the fantastic spectacle are seductive and unattainable dreams of the obscure objet petite a to me. I have watched films such as Orlando and relished in the recreation of these things of beauty where the poetry object, i.e.; Stella, is exalted as object of worship of idolatrous love to such a degree that for me, a ghostly romantic relationship to the poet is formed upon every encounter with its text. It is here that I first discovered that a poem has a life of its own. The poet may be long dead, but his words are still alive, therefore I speak about him in the present tense. My own desires in language are now never satisfied. The poetical imagination and inspirations of Poesy of the days courtly love seem lost yet remain eternally ours. The vibrant energy of courtly love and its circulation of social energy is proven by its evidence. The courtier’s fine art does not find its way into contemporary art galleries and poetry gatherings, but for me, its presence is defined by its absence. Men no longer worship the cruel queen and yield to her golden scepter and kneel blinded by her crown, but we know of this experience because we have read about it from the poet and we have become observer of the culture because we have been informed by the cultural informant. To read Astrophil and Stella is to share the dream of love, we too experience the awe of such things, such objects of desire. Such is the craftsmanship of the wordsmith. The courtier, too, is a manufactured artist, but in a different economy of cultural commodity. It isn’t fashionable in many postmodern literary circles, especially a poetry slam, to yearn for such beauty because of its memory of British Empire and its treatment of indigenous peoples, as well as its inability to speak to Modernism, but I think that anyone who openly refuses to appreciate its aesthetic value is either a liar and secretly harbors envy of its sophisticated command of language or hasn’t been taught to understand its subtlety, lyricism, symbolism and crafty wit.
Poetry is meant to be read out loud. The experiment of Dada and sound effects encourages me to listen to the sounds that I am making within the poem. There is a disruption of coherent syntax in favor of sound, albeit I want to use potency of (nonsensical?) signifier and signified in such a way as to penetrate the conscience and subconscious. The poetry readings that I attend encourage me to write to delight and please the oratory experience of the listeners. I think that I do not often intentionally write with the intention of reading the words out loud initially, but I will read the words out loud when the poem is at a certain point in development. It is at this point that sound becomes an essential element to the poems construction. I have been going to poetry readings for years, long before I started writing myself, so I had already begun to develop a sense of aesthetics as a poetry listener first, which I think has really helped me to have a better sense of how to fine tune my poems. Poetry definitely has a performative element for me. I intend for it to delight and please or to startle. It has to have an effect on thereader or listener. I want to allow the poem to address the reader or listener as participant. I don’t write solely for myself, to please myself only. It does give me a personal joy to write, but I hope to share my thoughts and it is in this fashion that I do it. Since much of my work is political, whether it is directly about current affairs, critical humanitarian concerns or engaged in the experiential of my female body and mind, it addresses the systematic social constructs we all endure and it is my desire to reach that level of sharing the experiential of my higher self. I make it a personal policy of mine to never apologize for art. It often will startle and shock the reader, listener and viewer. It has a tendency to make people feel uncomfortable. If that means that the dear Other has to think harder and to question my logic, I do not believe that I am responsible.
Transhistorical views of poetry: I give pause to Virgil, a bee keeper and a writer of sacred texts, as I hold his work on Bee Keeping in Georgics to be. From the point of reverence for nature and respect for all living things, a poet begins to understand interconnectedness. Even the Flarf poets who come from a space of mocking language and popular culture, internet technology and machine created poems do so because of the inherit disconnect that is experienced. Without connection the disconnect would not function as apparatus in literary device. We do not need the Conceptualists to tell us that Virgil’s Bee Keeping is poetry to give that aspect of validity in literary circles and academia so that we can all agree to read it thoughtfully as poem. The idea that Virgil kept his valuables in bee hives gives us all reason to embellish on the secret meaning of bees as a sacred symbol to ancient poets and philosophers. I have thought about keeping bees myself, and to move on to the next step of my observation and reverie of their geometric movement and the musicality of their flight. Holding on to the ancient practice of poets gives me a feeling of connecting to ancestors. Planting for bees in my garden also has led me to learning things such as the Victorian meaning of flowers. Each flower tells a story about mating rituals, courtship, literary interpretations of love and friendships.
Cross genre completely makes sense to me because I am a multimedia assemblage thinker. I first began this with found objects. I would collect things that I would assemble later as sculptures. My first considerations in my own art began with objects. I have to contribute much of my influence to Andre Breton and Poem-Objet for this. In studying art, I was taught that my sculpture enhances my drawing; my drawing enhances my painting which assists my film making which assists my poetry, etc. Mixing genres has been something that I have done since earlier art studies and now has become necessary. I enjoy experimenting with audio files, performance art, mixing in various artists that I have read my work from time to time, music, film, video, etc. The natural evolution to intersect my poetry with performance art and film seems that it was inevitable for the reasons that I have stated regarding my earlier beginnings in the study of art. I think that since poetry is somewhat inaccessible to most because of its absence in the cultural mainframe, interjecting it into other genres enhances its potency exponentially. It creates new opportunities for its exposure, its access and places it into a myriad of other social systems that would otherwise have been restricted or restrained from being presented. A poem with and audio file superimposed upon film can be formatted to be transmitted via the internet for a multitude of intentions. Social protest poetry can more readily penetrate culture as well as have another life of its own. So poems can become multi-media assemblages. My interests in this as an art form have been evolving. I have been collaborating with other artists to make this happen with wonderful results. My latest two completed pieces are Volatile Bodies and The Precautionary Principle: First Do No Harm. They are both infused into audio files that are assembled with films by another artist that worked closely with the poems. The process of using technology to enhance the distribution of poetry becomes a way of documentation and hopefully, if humans don’t kill each other off, will allow them to have a permanent record. Anyone in the world with internet access will have the ability to experience them. Maybe one day aliens will have access to our internet technology and be able to have a way of understanding our communication.
IIII
Earlier Influences
Influences on my literary pallet have been largely influenced by Classical Literature, Elizabethan Courtiers, Romantic Era poets, Dada, Surrealism, Beatnik poets, Punk, New Romantic, Gothic Rock and Jazz Fusion, intensely curious newspaper headlines, and the discombobulated language of my mother’s schizophrenia. Her love of Jack Kerouac influenced my own literary experiences. I once read Subterraneans to her at her bedside when she was at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. A rush of memory came to me as I was reading the words and I unlocked the language trunk that I had left in the attic of my mind. She had read it to me as a child. That was a poetics of space moment for me.
I feel happy when I jot down random sentences that people utter underneath their breath. I enjoy word combinations that I spontaneously find on signs. I once saw a sign that read “free bat boxes” near the general store on the highway coming out of Calistoga. Those are precious moments when I am able to find intriguing word combinations that ignite my interests. I am interested in text that reads as transrational because lines are fragmented. I use an erasure process of eliminating articles and select the words/signifiers with the most potency and appeal to aesthetic sensibilities. I am fascinated by text that reads as transrational because it is transpired from an organic process because lines are fragmented and sound effects occur. Many of the lines from my work are also derived in this manner. Yet, my work is manufactured and I am unapologetic about that. I look for sources, from the written word of philosophy books to place out of context and redefine. By implementing an erasure process of eliminating articles and selecting the words/signifiers with the most potency and appeal to aesthetic sensibilities, I attempt to create artful sentences with idiosyncratic syntax designed to use poetical force. To be able to master this art to the point of even being able to invoke an evocative description of the sublime anguish & ineffable agony of a common thing and give it a life of its own.
At an earlier stage in process, I began writing lists. I adopted this format from Tulie Kupferburg, having been enamoured with 1001 Ways To Beat The Draft. The list also began to evolve from interacting with another spoken word artist who asked for the audience to contribute to his topic list that he would freestyle rap from. I enjoyed that process very much and began sending him lists via email personally that he cherry picked from and offer response. From the idea of response, I started addressing another poet with a piece titled To Hilda Doolittle Regarding Tribute to the Angels that was published by Wicked Alice in 2005. I went through her poem and did an internet search on every mythological personification that she mentioned to create a counter discourse to her poem. It felt like It was a way to have a dialogue with the other writer. This is influenced by Sir Philip Sidney’s eloquent rhetorical argument In Defense of Poesie that is a response to The School of Abuse by Stephon Gason.A writ of great power and magnificent artifice, this is a powerful literary device that I aspire to be able to master one day.
I read a lot. I think that it is valuable to investigate the projects of earlier movements of poetry and to study the intersections of art, music and literature. I don’t want dominant movements, such as Flarf and Conceptualism to dictate my own work to the point that I am afraid to test their authority. Yet, I do want to belong to an aesthetic movement that has poetry at its core. I want to write a Manifesto with a new set of rules like the poets who have preceded me have done.
If there is any movement since Modernism that I find the most interesting currently, it is Dada. The influence of Freud and artistic effort, the affirmative absence of the term Art, the expression of the anguish of traumatic experience with sound poems and the disregard for prescribed text format as poetic force make the Dadaists heroes of Modernism. In this brand new Millennium, the obituary for Poetry has been written and like the Phoenix, it dies and rises the same.
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