It has been a chaotic reading month.
BOOKS+READ+++++++++++++++~~~ Learning POEM about Learning about being a POET by Michael Basinski (PressBoardPress, Buffalo, NY, 2012) Printed by Patrick Riedy ~~~ Mike was the longtime curator of the Poetry Collection at UB. I’ve been meaning to read more of his sonically bouncy, gently surreal & rust belt inflected work. This one slides between childhood the specificities of childhood memory and daydream. I think of Mike of not just exemplifying a certain strain of Buffalo Great Lakes / Rust Belt poetics in dialogue with the decline of the region but also shaping our larger understanding of it through his curation which made room for so many small publications and ephemera, which I benefited from as a student at UB. & I don’t mean to overly regionalize his work as if that somehow makes it irrelevant. Nah, I think Rust Belt is just this rotten occident ahead of its time. As more and more places are abandoned, we might start to see this poetries emerging from provincial decay speaking to each other, as not articulating an over there but a here, also, with difference.~~~~~~~ Anyway. Here’s a quote, first page, setting the scene: “into my tiny Circe thirsty room of child from / the east into the house where my father / raised yellow canaries when he was a boy on / May Street, 119 May Street on Buffalo’s / eastside, up the street Walden Avenue, hello / Walden, near where Walden and Sycamore / come together, right now, and the bus stops, / No. 6 Sycamore Street red and white bus, / next door was Ray, lived Ray and his / brother and they had a black bear living in / the basement.” + + + + + + + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Gloom 6: Screening Room by Jake Reber (11:11, 2024) ~~~ Reber’s pixelated poem comic series continues to spiral into its haunted Silicon Valley r&d facility, this one ending in a screening room of the protagonist’s own death. Admire the rigorousness in which Reber presents a media world of tapes and screens that merges with flesh. Sitting in a room reading media about reading media. With a propulsive, psychedelic palette. + ++ + + + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Cultural Imperialism Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature (Liberated Texts, 2022) On the awarding of Shmuel Agnon’s The Third Temple a Nobel Prize in 1966: “Awarding Agnon the Nobel Prize represented a fraudulent and illegitimate literary endorsement to humanize what is fundamentally inhuman and to confer a civilizational value to what is reactionary, chauvinistic and racist. It amounts to a literary Balfour Declaration” (113). For all those who want to excuse literature and the influence of awards and publishers on our political consciousnesses, one of purest distillations of the political power of literature. The book is full of receipts to support this position which looks hard at the ways decades of novels legitimized an elminationist, g!n!c!d!l /// settler /// colonial ./// project. + +++++ ++ + ++ + + + + + + + + ++++++++++++++++ + + + + + + ++++++++++ + + +++ ++ + + + + + + Gloom 8 by Jake Reber (11:11, 2024) Prayer rooms. Cybernetic flesh. The saint of the slitted eye. Realizing that Reber was prognosticating about the convergence of Silicon Valley, the right, and tech dystopia years ago. He was right about what we should be tracking. This issue of Gloom leads into dank symbols for tech’s experimentation with mysticism—or it’s fucking around with the strange nozzles and knobs in our psychic goo that trigger cultic belief and behavior. ++++ + + + + + + + + +++++++ + + + + + + + + Gloom 9 – Epilogue by Jake Reber (11:11, 2024-5) ~~~ One of the challenges of this social-technical moment is to defamiliarize our relationship with technology. Here, approaching the climax of the sequence, Reber’s narrator starts to stumble upon such defamiliarizing symbols of wired tech integrated into flesh & thought, toggling between a lurching humanoid and rat whose flesh has been jacked by tech, drawn so that they seem to ooze blood and cables, so that the abrasion of the psyche by tech is a wound whose arc is total desubjectification (“I am nothing…I am all things”). &, hey, I’ll doomer here: that’s one potential arc of ChatGPT, an offloading of cognitive processes so that the signs which represent us to the world are a normed word slurry constituted from enormous data sets—the extracted and melted down breath and energy of millions of communicators. + + + + + + + ++++++++++++++++++ + + + +++ + + + + + + + + +++++++++++++ + + + + + + + + + + + Look by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf, 2016) & “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” by Solmax Sharif (2013) ~~~ For several years in the teens I largely quit reading contemporary poetry in favor of history and theory and historical work. I’ve been trying to revisits some of the ‘big’ books of those years. “Near Transitive” has several moments that move(d) the conversation forward on the political effect of erasure: first by simply noticing that it had become a favored tactic for a sort of self-consciously serious political poetry; second that there was an under-theorization of the fundamental fact that erasure is a technique of the state, used in particularly painful ways against imprisoned people; accordingly, “Poetic erasure has yet to advance historically.” It’s worth thinking w/ & thanks to Alex T for getting it to me. That said, the advice to political movements to be more lyrical—that movements have more to learn from poetry than poets have to learn from poets—I’m not convinced. You’ll have to talk to me about what I think of Look. + + + + + + + + + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + Dissent (Spring, 2025 Border Politics Issue) The writing on the border is somewhat useful (though feeling, already, data) is crystalizing new realities (U.S. death squads dissapearing people into concentration camps) but Dissent remains awful on international politics, dutifully reporting on enemies of the state (China, Cuba) as if U.S. imperial power has no influence on their domestic realities. Almost lol-barfed as one review of a book about authoritarianism in the Chinese educational system took the author to task for not being hard enough on China. It lacked nuanced that might come from a rigorously comparative perspective, rather than an idealistic view from nowhere. Realizing more and more how much soft nationalism & orientalism pervades the socialist left. I mean, they’re fuckin’ w/nationalist socialism! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++>>>>>>> “Lola Ridge’s Pivotal Editorial Role at Broom,” Introduction by Belinda Wheeler (PMLA, 2012). Fascinating glimpse into the neglected anarchist Lola Ridge’s shaping of a major modernist magazine and her departure over the publisher’s insistence of including a mediocre Gertrude Stein piece, which Ridge objected to on aesthetic and ideological grounds. Thx to AZ for bringing this one & Broom to my attention. +++++++++++++ ++ + + + + + ++++++++++++++++ + + + + + + + + + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds by Sara Lefsyk (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Delightfully, disturbingly strange bottle-world prose poem sequences from the prolific editors and book maker of Ethel Press that bring to mind the best possible mix of Russel Edson, Lorca, & Kim Gek Lin Short but which are most definitely their own, subversive thing. +++ Signs, graffiti, endless social media scrolls, the horrible, rage inducing news of empire’s evolving crimes & ++++
Composed in LibreOffice. No AI/author-corpse-slurry
JOE HALL 