...I'm Chuck Bass.

For those of you willing to indulge my latest insane project, here's ...I'm Chuck Bass.

Her Noise

This film on the making of a sound art exhibit touches on a subject that pops up on that VIDA blog, and one that plagued (plagues) me while working on the poetry festival, that I was a feminist organizer concerned with female representation at the festival, and we still wound up with more men reading (both among featured readers and students- at SLC!). I can tell the story of how this happened, but can't anyone?

There's also some commentary on zines, commerce, and some great music. If anyone wants to start a band after graduation, let me know. I'm serious.

Response Burger: A Story of Rejection : Ada Limón : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Response Burger: A Story of Rejection : Ada Limón : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Ada Limon sheds some inspiring light on rejection here. I've been excited about rejection letters lately. It's a little ridiculous, but it makes me feel like I'm in the game. (Which--for once, since I'm not sporty-- is nicer than just watching from the sidelines and wondering what it would be like to play.)

The Dumpster Project

This almost makes me cry.

http://thedumpsterproject.com/

mending the potholes of Paris: Juliana Santacruz Herrera

This incredible woman fixes the potholes/cracks in the sidewalks of Paris...with yarn.

Wallace Stevens' The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words

Upon seeing a quote from this lecture in Don't Let Me Be Lonely I was intrigued, as I remembered the lecture as standing in opposition to works such as Rankine's. Upon rereading it I realized I was not entirely, but mostly, mistaken about that. I like to think about the lecture as a an unexpected starting point for Rankine's work. I will link to the lecture, but here's an excerpt:

"...if a possible poet is left facing life without any categorical exactions upon him, what then? What is his function? Certainly it is not to lead people out of the confusion in which they find themselves. Nor is it, I think, to comfort them while they follow their readers to and fro. I think that his function is to make his imagination become the light in the minds of the others. His role, in short, is to help people live their lives."

Uncanny Valleygirl

Just wanted to post briefly about a new project I started this weekend, Uncanny Valley Girl: an exploration of the uncanny valley via Hannah Montana fanart I found on the internet.

The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The name captures the idea that a facsimile which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction [Wikipedia].

Here is an article about it from the late, great Damn Interesting. Some YouTube examples of robots that might evoke the response are here, here, and especially here and here.

--Ryan

Poetry and Labor

I've been listening to some of the presentations from last year's conference on Poetry and Labor, which focused on poetics and politics for poets who work outside of the academy.

Here is a link to their blog. I particularly enjoyed Andrew Joron's thoughts about aversion to labor and the elitism of breaking social expectations.

It all seems particularly relevant as we prepare to graduate and navigate and/or deny the Vocation-Job venn-diagram. If anyone already knows where they stand on any of these issues, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

The McCarty to Bonney Transition.

It is such a pleasure reading a book that takes place where I'm from. It's even better that I adore the book.

I'm pretty sure that both the Mescalero territory, and the Chisum's home are in southern New Mexico. Here are some of my brother's photos from that area. He walked the entire length of the continental divide in the United States and has some amazing photographs. However, keep in mind that is rarely rains. (Average precipitation is less then 10 in/year.) It just happened to rain while he was there and everything looked unusually green afterward.

I'm trying to find my (lesser-in-quality) photos of Fort Sumner and Mr. The Kid's grave, but they are MIA. I used to go there in high school. Anyway, my family has been in NM (southern and eastern) 4-5 generations and just to indulge myself, here's a family photo.

Moving Poems

Feeding into my obsession with moving words, here is a website --- it is an on-going anthology of videopoems, filmpoems, and animated poems appearing at a rate of one every weekday.  

Here is How to Make a Dadaist Poem.  

It demonstrates the process of my experiments with dadaism.

~Saundra

Giest Erasures

I played around with some erasures from the Canadian magazine Giest

Blackout Horoscopes for April: Austin Kleon

For you! All the rest are here: April Horoscopes!

Leigh Stein: a young poet bringin' the lolz

So, I really love Leigh Stein's work. Her blog, "Mythical Creatures," is FULL of goodies.

This poem is especially wonderful:

SECOND DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE

I am wearing my librarian costume.
Yes, I saved it from the fires.

In the future, when we say antiquity, we mean
state fairs and musicals. We mean affairs

of state, amusement. You left me a message
to say you were sad but you understood
which state I was coming from and I’m wondering

now which state you meant. West of us?
Or did you mean a state of mind?

I don’t have states of mind, I only have sweater sets.

I get dressed up and then I undress. I’d show you,
but this is a dispatch, I’m the dispatcher.

The calls come into my call center and
it’s my job to say, what’s the future

of your emergency?

Our new state flag is an aurochs,
not to celebrate extinction, but

to celebrate the wild part of us that died
in 1627. They moved her skull to Stockholm.

I wear my state flag like a dress.

____________________________

For National Poetry Month, she writes on her blog, "For National Poetry Month, I will be writing/posting poems using dialogue from reality TV shows. Please to enjoy."

AWESOME. Ryan, I'm lookin' at you to AWESOME this as well!

Photos from break

Spring 2011, a set on Flickr.

Here are a few pictures I took over break...I wish the weather hadn't gone in reverse.

The Botanical Gardens have an incredible orchid exhibit right now, I think it's going on for a while longer & recommend it to everyone. Besides being beautiful, there are a lot of strange (downright alien) looking plants in there as well.

Robert Grenier

I promised a while ago I would post about Robert Grenier (specifically, a link to his scrawls, also referred to as his "illuminated poems" or "holographs"), and here I am fulfilling that promise.

Silly as they look at first, I was initially skeptical about the scrawl poems (though having loved for a while Sentences, probably his masterpiece, a series of Saroyan-esque micropoems written on index cards, a digital version of which appears here), though I think one begins to understand in a new and immediate way, if only intuitively, the difficulties of written language seen at its near-ultimate extension.

Silliman sez:

What seems to interest Grenier most [in the scrawl poems] is the making explicit of the “coming to recognition” process of reading. He is really fascinated at the idea of identifying the instant a word “pops” into consciousness & poem after poem functions to locate precisely this moment.

Which feels right to me, although I have maybe a half-sense that there's a fair amount more to it that I can't put my finger on, whether about language as a kind of AI that's become more intelligent or pregnant with possibility than its inventors, or about written language's ability to replace the world, or at least spoken language (after all, Grenier is famous for "I HATE SPEECH", which, me too), or both –– or something.

About the above holograph, Grenier writes:

Whether drawing poem texts like 'the one about crickets' (no. 39) accomplish (or help accomplish) whatever it is they are otherwise 'saying'—so that seeing/reading "crickets" a reader may hear 'crickets themselves' (& even be able to literally go ('by ear') "across/the/road"?)—remains an animating question.

I'd love to hear what you guys think. A correspondence interview between Grenier and Charles Bernstein is here.

--Ryan