1913

Just got word that a piece of mine ("The The Weather Project") responding to Olafur Eliasson's 2003-2004 Tate Modern installation "The Weather Project" will be included in 2010's issue 4 of 1913: a journal of forms.

Very exciting. 1913 is one of the most beautiful journals in existence. It's an honor to be part of the project.

Meanwhile, at other blogspots...

With + Stand puts out the call for its much-anticipated Lisa Robertson issue.

Dig it.

Israeli gesture

The Paper of Record has as its electronic lead this morning:

As Obama Begins Trip, Arabs Want Israeli Gesture

I can't help but read gesture for its primary definition, a movement of the body/hand to express an idea or emotion. So I did a Google image search for Israeli gesture... Here's my Flarf photo essay. I call it "A tank is apparently a good platform for an Israeli Gesture"

The Winning Order

For $102.59, or $2.59 funds laid out, I just ordered from SPD:

The Sophist, Charles Bernstein, Salt reprint.
Clampdown, Jennifer Moxley, Flood editions.
8x8x7, Colin Smith, Krupskaya books.
Debbie: an epic, Lisa Robertson, New Star books.
The Weather, Lisa Robertson, New Star books.
The Men, Lisa Robertson, Book Thug.

Thank you SPD for this gift certificate; thank you Yao Ming for the inspiration; and thank you Zack Tuck for taking my order. I apologize if my head cold made me sound less excited than I am. I am excited. I am coming to get these excellent books on Friday. This is my excited face:

Chn mthrfckrs wht

SPD's contests have now won me an Anne Boyer book AND a $100 gift certificate. This time for a poem about Yao Ming in which all the words are misspelled.

Living large.

Reality

"Reality is too complicated to be fully expressed by poetry – or any other art form."

So said Jerome Sala at the Best American Poetry blog last month.

At first blush, most sane people would agree. After all, how to press into words or paint or ones and zeros or any other medium the infinite complexity of, say, global capital (my own favorite quest), or even just the blogosphere, or the sixty-something-million registered cars in the U.S., or the particles emitted by those cars, or the microscopic creatures killed by those particles, or the less-than-microscopic creatures affected by those microscopic deaths, or, or, or... Just ask Juliana Spahr—it's a list that does nothing but expand.

Still, while Sala goes to Hegel, I go to Adorno, my favorite roadmap for my favorite quest. And so I find myself worrying somewhat less about the intent to express reality—holding no illusions about my brain's ability to contain such sublime totalities in model form—than about the inevitability of refraction and reflection.

This to say: my poems do not express reality because I will them to do so; reality, refracted, sets their forms. And if my poems are any good, and I leave that to others to determine, it is because they point up the distance between what my brain expresses and what reality forms.

Quoting my dissertation prospectus, quoting our man Adorno thrice:

“[Aesthetic form] is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth.”

“History in artworks is not something made, and history alone frees the work from being merely something posited or manufactured: Truth content is not external to history but rather its crystallization in the works.”

This is to say, aesthetic form is history—the contradictions of social life at a given moment in history, visible in the form of an artwork as “ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other.”

Grinding, cousin. Just thought I'd remind y'all.

Cracking up