poem: “I want to be That Man”
listen here man.mp3
You can read and listen at the same time if you open 2 windows;
music and production by Emil Brikha
I want to be
that man
that man on the telephone in the airport
that man I walked passed
that man.
I want to wear
his brown saddle shoes
his argyle socks
his soft sage corduroy pants
his creamy cotton oxford shirt
his cashmere vest
his tweed jacket
his tortoiseshell glasses.
I want to
run my hand through my thinning sandy hair
push my glasses up my sharp nose
rub my chin and
think about shaving clean the night’s stubble from my angular face.
I want to
talk in my man’s voice, make my man’s deals, make my man’s money.
Now, do you think
do you think if I
walked over to him and
unlaced my black boots
removed my socks
unbuckled my belt
slid my Levi’s over my hips
unbuttoned my silk blouse
revealed my breasts
do you think
do you think if I
stood naked in the airport beside him
he would let me put on his clothes and be him?
Would he let me live in his Chicago apartment and feed his tabby cat?
Would he let me race around the lake in his powerful lean man’s body?
Because if he would, I would like to feel how it feels
to become aroused the way he becomes aroused.
If I was he, I would take my slender man’s tongue
and dance across my lover’s body, stopping
to savor the flavors with my man’s tastebuds
before I graced myself oh so carefully in.
And then, and then, do you think my man’s body
knows how not to get too excited too quickly?
my mind knowing I could come and come and come
and not watch each day for ovulation, for blood?
You see, it’s not that I want to be intimate with him.
No.
I want to intimately be him.
Instead I get on my plane and I marvel over Ohio on that man
that man on the telephone
that man in the airport
that man I never met.
You can listen to it w/o music as part of nila northSun’s interview with me on Blogtalk Radio. (I read it near the end of the hour long interview.)
For more poems about watching, go to readwritepoem; or ride the poetry train!
The Grateful Palate sale Sat. 6/7/08: GO
Yes you should, you should go to the Grateful Palate Warehouse Sale Read more…
“He’s Frank” w/Iggy Pop
While I’m working on that next conceptual poetry post with links to videos shown at the conference as well as blogs about it, I am listening to KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic which just played “He’s Frank” by Brighton Port Authority (originally recorded by Monochrome Set in the late 70’s).
I’m eagerly awaiting the June 17 release of the new Fatboy Slim aka Brighton Port Authority aka Norman Cook which will include my favorite song right now “He’s Frank” which features the distinctive, craggy vocals of Iggy Pop (“Lust for Life”). When I get the cd in my hot little hands, it will replace Dengue Fever’s place on my cd player for that last few months (it replaced Radiohead’s In Rainbows…once I get a cd in the player, I play it over and over for months…I listened to Palookaville for months at a time for a year…)
In the meantime, to tide me (and you) over for the next few weeks since KCRW only plays it once a show or two, I have posted this version. Check it out!
go here: Part 1 (Days 1&2)
Here therefore is The Constraint (known in publication practice as “the note”): type up word for word appropriated text as recorded in daybook at the Conceptual Poetry & Its Others gathering in Tucson May 28-31, 2008.
Tracie Morris
Run Jeremiah
<o+ & tech? men goof off>
<everybody thinking the way they
do poetry, the poetry they like
is the best, the only>
Becket Cascando–radio play
is this one worth doing? — Tenny
be done better? or otherwise?
what’s the question?
was this the right one?
“canned chance” Duchamp
canned subjectivity?
never objective
but Kenny is canned chance
choose the day & chose
when where to being end
USC unboring boring brunet
unsubjective subjectivity
==
“the old expression are always
with us as are others”
Others Magazine
Wallace Stevens “13 Blackbirds”
poetry pregnant with thought
Chs B
<the other is subversive>
Ch A
physical pleasure
what’s the gap btwn expression &
conceptual?
Bryan Reed? sources get confused
over time (Russian)
a problem to be solved
a project to be explored
project based work
what are the bonds of a poem?
boundaries
distributive agency
Vanessa we all want to kill someone sometime in our lives
post conceptual writing
<menopausal?>
nitebase
Chas Kate Hayles
Mer
chamo/pulesegel
Chance & will fuel adaptation
Christian Bok
(1) an innovative literature
disaster
<achsisms (axioms)>
<not a readership but
a thinkship
novelty to its concept
<achsiomatic dicta>
aliatonic forms of expression
(2) what is expressive
: WmTell: a novel
l McCaffery
willing & the telling
what they will & what they tell
(3) what is conceivable
in coption literature?
I cognitive II Mamastic
intentional more intentional
expressive less expressive
self conscious witness skirt
& self assertive formalized experiment
IV Automatic III Aleatoric
less intentionality less intention
more expressive less expressive
unwilled self exhibit stochastic experiment
diatribes of ainsbry
I prelude Wordsworth
Lowell
bearing witness to its own
thoughtful expression
_________________________________________________
4 concepts possible
Games
I Mimicry II vertigo Argon
Ilxe
adapt game of combat
persona & thought
atheletic
restraint
IV ver chance Alea
vertigo opinion of wng
orft losing
throw of the dice
C. Bok
explain to my
students why I do
what I do
———-
C Bernstein
Yellow Pages the critic
> a capella
The Attack of the Difficult Poems
Painting by Susan B
Droome to Wh
I sleep on the side of road for poetry
The lingerie drawer
of the computer desktop
______________
in the way was a ston
I’ll move around like a
televangelist
__________
legends bachelor machines
recantorium my most
elaborate bachelor machine
can’t engage that
that’s outside
the nseby
<when rejected, we
reject those who reject us>
Chas Bernstein Asylum
40 copies typed copied
<Jonathan Stalling Chinese translations
<There is no language
if there is no emotion
says brain research> Graca Capinha
Stephen Fredman quotes DJ Spooky
samples Emerson
online distributed living
Chas A student of Al Young
<Certes subversive helping a plan>
collaborative conception
+ live delivery
= birth of unthought
extant notions of textuality
________________________
Myin Choic
the idea we’re going
to come to heads
nonproductive
rigorous thinking
worrying there’s
a particular choice that
e Kenny & Craig made
Marjorie
It really bothers me
_________
Vanessa
(This conference has served )
to dissemble a
manocitric notion
of what conceptual poetry is
——–
Craig UBU web anthology
is an illustration
a provocative sketch
it could be all women
what’s the relation of gender
what are the various social political
around conceptual writing?
(but aesthetic excludes
O+ & they are ”
what is a isn’t to
numerous readers)
do a close reading of the symposium materials
___________
Flarf: using google to write
through
holds onto traditional
notions of
“Poetry. I like poetry,” the boy says
“Poetry. I like poetry,” the 4 and a half year old redheaded boy says when I tell him I was at a poetry conference, “but only when there’s something to watch on a screen.”
Here therefore is The Constraint (known in publication practice as “the note”): type up word for word appropriated text as recorded in daybook at the Conceptual Poetry & Its Others gathering in Tucson May 28-31, 2008.
Tracie Morris
dream within a dream Be
if you’re an Artia Am poet
do you have to sing?
The day was brighter
than teeth
Gees Us Saves Us
It all started when
we were brought here
as slaves from Africa
=
Charles Bernstein
Poetry & social & ideological
construction
social poetics
nuances and nooks
crooked and beet prose
<by your hump>
abnormal poetry techniques
unnatural constraints
of any kind
poverty>poetry
in the books of
the accessible poet
substitution of the
plagiarized & the
manufactured fo the
original
improper employs
bad gramma desery at I
Bent Studies
I loved language more than the truth
unoriginal
Marjorie Perloff genious
Walter Benjamin
“Wizardess of Oz” behind the screen
Silliman’s In the Am Tree
poetry made of language itself SF & NYC
WCW A poem is a small valve
21st Century Poetics
submission to a chosen pole
Ja Batens restraint
I am a poem be done better (workshop)
or differently?
who’s death
the new sentence
/////////////////
Craig Dworkin
Rob’t Metropolis 16
3XXX
recycling words ala Bush
also poest
Fitterman
redactive
tax records list by bizness
in certain streets
what you want to do is
meat
Moon Ear reading America
remove every 7 word > a list poem
on the road
across country I 10
_____________________________________________
64 ampersands > Am Mac
Bervall
our need to make sense (cents)
_________________
K. Gold
life aft tent the continous preschooler
how much did you say that
paragraph weighed?
method of disorientation
is the procedure well articulated
& executed
III Information Management
/ change all words to homophones
Kenneth
IV
you don’t need to read my
books you just need to
know my concept
unboring boring that’s fascinating
downright sexy
boring boring have to endure
someone’s self indulgent
poetry reading
being somewhere we don’t want
to be
because I had value tearall
to be bored it was the
most fascinating thing I’d
seen
here we are ready to be bored
once more
Kenneth
engage in a durational sense
you didn’t write a word of what you said
but w/on my introduction
these works wdn’t have found
their way into the world as lit
I hate comedy
humour is there if only we have ears
to hear it
we’re so limited by what we
possess between our 2 ears
—
> manual?
what is the difference between retyping
cut & paste & format?
why being an author if
everything is literature?
Vanessa-where our form?
K where the artist puts it
Maj a gesture can one make
the materiality does matter
be
____
Cole The I wanders unguarded
<better but different>
9-1-00>
9-11-00> Ken new project
Chas B The Attack of the Difficult
Poem
news is always social, polici abu
& culturally situated
poems take a theory
through these particulars
<process not product> Chas
Does it work is ca
better question than
is it good> Vanessa
Push to the border of discomfort
(June 28, 2008)
walk Main & transcribe
Carlos Students are looking for a point
Chas If you read a poem
as an ambient room
poetry is a clickable environment
Puritans meaning shold be recuperated
an ideal
Carlos (Worsdworth walking/working
poet
(June 28 1958)
constraint
remove the I/i from
—– (June 28, 1908)
remove the you/u (June 28, 1858)
=
homonyms (June 28 1808)
which sounds the
same 2 meanings
1758
1708
1658
1608
1558
1508
1458
—-
12
from the
river to
my office (house)
Cole Swenson
rhythm repetition ll & juxtoposition
<These are our friends
we should be on time> Charles B
<What gives conceptual poets
permission to make poetry
that makes fun of others
laughs cynically priveledges at their problems?
makes us laugh at them?
how is that different from “accessible poets” who make
us care or face?>
(2010 Eco Poetics)
note from the Art Predator: come back tomorrow for part 2, Day 3! And for some completely different and more likely more “expressive” poetry bound by the constraints of traditional forms more likely than not, head over to readwritepoem or jump aboard the poetry train! Or even read other poems on this site, like last week’s “These Brothers They” or “spring poem” which is the most read poem on this site (about 225 reads).
One idea that came up repeatedly at the conference was not could a poem be done better (the question of the workshop), but different. I am thinking this text might be different: a prose poem one word laid out after the next, an onslaught…hmmn
INTRO: I spent the last few days at the Conceptual Poetry & Its Others conference in Tucson. (I was definitely one of the others.)
To those uninitiated, a conceptual poem has a “concept” or idea behind it which often and typically supercedes other “aesthetic” notions imposed upon a work by writers. These ideas often take the form of a contraint, for example to type every word and punctuation and mark on the page of the September 1, 2000 edition of the New York Times ala Kenneth Goldsmith’s 900 page work entitled Day (of which he appears oddly proud that no one bothers to read). Works are collaborative in nature, whether the collaborators intend to be part of the project or not, as conceptional poets appropriate many if not most of their texts from other sources.
Or as Laynie Browne put it in her collaborative piece with responses from over 50 poets and by using a computer analysis to compose the following answer to the question “What is conceptual poetry?”
A can of call and response. An unfortunate noun modified by an adjective. What poets are NOT conceptual. It makes me ambient. Quagmire out side of texts. For example, Kathleen Fraser’s essay, on “Partial Local Coherence.” My life is a highly conceptual work. Predicated on the desanctification of the aesthetic object. Hejinian’s poems, often organized around grammatical structures. Idea has preference. Bernadette Mayer–how can Utopia not be conceptual? It began with Acconci and Mayer’s 0-9. Foulipo (Spahr and Young’s piece) was conceptual. Given Dworkin’s definition, I’ll have to change my bio note. Language beyond born.
So I have decided to post my notes from the conference word by illegible word here as a conceptual poem using the words and format of my notes in an attempt to transcribe what is there verbatum.
That post coming right up…
Laynie introduces me as the poet who
Laynie Browne introduces me as the poet who drove all night from LA to get to the Conceptual Poetry and Its Others conference in Tucson.
This is not quite true.
Just outside of Tucson, at the Picacho Peak Road exit, as the trucks rumbled by, from 213 am to 457am I slept periodically on the backseat of the rented PT Cruiser.
an invitation
Dear Art Predator,
It is my pleasure to invite you to participate in the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Symposium “Conceptual Poetry and Its Others” from May 29-31, 2008.
This symposium will explore the role of conceptual poetics in contemporary literature. I would hope that your work as both a poet and educator will be enhanced by the conversation among U.S., Canadian, Australian, and European experts in the field and I am certain that your expertise will further the conversation in new and unexpected ways. As is clear from your literary projects, your interests and insights are well-aligned with those of the Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Symposium.
We hope that you will be inspired to respond in writing to Conceptual Poetry and Its Others. If you are, we would be delighted to consider your response for our electronic newsletter and/or a website offering audio/visual elements and documents from the Symposium. All written responses must be received by Friday, June 6 for consideration.
You can learn more about Conceptual Poetry and Its Others on our website at www.poetrycenter.arizona.edu. Please note that our registration deadline is May 23, 2008. If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact me at (520)626-1185 or sjoberg@u.arizona.edu.
I sincerely hope that you will be able to join us.
Respectfully,
Frances Sjoberg
Literary Director
University of Arizona Poetry Center
May 29-31, 2008
now accepting registrations!
www.poetrycenter.arizona.edu
art predator 