I’ve been re-reading Muriel Rukeyser’s
The Life of Poetry the last few nights. It’s not an easy book by any stretch, its density matched only by her elusive biography of
Willard Gibbs. But there are numerous passages of immediate moral if not linguistic clarity, the following of which struck me last night: “[I]f communication has broken down, then it is time to tap the roots of communication. Poetry is written from these depths; in great poetry you feel a source speaking to another source. And it is deep at these levels that the questions lie. They come up again and again during these years, when under all the surface shouting, there is silence about those things we need to hear.” Later, in a somewhat different context, she writes, “The gestures of the individuals are not history; but they are the images of history.”
Rukeyser’s insistent humanism reminds me of Hayden Carruth’s, but not as individualist as his, & though her prose can, as I said, be cumbersome, her position is clear. Against the dominant strains of violence, imperialism, & inequality, she defines poetry as the center of healing, peace, community, & learning, as a measure of progress. Whether or not she’s right in this assertion might be open to debate (I’m pretty sure she is, for what it’s worth) but she remains, in any case, an active & productive source of inspiration as we approach election-times & face a seemingly neverending war.
Last night I had the privilege to share a bill with Dan Beachy-Quick & Norman Finkelstein. We read at
Magers and Quinn here in Mpls. The turnout was enthusiastic & attentive, the poems plentiful. It was a delight to hear both Dan’s & Norman’s poems, though for different reasons: the former’s because his work is fairly new to me & his remarks & voice yielded insight into some remarkable poems; & the latter because he is my newest old friend & I always enjoy our time together, however brief or chaotic it might be. Thanks to everyone who made it out & also to those who made it over to our place on Saturday. Next time I’ll make sure I travel the day before the party. Special thanks to my beloved Kimberley, who held down the fort in the face of seemingly continuous adversity during my week away.
[Clockwise from left: the McKendrees; the Rock House; Kevin & me; neighboring farm & me]
I spent most of this past week in Franklin, TN. The purpose of the visit was to write & record music with my dear/old friend Kevin McKendree &, when possible, our friend Steve Mackey (not the guy from Pulp). The trip was a success on all fronts: the pleasure of seeing Laura McKendree was immeasurable; I met my new pal Yates McKendree; & playing music with Kevin (& Steve, though our time with him was precious little) proved to be as satisfying as ever. I also got to meet Kenneth Blevins, who is, as they say, true blue. If you’d like to hear some of the material we recorded during our first session (back in 1999), you can do so at
zachbarocas.com. New tracks might or might not be posted, depending on what we decide to do with them. In any event, as a token of my gratitude, I paraphrase Hollis Frampton: “[The McKendrees] and I live far apart now, and we seldom meet. But I cannot recall one moment spent in [their] company that I didn’t completely enjoy.”
On the left is a book called
Circles of Confusion: Film · Photography · Video: Texts 1968-1980 that was written by the man on the right who was (in his lifetime, from 1936 until 1984) & is called
Hollis Frampton. It is a book of essays, most of which were originally published in
Artforum magazine when it was edited by Annette Michelson, a film theorist & critic whose abundant & energetic wing fostered three generations of scholars & filmmakers, including & perhaps especially, Hollis Frampton.
Visual Studies Workshop Press in Rochester, NY, published the collection. The connection between VSW, Rochester, & Frampton is not as obscure as it might seem: Frampton taught at SUNY Buffalo in the 1970s, the campus of which is situated roughly 70 miles west of Rochester, home of Kodak, & therefore a center of film manufacturing.
Such connections are, rudimentarily speaking, the stuff of Frampton’s thought & work. He came to still photography via Ezra Pound & James Joyce; to filmmaking via still photography, painting, & a devotion to mathematics & science; to video & photocopiers via filmmaking & a return to still photography. His films run the gamut from his earliest efforts whose concern was primarily motion (e.g.
Manual of Arms, 1966) to found-footage films (e.g.
Maxwell’s Demon, 1968) to so-called
structural* works (e.g.
Lemon, 1969; in this case a full-frame shot of a lemon subjected to a range of light & exposure, about which Frampton said, “As a voluptuous lemon is devoured by the same light that reveals it, its image passes from the spatial rhetoric of illusion into the spatial grammar of the graphic arts.”) to the unfinished
Magellan, which was intended to expand to include a film for each day of a 371 day cycle.The spirit of inquiry, the sense of humor, & the feeling for the necessity of art infuse his writing as they do his films. These are curious works, works of a curious mind, works for curious minds.
_____________
*I’m not sure I agree with the entirety of this page’s explanation but it does serve to provide a definition of this kind of filmmaking. I prefer to view structural film, like film noir, as a style or method as opposed to a genre.
The
Cultural Society’s 5th Anniversary Update features reviews of Norman Finkelstein & Peter O’Leary by Jon Curley; poems from Dan Beachy-Quick, Norman Finkelstein, Graham Foust, Aaron McCollough, Robert Murphy, John Phillips, Nate Pritts, Sun Yung Shin, Sam Ward, & Tyrone Williams; prose from Michael Heller; photographs from Paul Biedrzycki, Cary Conover, & Carlyle V. Smith; picks from Graham Foust & Sam Ward. We’ve also got our first online chapbook, a PDF republication of Joseph Massey’s
Minima St.
The following is a short series of notes I made on 9/12/01:
*****
I.
Thousands of New Yorkers, mostly, I suspect, looking across a river or from uptown,were amazed yesterday morning to see the impervious Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burning. Within minutes, television, radio, & the internet were carrying the story, & millions of discrete viewers & listeners concurrently received the news. By late morning, first the southern & then the northern Tower had fallen.
Lower Manhattan looked, for all practical purposes, like 1969 on fire.
II.
We have made the mistake of enforcing our greed beyond its practical limits.
III.
The Towers had stood for three decades, a single, tandem, primary symbol of our rightness & might, the Castor & Pollux of our culture, a beacon of contemporary American capitalism. A living monument to our collective ambition, they were modern & clean, & above all else stood literally above all else. The Towers differed from New York’s other money-temples in that the latter were built as testaments to personal & private wealth & success. The Towers, on the other hand, were a testament to collective dominance & international, not individual, conceit.
(Assuming that the Towers are one pole of the spectrum & the Chrysler & Woolworth buildings the other, the middle ground is held by the Empire State Building. Erected during the Depression by a small group of private investors, it has always been something of an alcoholic uncle: tolerated, unable to realize its potential, loved, definitive. The Trump Tower is dismissed out of hand for its ugliness & air of desperation.)
IV.
The terrorist demolition of the Towers is both metaphor & actuality, message & carnage.
*****
The ensuing 5 years have done little to reshape my initial response to the Event. To have sat in a top-floor office on Grand St. which had, until 9/11/01, afforded a clear view of the Towers, & watched the Event occur from my desk, is an experience that has created a permanent rupture in quotidian perception: blue skies have not since been the same; I’m still in furious disbelief that we have entrusted a coterie of short-sighted, maniacal bullies to restore a sense of security & order. We have, in terms of policy, learned nothing from the Event, causally connected it to none of our international behavior of the last 90 years, & consequently made matters only worse at breakneck speed. None of which is news; all of which should be said as frequently as possible.
