John Keene & Christopher Stackhouse’s
Seismosis arrived today. It’s a wonderful-looking book with texts by Keene & drawings by Stackhouse. I don’t know the latter’s work but Keene’s
Annotations has been one my favorites lately.
For what it’s worth, the poems remind me of Annotations though Keene’s style has developed remarkably, assured & matured in both subject & delivery. Seismosis, is less of a personal history than Annotations, though no less thoughtful, reflective or considerate. Keene’s approach is to take his subjects as objects in hand, noting their materials, weights, surfaces, contours, & variations. The drawings pre-register these notations, providing a record & measure as a fortifying context for Keene’s meditations.
Stackhouse’s drawings are scribbles, mostly, likened here to the titular needle-jumps of a seismograph. Taken as the book’s point of entry, they’re a pleasurable, bodily foil to the shape of Keene’s texts (lines, grids, blocks). The opening & closing poems, for example, share the title, ‘Process’; both are printed on recto pages, faced by Stackhouse drawings of dissimilar stroke & light: the first concentrates its vigorous strokes over each other & in the center of the page; the latter keeps its strokes to a relative minimum, creating two forms on the left & right sides of the page.* Of the poems, the first reads, “In the mark event, you enter your signature.” The final poem, after much speculation on — among other things — spatial relations, human relations, & the relations between the drawings & texts of the book itself, acts as an aphoristic resolution of the first: “In the mark, we choose and lose signature.”
The distiction between the mark itself & the mark’s event is a crucial one for these collaborators, whose marks are contingent on the event of their collaboration; that is, the event (the book) of the marks (poems, drawings) amplifies the effects & meanings of the marks & transforms them into a single event, the way single notes form a chord. The resulting unity is no small feat. Most efforts at such union of illustration & text suffer the egos of their makers, an unwillingness to see their work subsumed into a greater project. For Keene & Stackhouse, on the other hand, it seems that Seismosis was occasioned by likemindedness, trust, & an abiding kindred sense between two artists.
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* The drawings, part of his Perpendicular Series, are not entirely scribbles. Stackhouse’s use of straightedge, in particular, generates effective armatures for the works, directing attention from the page margins to the structure of his forms: drawings XII, XXI, XXIX (my personal favorite & the most ‘perpendicular’ work in the book), L, & LI (described above in conjunction with the second ‘Process’), are examples of this practice.
If you’re not familiar with Kate Greenstreet’s first-book interviews, you should take a look over
here. The latest addition to the series is Kazim Ali regarding
The Far Mosque. I’m not familiar with his work but one remark in the interview particularly struck me. In response to the question of how his life has been different since his first book was published, he says he asked himself, “[H]ow do I generate the emptiness of spirit necessary for poems to find their way to beginning?” Though somewhat awkwardly phrased to my ear, I think he hit the nail right on the head. The last several weeks’ ‘free’ time have been consumed by Letterbox, music, editorial work, & general busy-ness, leaving little time for poem-writing. How to ‘generate the emptiness of spirit,’ indeed. Well-put.
Also: Ms. Greenstreet’s own first book,
Case Sensitive, is now available from Ahsahta Press.
My experience as an artist is more or less divided into two spheres: on the one hand, I’m a musician, a practice which has always involved public performance & the explicit realization of a community. On the other hand, I’m a poet, a practice which has been, until the last year or so, an almost entirely private practice, one I shared with a handful of people, whose publication was limited to a couple of poems published several years ago (including, as it happens, the same poem twice). By & large, the two spheres remain separate, though, decreasingly so. I have tried to model my life as a poet on what I learned in the Rochester, NY & DC punk scenes from roughly 1989-2000: that artists, regardless of their art, carry with them a responsibility to the world in which they create & exhibit their work (it is, after all, created & exhibited in the same world).
The Jim Saah photograph above is from a Jawbox show at the Black Cat in DC; I think the year was 1994 & it might have even been the show advertised in the poster next to it. I have kept a print of the photograph on my refrigerator since that time to remind me of several things, chief among which has become the best-integrated art/politics scene in which I have been an active member. It was the reason I moved back to the area in 1991, & found it to be an invigorating & inspiring time & place to be as both writer & musician (I had, when I left Rochester, decided to give up music entirely, in favor of literature; thankfully my mind was changed 9 months later when I joined Jawbox). There was a near-constant air of protest, of seeking out materials & economies that abandoned convention in favor of defiant humanism & concern for essentially leftist values. This took place mostly among bands & show-attendees, who were gathering anyway for music & new ideas. There were frequent benefit shows, protests, & a network of people around the world whose contact with each other depended on touring bands. The link was inherently political: we were doing our thing, not the mainstream thing. It worked, too.
By 1994, several of us (by which I mean bands) had signed to major labels, in hopes, variously, of reaching larger audiences, or at the very least, having more time & money with which to make records. I think Jawbox was more concerned with writing better songs than we were with fame. The jump to the majors allowed us to practice more, tour more, & record under better circumstances. The ramifications were obvious enough then as now: we were selling out. For my part — I can’t speak for J., Bill, or Kim — I’ve always thought of it as cashing in, though there wasn’t really much cash, & I’m not certain that the distinction even matters anymore. For what it’s worth, I didn’t feel like we were wrecking anything by signing to Atlantic; that is, the decision was ours, the consequences were ours, & it didn’t reflect on any other bands, labels, or fans. I was wrong. The scene from which we’d come felt, in some circles, betrayed, & the mainstream rarely has the patience required for unconventional art. We were ignored by our label within 9 months of our first release & completely pushed aside within a year. Our story is not at all unusual except perhaps for the degree to which we continued to practice a DIY-based method, regardless of being on a major label; that is, we knew what we were getting ourselves into (most of the time). I don’t know that this recounting requires much elaboration at this late date so I’ll just say that if I was in that situation today, I’d probably handle it differently, though this remark is qualified by knowing that the circumstances that made Jawbox possible at all no longer exist for me.
In the end, I can’t say I regret our deal with Atlantic. Kim & Bill even bought our tapes back from the label & are planning to re-release both For Your Own Special Sweetheart & Jawbox online. The fact remains that we made our most challenging music under those conditions, & my experience in that band has positively served my consciousness as much as anything else I’ve done, before or since.
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On a different note: Robert Archambeau has been generous enough to share with me a draft of a paper he’s been working on whose subject is, as he puts it, ‘What I have to Say About Aesthetics and Politics.’ Though I’ve yet to read through the whole thing, it entices & satisfies in its erudition (characteristic, I’ve come to learn, of its author). Thanks to R.A. for the opportunity to get a look at this work-in-progress.
Today is Kimberley’s & my third wedding anniversary.
The Twin Cites Book Festival is coming up soon. Click
here for the full scoop.
The Cultural Society will be there with our publications as well as a variety of books Kimberley & I sell at
Letterbox (click on ‘retail’ there to see a list of what we carry). Feel free to drop
me a line if you have any questions.
I’ve kept an intermittent eye on the Silliman-based School of Quietude v. Post-Avant bit & recently came across a terrific series of remarks on the subject by
K. Silem Mohammad (9/01/06), as well as
Robert Archambeau’s response to them. Whether or not a poem falls on one side of Silliman’s line or the other is less important than what poets believe to be the function of their art. Archambeau’s response is also related to a passage from Hollis Frampton’s
Circles of Confusion.
Hollis Frampton writes:
Typically all that survives intact of an era is the art form it invents for itself. Potsherds and garbage dumps are left from neolithic times, but the practice of painting continues unbroken from Lascaux to the present. We may surmise that music come to us from a more remote age, when the cables were first strung for the vertebrate nervous system.
Such inventions originally served the end of sheer survival. The nightingale sings to charm the ladies. Cave paintings presumably assisted the hunt; poems, Confucius tells us in the Analects, teach the names of animals and plants: survival for our species depends upon our having correct information at the right time.
As one era slowly dissolves into the next, some individuals metabolize the former means for physical survival into new means for psychic survival. These latter we call art. They promote the life of human consciousness by nourishing our affections, by reincarnating our perceptual substance, by affirming, imitating, reifying the process of consciousness.
What I am suggesting, to put it quite simply, is that no activity can become an art until its proper epoch has ended and it has dwindled, as an aid to gut survival, into total obsolescence. (Circles of Confusion, “For A Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” p. 112)
Robert Archambeau writes:
[O]nce art becomes something done for its own sake (not for the Church, not for the Noble Patron, not for the bourgeois market) (and of course much art continues to be made for all of those things) (but some isn’t) — once art becomes something done for it’s own sake, a lot of artists who love the freedoms of this autonomy become haunted by the idea of uselessness, irrelevance, etc. How to be both free and useful? Believe that freedom is a kind of radical political utility! Shazam! Problem solved. (from
Samizdat Blog, 09/10/06)
From this vantage, accepting/excepting R.A.’s sense of humor, the evolution of a given practice into an artistic practice is causally linked to the evolution of an aritistic practice into a political practice. I don’t think this evolution is true in every case but I think it provides a reasonable approach to the problem of utility in art & also that of what we, as artists, can do to effect political change.I think, too, of George Oppen’s ’silence,’ so described only from the side of poetry but not from the side of a life of politcal activity.
