Supposium @ MoMa

I'm trying to aim for brevity these days, so let's see if I can adapt. 

Yesterday at MoMa I attended the Supposium, an interactive "thought experiment," aimed toward moving "beyond default geometries of attention," which comprised "[Six Thought Experiments Beginning with 'Suppose']." That is the way the flyer announced the event and the way it unfolded. Before I describe it in greater detail, I want to thank Chris Stackhouse for forwarding the announcement to me, which allowed me to sign up and attend.

The Supposium announcement

The Supposium was a refreshingly simple but provocative and generative participatory event, of the kind I don't take part in enough, and that should be available to more people, more frequently. There were a sizable number of Bard College, MoMa people, and upstate New York art world people involved, but from what I could tell, there were also people who did not have as direct links to the principles, who included the author and critic Joan Retallack, and Adam Pendleton, very the talented young artist. 

The Supposium worked like this: Pendleton thanked folks and Retallack delivered her intro, which invoked among others John Cage, the first half involved 6 “thought experiments” based on the word and premise “suppose"—a video, by Sandi Hilal, architect and co-founder of DAAR-Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, based in the West Bank, on architectural forms and discourse in the refugee camps in Palestine; author Peter Krapp talking about simulation and the history of the “thought experiment” going back to Thales; Pendleton riffing on “suppose to choose," with detours through African American Vernacular English (AAVE); poet and critical polymath Fred Moten doing his dazzling thing, letting a long early 1950s piece by Miles play without saying anything, which made some people uncomfortable, before he provide a sideswerve of exegetical lyricism; and finally poet, critic and scholar Anne Carson presenting 73 conditional sentences (If x….,) based on a drawing of a seated figure. As they spoke/performed we were supposed to take notes in reporters' notebooks provided to us, and I did, and then after each finished we had 2 minutes to write down further thoughts, questions, etc.

We broke for 15 minutes of food and drinks. During this period I ran into a number of friends I hadn't seen in a while, as well as others I knew would be there. Then we resumed the project, and the entire room was reconfigured into a giant oval. From this we then broke down into smaller groups, mini-ovals, of varying sizes, to undertake instructions that were on the back page of a handout we all received. In my oval were poet Erica Kaufman, art historian Micah Pollack, two famous artists Lorraine O’Grady, whom I've written about enthusiastically before on this site, and Beverly Sims, Beverly’s husband Henry, and one of Pendelton’s friends, a former Bostonian named Karsten C. As a group I felt we interacted well and fluidly. One common thread for several of us involved having lived in Boston and its environs. I was one of the few who could say much positive about my time there, though it was also often quite difficult in multiple ways.

The instructions from Joan were based in part on Cagean procedure. We had to take six quotes from our notes, write them on notecards, read them to each other. Then we had to shuffle the cards so that we only had one of our cards. We ended up creating an “exquisite corpse” style piece (a cento, really). Each group performed them. Some sang; some presented multichannel-style readings; others spoke in unison; others chanted their words in sequence; one group recreated a “thought experiment” using words from the “thought experiment” presentations. I gather that the goal was for there to be more unscripted exchanges, for people to respond individually too, but perhaps there were too many of us and perhaps many people felt a bit shy. It was great nevertheless to hear all the ways people interpreted, processed and performed what they took from the presentations and the concept of “suppose.”

By then it was 6:30 pm, so everyone said goodbye but we passed in the cards and have until April 1 to return something more for a forthcoming book. I have some ideas that I plan to tinker with. In terms of the event overall I found it a wonderful way to spend a Sunday, a fascinating new mix of people to create something with, and really special for the time I had to chat with the members of my group, not least among them the amazing Lorraine O’Grady. I hope more such events are happening soon!

The room after the break

Joan Retallack, showing us how
to configure the groups

The oval, to the right of me 

The oval to the left of me

Lorraine and Karsten 

Erica and Lorraine

One of the groups (Anne Carson
and Fred Moten at left)

Rutgers-Newark Student Readings @ KGB Bar

KGB Bar, one of the East Village staples, where many a young writer, including yours truly, has read work in progress. In the 1990s the creative writing programs--or perhaps it was just students organizing them--at NYU and Columbia used to host a joint reading fiction series that brought together what always felt like somewhat contrasting styles: technical proficiency in the case of the Columbia writers, and wilder subject matter from the NYU wordsmiths. Very likely this was just my impression and others went away with different insights, but the gatherings were always a lot of fun, and somewhat bridged the divide between the two behemoth institutions. At other KGB readings I can recall faculty members from both schools also reading, one that I particularly recall involving Randall Kenan, then at Sarah Lawrence, though he has long since departed for more southern climes. 

But it had been a while since I hit KGB, so it was a pleasure to head there last night to catch three Rutgers-Newark affiliated student writers, nonfiction writer Iris Ortiz, poet Adam Bowser, and fiction writer Serena Lin, reading their work live, as part of a series Rutgers-Newark students have been running for the last few years. The bar was still so small as to make a tiny crowd feel like a packed stadium, but I found a spot, sipped a Guiness, and listened to all three writers. I should note that I currently am advising Adam and Serena, so I am quite familiar with their work, and I'd even seen Serena read during last year's student series in Newark, but it was a pleasure to hear all three of them, Iris reading from a personal memoir, Adam performing poems with a bit of local flavor and language, and Serena reading from a moving story about a character's struggles with and loss of her mother.

The warmth of the bar and the liveliness of the introductions (by a few more Rutgers-Newark students I've been lucky to work with) and readings made venturing out in the bitter New York cold a worthwhile proposition. It also made me think that I should check the bar's schedule to once again start catching more readings there if possible.

Iris Ortiz

Iris Ortiz 

Adam Bowser 

Serena Lin 

Serena Lin

Random Photos

As so often is the case, I have numerous blog entries half-begun but cannot find the time to complete them. Soon, soon.... In their place, photos. (I am not yet succumbing to the mostly textless lures of Tumblr, I tell myself). And I can muster a paragraph longer than 140 characters. I also will not blame the snow and cold, which are, I read recently, supposed to provoke action. (Cf. Max Weber.) Please click on the images to enlarge them (I think that still works, though Blogger, like every other site, changes its functionality, with little fanfare, explanation or guidance.)

Only in Manhattan: a trouserless man
relieving himself in front of the New
York Public Library (when I mentioned
this to one of the library guards, he
shrugged and waved me on)

The Woolworth Building, shrouded in fog 

In Chelsea Market, an arch of lights

One of the countless worksites in Manhattan
where a luxury tower will soon rise

Along 9th Avenue 

Near 6th Avenue and 19th Street,
yet another worksight (and lift)

Vincent Katz and Chris Stackhouse
at the launch party for the final issue
of the lit journal Vanitas, at Zinc Bar

My colleagues Jim Goodman and Rachel Hadas
at their Writers at Newark reading at
Rutgers-Newark

A young woman eating a large
bell pepper on the PATH (I'd
never seen anyone eat a bell pepper
like this in public--until her) 

The passageway connecting the PATH
World Trade Center site with
Brookfield Place and the North Cove Marina

Inside Brookfield Place's atrium 

World Financial Center ferry heading
to Jersey City (in the distance, left to
right are: Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island,
and the Goldman Sachs tower)

Looking southeastward, from
Brookfield Place's other atrium
(this was the old World
Financial Center, west of the WTC) 

More of the endless snow!

Birds on the light-rail wire, Jersey City 

The Freedom Tower, Frank Gehry's torqued
luxury tower, and the Brooklyn Bridge
from Dumbo (I never tire of this vista) 

Jared Friedman, at This Red Door

On 125th Street, in Harlem

Now gone: the old, reliable Gray's
Papaya (I grabbed a quick bite here
many a night during my penniless
days as an NYU grad student)

New Books: Poetry & Translation

A number of new books now grace my desk, so here is a little information on several that I have had a hand in. I'll begin with Rodney Gomez's Mouth Filled with Night, the second winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Chapbook Prize, a national honor given to an emerging poet of color, resulting in a beautiful chapbook published by Northwestern University Press. During my final year and a half at Northwestern, I served on the planning committee and as a judge for the inaugural prize, when a committee of poets and literary scholars awarded to Kristiana Rae Colón, for her striking, powerful book of poems, Promised Instruments.

Before I left, I again participated on jury that selected Rodney Gomez's vivid, moving poems for this year's prize. As the images below show, these are not just impressive first literary sallies, but beautiful books in themselves, and I highly recommend both, as well as eminent poet and Northwestern professor Ed Roberson's Closest Pronunciation, which was also published, as a volume by a senior poet, in conjunction with the contest. Since I left Northwestern I am no longer involved in the Drinking Gourd Poetry Chapbook contest, but I wish the winners my heartiest congratulations, and the prize itself, which introduces the work of writers who might otherwise see publication by such a distinguished press to a wide audience, the very best.

Rodney Gomez's Mouth Filled with Night (2014)

Kristiana Rae Colón's Promised Instruments (2012)

Ed Roberson's Closest Pronunciation (2012)

***

During the period that I was moving back to New Jersey, I began to become involved in helping to launch another wonderful, invaluable book publishing project, The African Poetry Book Series, one component of the African Poetry Book Fund, which the multitalented, prodigious and visionary poet and critic Kwame Dawes helms, at the University of Nebraska. Its mission, to quote the APBF website is as follows:

The African Poetry Book Fund promotes and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts through its book series, contests, workshops, and seminars and through its collaborations with publishers, festivals, booking agents, colleges, universities, conferences and all other entities that share an interest in the poetic arts of Africa. The Fund is committed to seeking the resources to support this mission and to ensure that all its efforts are carried out with excellence.

The Fund will, through the Series and other projects, promote the writing and publication of African poetry through an international complex of additional collaborations and partnerships. The Fund and its partners will offer support for seminars, workshops and other publishing opportunities for African poets.

The other APBF editorial board members include Chris Abani, Matthew Shenoda, Gabeba Baderoon, and Bernadine Evaristo. Distinguished figures from the worlds of literature, business and publishing fill the Advisory Board.

Among the first books the APBF will publish, two are now in print: the winner of the first Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, which is Kenyan poet Clifton Gachagua's wry, ever-fresh and compelling Madman at Kilifi, and the great, late Ghanaian poet, novelist, teacher and mentor Kofi Awoonor's The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964-2013, which was in process before his tragic death last fall at the Westgate Towers in Kenya, and which serves as a fine tribute to his extensive poetic gifts and legacy. Both books, published by the University of Nebraska Press, will officially reach bookstores on March 4, 2014, but you can put your orders in now and receive them as soon as they appear. More APBF books are on the horizon, so check the APBF site to see when they will appear.

Clifton Gachagua's Madman at Kilifi and
Kofi Awoonor's The Promise of Hope: New
and Selected Poems, 1964-2013

***

Finally, but not least, a year's work has now achieved fruition with the official release, as of today, of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst's 1991 masterpiece Letters from a Seducer, which I translated into English last year, working closely with Brazilian publisher A Bolha Editora and its editors, Rachel Gontijo Araújo and Stephanie Sauer (now no longer with the house), and US publisher Nightboat Books and its head, Stephen Motika, who have jointly released the volume pictured below. You can purchase a copy directly from University Presses of New England, who distribute Nightboat's books, or from one of the many online bookstores. Or you can check your local bookstore and if they don't have a copy in-store, urge them to order one or some. I will say only that this text of Hilst's isn't for the faint of heart, just as it wasn't in the original Portuguese, but if you looking for a book that truly charts a distinctive path in late 20th century literature, with a heady dose of trangressive sex, literary intertextuality, meta-critique of writing, and textual depth and music, as well as humor, that could give William S. Burroughs or Kathy Acker runs for their money, Hilst's Letters from a Seducer should be in your hands, pronto.

Hilda Hilst's Letters from a Seducer

A New Year, A New Semester

First week of class

The other day I was telling a colleague that I had only been at Rutgers-Newark since the fall of 2012, and he expressed surprise, because, he told me, it seemed to him that I'd been on the faculty for much longer. But it really has only been a year and a half, and I now enter my fourth full teaching semester, summers and the winter breaks not included, which is to say, my second year. Since arriving I have not taught the same course twice; I have taught undergraduate and graduate literature and creative writing courses; I have taught courses geared primarily towards English, African American and African Studies, and creative writing students; and I have taught courses that bridged these various disciplines. Each of these classes has included its share of challenges, some intellectual, some pedagogical, but all have turned out to be quite enjoyable, and one of the greatest benefits of each one has been the students I have had the good fortune to work with. Thus far I have not supervised or work with teaching assistant, and my smallest classes have totaled 12 students (graduate) and 15 or so (undergraduate), while my largest class, last spring, had 40 students (which was, nevertheless, a manageable number).

This spring my courses are Writers at Newark II and History and Myth in Contemporary African Diasporic Fiction. The former is a graduate course that entails reading, discussing and writing about the work of writers who will be visiting and reading in Rutgers-Newark's MFA annual literary series. This spring semester's visitors include two program colleagues, Rachel Hadas (poet, nonfiction writer and scholar) and Jim Goodman (historian and nonfiction writer), as well as Richard Blanco (the inaugural poet), Andew Solomon (the nonfiction writer), Natasha Trethewey (US Poet Laureate), Edward P. Jones (the Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer), Matthea Harvey (poet), and George Saunders (fiction writer). I have taught the work of several of these writers before, and appreciate the mix of genres, which mirrors the mix of interests the MFA students bring to the program. We just finished lively discussions of Rachel's The Golden Road: Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2012) and Jim's But Where Is the Lamb?: Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac (Schocken, 2013). Next we will be discussing Richard Blanco's Looking for the Gulf Motel (Pittsburgh, 2012) and Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (Scribner, 2013). Both writers will be on campus later this month, and I'm looking forward to meeting and hearing both of them.

My second course is a new version of an undergraduate English course I taught several times at Northwestern, though I have updated it with different texts, trimmed away a lot of what I realized was somewhat unwieldy theoretical material, and recalibrated it so that it better meets the needs of my current students. It officially falls under the rubric of Studies in African and Caribbean Literatures, and is crosslisted both in English and AAAS, though it is more than any thing a Comparative Literature class. Whereas in the past I would sometimes shoehorn as many as 10 books into a term's reading, along with a bookshelf's worth of background and theoretical articles (on the quarter system, no less!--what was I thinking?--my former students in that course and others all certainly deserved medals for endurance and fortitude), I have pared that number down to 7 novels, with a number of short stories mixed in. The writers we're reading include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Ana Maurine Lara, Alain Mabanckou, Zakes Mda, ZZ Packer, Ishmael Reed, Yvonne Denis Rosario, and Jean Wyllys, as well as one of my own brief stories, with short theoretical articles by Natalie Zemon Davis, Robin D. G. Kelley, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Colin Palmer. So far the course is going well, and several new students have signed in, so it should be an intellectually enriching experience for them (I hope) and me.

The Snowstorm (Thundarsnortex)

Cold I was expecting. For the last few days the weather forecasters were predicting temperatures in the mid-20s and lower for this upcoming week, the first of the new spring semester, so I have made sure to have longjohns, ski gloves and cap, a heavy wool scarf, and other Chicago-level weather essentials ready. Then, yesterday, I think C and I caught an evening news broadcast that announced a major storm would be blowing through, beginning in the afternoon. Major it is, but the thundersnow arrived in Jersey City this morning.  Snow has steadily fallen, horizontally, and by noon I received an email alerting me that after 3 pm all Rutgers campuses would close for the day.

The university is supposed to open tomorrow at 10 am. We'll see. If the still-falling snow and polar vortex conditions--thundarsnortex, I think Gothamist labeled it--continue, I may not teach my first class until Thursday. A snowplow has visited our street twice so far, a very good sign, but this afternoon I took the light rail, which was running without a hitch, to downtown, to make sure it was running in preparation for tomorrow, hit the post office, and get out and about. The main streets also appear to be ploughed but outside those, here downtown, some of the streets remain untouched. The snowfall is so thick that it's enfolding the tops of our local skyscrapers and lower a curtain such that you cannot even see a yard across the Hudson. Somehow, though, the seabirds, soaring in undulating lines across the water's shirring surface, know where they're heading.


The Hudson River, with its head of snow (Manhattan, usually visible, is straight ahead)
Exchange Place, looking toward the ferry terminal to Manhattan
The parking lot near Harsimus cove
 
Near Exchange Place
 
The light rail platform and tracks

Two Events in Chicago: New Translation & Red Rover Series Vulnerable Rumble Performance

UPDATED: See: corrected "Codes of Vulnerability."

January, to those in the literary studies and related fields, means the annual conference of the Modern Language Association (MLA). This year's gathering took place in Chicago, but instead of heading to give a paper, sit on a hiring committee or interview for a job, I headed to attend two off-site events, one focused on translation and organized by Patrick Durgin, a poet and publisher of Kenning Editions on January 10, the second an experimental reading that the Red Rover Series organized at the Outer Space Studios in Wicker Park on January 11. Given the bad run of weather in the Midwest and more than a decade of familiarity with sudden snowstorms and treacherously icy runways, I was concerned about whether I would even get there by the time of my evening event, and my concern was not misplaced, because the first leg of my connecting flight, from Newark to Philadelphia, was delayed by 1 1/2 hours, which meant that I had to run--literally, sprint, with my bad knees--to my departing gate, which in Philadelphia's airport requires transport via a winding, slow bus! I barely made the flight (by minutes), landed in Chicago, picked up my rental car, and then spent 2 1/2 hours in driving iced rain, in part because I hopped on the expressway and a fire on a CTA train (on which my cousin's husband was riding to his job at the airport!) necessitated a partial shutdown of the highway, which meant that after being stuck in gluelike traffic I had to divert via local roads to my hotel, gliding across sheets of ice, past mountains of snow (Chicago had gotten 9 inches in its last snowfalls) and amidst crazy driving....I arrived at my first scheduled event a bit out of harried, but thankfully, in one piece, and on time (7:30 pm).

The translation event, pithily titled New Translation, was held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Sharp Building on Friday. The translators included Nathanaël (speaking, with her usual cogency and grace, about translating Hervé Guibert from French), Anna Deeny (speaking about translating several different Hispanophone writers, including Alejandra Pizarnik and Raúl Zurita from Spanish), Daniel Borzutzky (speaking about translating Zurita and Gabriel Soto Román from Spanish), Urayoán Noel (speaking about translating Amanda Berenguer's "concrete poetry," which he defined in relation to the usual connotations of this term, from Spanish), Jonathan Stalling (speaking about several different authors from Chinese and his creation of a "phonotactic" structure to do so), Jennifer Scappettone (speaking about translating F. T. Marinetti's "aerofiction" and "aeropoetry" from Italian), Joshua Clover (speaking about translating--which he called the "last gasp of close reading"--Jean-Marie Gleize from French), and I. Translator Johannes Göransson was unable to attend. 

The event unfolded without a moderator; we were to time ourselves, reading a small amount of our translations and speaking about the process and anything else related to the topic, theoretic, critical, scholarly, or otherwise. With 8 translators, however, things went long, though everyone offered up insightful comments about their practice and the texts they were translating. Daniel Borzutzky in particular offered one of the most clarifying presentations, linking our presence in Chicago to the Chicago School of Economics, which used Chile, Raúl Zurita's and Daniel's native country, then under the control of a military dictatorship, as its testing ground, with sometimes disastrous, often problematic results (its Social Security program, its huge inequality gap several decades ago, etc.), and was now using turning those same neoliberal policies back on the US, in particular Chicago, under the tenure of "liberal" Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel. Another really interesting point he made, echoed by others, was how transgressive Zurita's writing about nature was, in light of the Pinochet dictatorship and its severe censorial constraints.

I ended up going last, and so restricted my comments to the minimum, instead reading a few sections of Hilst as well as a little of her Portuguese to convey the rhythmic and sonic challenges her work posed even for Lusophones reading it aloud. I also noted how she played with the idea contained in the word "oco" (hollow, hole) throughout, telling the reader that Stamatius, both through her use of words echoing this one ("coco," "trouco," "toco," "pouco"--all of which contain the sound of "oco," or "OH-koo") and by having one of the protagonists, Stamatius/Tiu, tell the readers he was going into his own "hollow," and then titling the final section of the novel "De outros ocos" ("Of Other Hollows"). I also answered a question about Hilst's use of a pornographic linguistic register and discourse, to which Nathanaël, who with Rachel Gontijo Araújo collaboratively translated Hilst's The Obscene Madame D, added important information. It was an excellent event, and afterwards most of us headed a few doors down for dinner and drinks, and multilingual conversation.

A snapshot of the panel (© Jennifer Scappettone)

Poet, critic and Cal Arts professor Christine Wertheim,
before the event began

The translators, from left: Urayoán Noel, Daniel Borzutzky,
Anna Deeny, looking down, Nathanaël, and assorted attendees
(Joshua Corey is wearing glasses)

More of the attendees (translator Steven Teref sits
next to Christine Wertheim at right)

Patrick Durgin, organizer

Joshua Clover, Jonathan Stalling, Urayoán Noel

***

The second event that brought me to Chicago was "The Vulnerable Rumble," a reading-performance organized by local poets and activists Jen Karmin and Laura Goldstein, along with Laura Mullen in from Louisiana, as part of their Red Rover Series. Established back in 2005 by Jennifer and Amina Cain, the Red Rover Series has insistently fostered innovative poetic practice and performance or, as the series subtitle states, "[readings that play with reading]." During my decade in Chicago I was fortunate to catch a number of their events and participate in several of them; we even partnered together on May 2011's "Poetry for Labor" event at Haymarket Square downtown. Saturday's gathering, held at the Outer Space Studio, the upstairs artist-run performance space in the Wicker Park neighborhood, was #71, and staged as a special event for (and in response to?) the MLA's theme of "Vulnerable Times," or, in MLA President Marianne Hirsch's words

Vulnerable Times addresses vulnerabilities of life, the planet, and our professional disciplines, in our own time and throughout history. Its aim is to illuminate acts of imagination and forms of solidarity and resistance that promote social change."

As always, Jen, Laura and Laura thought carefully and creatively about this theme, and devised an open, aleatory program that, as I told Carla Harryman (one of the liveliest and most daring participants, whom I'd read for years but never met until this event), felt akin to what one might have encountered decades (the 1960s-1980s) ago, before poetry readings turned into tidy, academic-friendly affairs. Or, as I thought to myself, somewhat like the vibrant performances that Thomas Sayers Ellis thought up from time to time for the Dark Room Writers Collective. 

Some two dozen-plus poets--Kazim Ali, Amaranth Borsuk, Amy Catanzano, B. K. Fischer, Chris Glomski, Alan Golding, Rob Halpern, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Douglas Kearney, Philip Metres, Laura Moriarty, Ladan Osman, Danielle Pafunda, Lily Robert-Foley, Kenyatta Rogers, Heta Rundren, Jennifer Scappettone, Evie Shockley, Jonathan Stalling, Divya Victor, Barrett Watten, Christine Wertheim, Keith Wilson, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Kate Zambreno, as well as Jen, Laura and Laura--were scheduled to perform. Whether all of us did I cannot say; the poets I know from the list above all did make appearances, but several of I know but never met I cannot say for sure read. At any rate, while Red Rover has more than once presented readings that break the usual form of reading, I could not remember one I'd attended--and none I'd ever participated in--that included so many poets and with such a free-form approach. 

Laura, Jennifer and Laura imaginatively theorized and wrote the event's aims and approach in their "a vulnerable manifesto," which they read from at the evening's start, pointing out "often an order that allows one voice at a time to be heard, or one voice, the automatic discomfort at interruption- the exposure of muted layers that slide up against brains not programmed with patience." And: "if i hold you off for a minute before i must succumb, will i experience the rare sensation of my voice as presence? it's all i can think of in this moment but maybe you will think of more. i think more can happen that we haven't thought of yet, i'm sure." More specifically, all of the participants received a list of nine loose guidelines, or "Codes of Vulnerability," which were also posted around the studio space. 

1. The curators announce the beginning and end of the performance.

2. Readers self-determine the order by choosing when to appear onstage.

3. The evening proceeds by readers interrupting each other to take turns onstage. 

4. Readers can choose to stand in silence, as a signal that they will soon begin.

5. If a reader does not wish to be interrupted, shake head or make a stop signal with hand.

6. Readers can halt or disable their own live readings. 

7. Duets and choral readings are divine, welcome co-readers by waving hands forward.

8. Readers can reappear and read more than once.

9. Strategies are encouraged to respect each reader’s time and space for the work to be heard. 

10. Failure is also encouraged.  See Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure,

“Work together. Revel in difference. Fight exploitation. Decode ideology. Invest in resistance.” 

Indication by raising the hand or shaking one's head. Duets and choral readings. Self-halting and disabling. Strategies to encourage reader time. Failure. What principles, and I say that without irony. Oh, if only more poets would internalize many of these! What became clear as the evening proceeded was that many of us did, and rather quickly; there were some who read briefly, some who leapt in and then out, some who paired up more than once but never too long, some who added a theatrical or performative element to change the reading dynamics, and a few who seemed to step right back into the usual holding-of-the-floor at length, as if any other approach would not do. But, as Jennifer said and underlined, even failure at these "codes" was acceptable, so anything went.

One other interesting and important element was the presence of a stool featuring the works of Amiri Baraka, who'd passed away only days before. In a note to participants, Jen Karmin called attention to Baraka's death, and several of us decided that, if we could, we'd honor him by reading his work. To facilitate this for everyone, Jen provided several Baraka texts, including Dutchman, which factored in several times later on, and, I think--though I could have this wrong--The Amiri Baraka Reader. I made a point of creating a .pdf featuring several Baraka poems, as well as my own, and determined that before I read anything I'd written, I'd bring him into the space with me, and for all of us.

There were many highlights, but the event launched with performances that set the tone for what might follow. First, Christine Wertheim, crouched in the front left corner of the room, took one of Jen Karmin's hands (I believe it was Jen's) and began a cry-wail that turned into a series of repeating lines, after which Lily Robert-Foley and Heta Rundren, emerging from their seats along the right wall's floor, rose and began an antiphonal song-chant that instantly shifted the tone and atmosphere. In an order I cannot recall, Kazim Ali moved into the front of the space, and shortly thereafter Doug Kearney glided through the packed crowd reading Amiri Baraka's "Ka'Ba." Someone from Robert Halpern's Music for Porn before Halpern did, reminding me of Halpern's reading last year at Poets House in NYC, and later Halpern himself read from the text himself--or did someone else also read from it? Yes: Lily Robert-Foley.

Amy Catanzano read a long, funny piece that riffed off net-speech. Jonathan Stalling sat and read/sang softly, intently in Chinese. Doug, Ronaldo V. Wilson and Amaranth Borsuk read in tandem, and Lyn Hejinian read twice with others: once with Barrett Watten, and once, towards the night's end, with Jennifer Scappettone, partially to the accompaniment of "Planet Rock" (I think), played by Ronaldo on his computer. Phil Metres, who was sitting beside me, read while on his hands and knees, and tore up and handed out pages from one of his books. I got one and erased some of the words, but I did not read them. His "The Blues of Charles Graner," exploring the horrors of the participants in Abu Ghraib, became:

The Blues

the Christian

knows

but the corrections

officer can't

help love

a grown man

piss him

Later on, B. K. Fischer (I think) read, as Jen Karmin and Evie Shockley pulled at opposite ends of the rope, and then Evie, the floor hers alone, read a powerful poem, playing artfully with repetition, recursion and subtraction. Ronaldo ended the evening wearing a black mask, a paisley scarf wrapped around his head, on his side, as Jen (and Laura G.?) intervened by removing chairs. It was over. We all applauded.

(I should also note that I finally met a poet I'd first heard about when I was 18 years old, from her son,  who was one of the first people I met in my freshman year of college: Lyn Hejinian. A very good friend, Dorothy Wang, who attended the event, had mentioned meeting up with Lyn Hejinian the day before, and said she would be reading at this event, which I almost could not believe--after all these years, after quoting her in my first book, after reading and following her work for decades, I would actually meet this extraordinary poet in the flesh! I finally did meet her, and she was as lovely and gracious as I imagined. So that was another highlight of the evening for me.)

At some point early on, Carla Harryman--celebrating her birthday!--rose and inspected a plastic pot featuring various implements (a jump rope, a cone hat, a kazoo with streamers), and then, with Baraka's Dutchman, interrupted someone reading. There was a chair (visible in the photos below), and when things slowed a bit, I rose, suppressing my anxiety about interrupting anyone and just inserting myself into the proceedings, and, with Baraka's "An Agony. As Now," one of my favorites of his early poems, she and and I went back and forth, she reading Lula's lines from Dutchman, and I channeling Baraka. We performed the exchange, which seemed fitting given the format and the texts. I even felt like Clay/Baraka declaiming! I decided to practice a bit of self-curtailment and near the end of the poem I stopped. Maybe I even uttered this. I think it just felt too strange simply to walk off, though that is what I did. Did someone else join Carla Harryman? Did she stop too? Did anyone raise her or his hand? Did anyone nod a head to bring others up? I want to think someone did. Interruption was less frequent than patience and politeness mixed with volition about taking the floor. It worked.

Later Christine began reading from Dutchman. I thought about another Baraka poem, "SOS." Or "Letter to E. Franklin Frazier," which cuts me to the bone, to read with her. Or the poem I worked on listening to others. Or one of the ones I'd purposefully brought. But I stayed in my seat because some inner mechanism said, you have had your turn, and let others have the floor. So I sat and listened and watched and wrote. But I was utterly in the moment. It was thrilling, in the true sense of that word, and wonderful--full of wonder--in the deep sense of that word too. Like: I wonder if people are also finding this as fun as I am. I wonder if mixed in with the fun is a kind of anxiety about what might come next. I wonder when the poets I know who haven't gone will get up and should I act in some way to ensure they get a chance? I wonder how people are responding to this resetting of power, and authority, and exchange? I wonder if the men will respect the codes? They (we) did, and I thought it a remarkable event. Afterwards others concurred, or that's what I thought I heard. I want to do it again. And in the break I heartily thank Jen, Laura and Laura, and all the other participants as well as everyone else present, in the audience, for making it such a marvelous experience. Because that's what it was. An experience, with the emphasis on the root of that word that links to experiment. As the Red Rover Series has succeeded in pulling off, for nearly ten years.

A few photos (I aimed the lens at the light sources so some of the photos are a bit dark.)

Jennifer Scappettone and Christine Wertheim

Kate Zambreno holding forth

Carla Harryman

Alan Golding

Barrett Watten and Lyn Hejinian
(with Evie Shockley, Danielle Pafunda
and Christine in back)

Amaranth Borsuk, Douglas Kearney
and Ronaldo Wilson

B. K. Fischer, Phil Metres (kneeling)
and Jen Karmin

Some of the performance

Ronaldo V. Wilson

Ronaldo, at the evening's
conclusion

The door to the wonderful