I teach in several departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: Visual and Critical Studies; Art History, Theory and Criticism; and Liberal Arts. Formerly, I have taught in the MFA Writing Program at the school, the graduate theory seminar in the School of Art, University of Illinois at Chicago, and in English departments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and SUNY-Buffalo. I have been active as an editor and publisher in the small press literary scene of the United States since 1998. My interests include contemporary art, poetry, disability studies, philosophy and critical theory.
"Last Night" is my contribution to Tripwire's special issue on performance, and its tribute to th... more "Last Night" is my contribution to Tripwire's special issue on performance, and its tribute to the late Kevin Killian. It focuses on my journey from Chicago to San Francisco to attend Kevin's final poets theater performance, a rendition of "Box of Rain."
The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect (University of Michigan Press), 2019
This essay addresses lesser known collaborations involving Hannah Weiner in tandem to Deleuze and... more This essay addresses lesser known collaborations involving Hannah Weiner in tandem to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "transversality" and New Materialist inflections of Disability Studies "social model."
A short piece on Kenneth Goldsmith, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Adam Pendleton, discussing cultura... more A short piece on Kenneth Goldsmith, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Adam Pendleton, discussing cultural dissonance, neo-conceptualist poetics and artistic practices, racism, and appropriative compositional strategies. This piece was commissioned for "Conceptual writing (plural and global) and other cultural productions," a special section of Jacket2 edited by Divya Victor in 2015-2016. [http://jacket2.org/article/disaster-and-revival]
The work of Chinese-American writers Tan Lin and Pamela Lu is involved with at least three proble... more The work of Chinese-American writers Tan Lin and Pamela Lu is involved with at least three problems. The first is identity. The second is the novel, from the point of view of poetry. The third is facticity, that condition of truth that modulates what fiction can or ought to do. These problems coalesce in the motif of " ambience, " and ambient music in particular. I will survey some of the ways these problems are articulated and propose a way of thinking about ambience that amplifies the commonality of several works by these otherwise often very distinct literary stylists; ambience is not a style. Ambience is anything remaining available beneath a certain threshold of attention—a kind of lore whose superficiality is matched only by its ephemerality. It is not unreal, but it is really stupefying. Identity Pamela: A Novel, Lu's first book, described as " the last masterpiece of the twentieth century " (Wilson 9), uses experimental narrative techniques to question the relevance of avant-garde ideology to negotiate the more precarious facts of hyphenated identity. Pamela chronicles the artistic and amorous quasi-liaisons of a group of ethnically marked and/or queer student-artists, writers and philosophers in their formative years, mainly their hilariously confounded conversations—not much actually happens in the book. Proper names are jettisoned and replaced by pronominal initials (L, R, P), most significantly "I." As " I " lapses gradually into a putative " we, " what was at first a question of belonging is polished monument to myopia. In the first published review of the book, poet and novelist Aaron Kunin describes beholding this monument as a "mystical experience." Her second novel is possibly the first masterpiece of the 21 st century; Ambient Parking Lot is written from the point of view of a " we, " a band of musicians/field-recordists whose self-image is crowd-sourced to the fickle singularities of personal taste, reluctant mentors, and mutinous collaborators. Here the group is a musical collective negotiating the stipulative confines of cutting-edge pop sub-culture, enamored with received notions and rote tokens of infamy, sold on the idea of never selling out. Both novels temper the wry detachment and monumentality of avant-garde ambition by using liminal subject positions as an engine, taking risks formally where substantiation is elusive. Lu has even described herself as a sort of neo-avant-garde everyman:
Curatorial Rationale by Patrick Durgin and Devin King, published for the second annual Festival o... more Curatorial Rationale by Patrick Durgin and Devin King, published for the second annual Festival of Poets Theater by Links Hall, Chicago.
A brief roving through class and creative writing. I abandoned these memoirs, but this excerpt wa... more A brief roving through class and creative writing. I abandoned these memoirs, but this excerpt was published in the 7th issue of P-QUEUE in 2010. See http://www.p-queue.org/
This text was written on the occasion of the new edition of Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah We... more This text was written on the occasion of the new edition of Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah Weiner, published by Bat in September 2014.
Poetry of the aughts, conceptual writing and autobiography, ecopoetics, reification. This paper i... more Poetry of the aughts, conceptual writing and autobiography, ecopoetics, reification. This paper is best viewed online. See the URL above, or http://jacket2.org/article/new-life-writing
This paper is about the 1969 "Street Works" of Scott Burton and Hannah Weiner, and it speculates ... more This paper is about the 1969 "Street Works" of Scott Burton and Hannah Weiner, and it speculates as to the relationship between their intermedial format--as a form of poets theater that anticipates the demands of contemporary new media--and the social practice latent in early conceptual writing. I call "milieu logic" a "prosody of social expectation," or, to quote Dick Higgins, a way to "mean" a "social situation."
This paper reads Jackson Mac Low’s work of the 1970s as a hinge between the intermedia and early ... more This paper reads Jackson Mac Low’s work of the 1970s as a hinge between the intermedia and early procedural practices for which he is best known and the work of the 1980s, where a self-consciously literary practice resonates with the ideo-linguistic experiments of Language Writing. Beginning with a hypothetical list of the common hallmarks of literariness from a Mac Lowian point of view, the article then reads the "Odes for Iris Lezak" and "Phone" comparatively. This reading is situated beside a debate between Mac Low and Silliman in the pages of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in order to illustrate the decade as pivotal with respect to the aesthetico-political predicates of literariness.
A talk prepared for the "Poetics of Presence" panel, Association for the Study of the Arts of the... more A talk prepared for the "Poetics of Presence" panel, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Conference, Knoxville, TN, 2009--using Gilles Deleuze's concept of "the encounter" as a theory of influence bordering on "imitation," as a way to read Robert Duncan's derivation of work from Gertrude Stein.
This paper is concerned with William Carlos Williams as a mediating force between Kenneth Burke a... more This paper is concerned with William Carlos Williams as a mediating force between Kenneth Burke and Louis Zukofsky in terms of the juncture of their poetics. Hence, I am using the figure of “company” as Robert Creeley did, which Bruce Jackson summarizes as “whom one is thinking in terms of.” So by “poetics” I mean the terms of one’s thinking and the intended or effected cleavages between such terms. Company is the privileged cleavage—or figure of betweeness—because it is more than just a figure. It is a mode, a way of making correspondences and meaning, and a specific kind of intentionality. By elaborating a way in which Williams' sense of contemporaneity, simultaneity, and intentionality articulate questions of critical agency and poetic form that emerge in his "company," I hope to illuminate the place of musicality in validating such questions. My approach is comparative and spurred by the tendentious correspondence between Burke and Zukofsky, regarding the formal “noise” of the latter’s long poem “A.” The middle-man, Williams quite literally conducted this correspondence by forwarding Burke’s response to the 9th “movement” of “A” to Zukofsky.
Only myth satisfies completely; heart, reason, taste for detail and wholeness, taste for the fals... more Only myth satisfies completely; heart, reason, taste for detail and wholeness, taste for the false and the true, since myth is all that at once. —Aimé Césaire, " Poetry and Knowledge " There are many conceptualisms, but no doubt what they have in common is a concept called the concept. Since concepts are made things, there is a poetics of any given conceptualism, each to its own. I want to make a particular beginning with a poetics for Afro‐Conceptualism by panning back to two precursors and an unlikely pairing of very specific practices that have in a common a sort of dreamwork. Dreams incubate concepts by describing them in narrative form. Take Césaire's definition of myth. Its rendering of totality is a foil for any master narrative; myth is conveyed as a story. Myth is the spawn of what cultural critics call social‐constructivism. It asserts a way of life. Add also that life of the mind that is self‐sufficient. By any other name, even proceduralism, dematerialization or non‐retinal art, you have what passes for conceptualism. Conceptual art and conceptual writing flagrantly perform social‐ constructivism, and that is their politics. We dream these things up. We are these things. Only we are self‐satisfied. But not independent of the beings we posit in the dreamwork we do.
"Last Night" is my contribution to Tripwire's special issue on performance, and its tribute to th... more "Last Night" is my contribution to Tripwire's special issue on performance, and its tribute to the late Kevin Killian. It focuses on my journey from Chicago to San Francisco to attend Kevin's final poets theater performance, a rendition of "Box of Rain."
The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect (University of Michigan Press), 2019
This essay addresses lesser known collaborations involving Hannah Weiner in tandem to Deleuze and... more This essay addresses lesser known collaborations involving Hannah Weiner in tandem to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "transversality" and New Materialist inflections of Disability Studies "social model."
A short piece on Kenneth Goldsmith, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Adam Pendleton, discussing cultura... more A short piece on Kenneth Goldsmith, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Adam Pendleton, discussing cultural dissonance, neo-conceptualist poetics and artistic practices, racism, and appropriative compositional strategies. This piece was commissioned for "Conceptual writing (plural and global) and other cultural productions," a special section of Jacket2 edited by Divya Victor in 2015-2016. [http://jacket2.org/article/disaster-and-revival]
The work of Chinese-American writers Tan Lin and Pamela Lu is involved with at least three proble... more The work of Chinese-American writers Tan Lin and Pamela Lu is involved with at least three problems. The first is identity. The second is the novel, from the point of view of poetry. The third is facticity, that condition of truth that modulates what fiction can or ought to do. These problems coalesce in the motif of " ambience, " and ambient music in particular. I will survey some of the ways these problems are articulated and propose a way of thinking about ambience that amplifies the commonality of several works by these otherwise often very distinct literary stylists; ambience is not a style. Ambience is anything remaining available beneath a certain threshold of attention—a kind of lore whose superficiality is matched only by its ephemerality. It is not unreal, but it is really stupefying. Identity Pamela: A Novel, Lu's first book, described as " the last masterpiece of the twentieth century " (Wilson 9), uses experimental narrative techniques to question the relevance of avant-garde ideology to negotiate the more precarious facts of hyphenated identity. Pamela chronicles the artistic and amorous quasi-liaisons of a group of ethnically marked and/or queer student-artists, writers and philosophers in their formative years, mainly their hilariously confounded conversations—not much actually happens in the book. Proper names are jettisoned and replaced by pronominal initials (L, R, P), most significantly "I." As " I " lapses gradually into a putative " we, " what was at first a question of belonging is polished monument to myopia. In the first published review of the book, poet and novelist Aaron Kunin describes beholding this monument as a "mystical experience." Her second novel is possibly the first masterpiece of the 21 st century; Ambient Parking Lot is written from the point of view of a " we, " a band of musicians/field-recordists whose self-image is crowd-sourced to the fickle singularities of personal taste, reluctant mentors, and mutinous collaborators. Here the group is a musical collective negotiating the stipulative confines of cutting-edge pop sub-culture, enamored with received notions and rote tokens of infamy, sold on the idea of never selling out. Both novels temper the wry detachment and monumentality of avant-garde ambition by using liminal subject positions as an engine, taking risks formally where substantiation is elusive. Lu has even described herself as a sort of neo-avant-garde everyman:
Curatorial Rationale by Patrick Durgin and Devin King, published for the second annual Festival o... more Curatorial Rationale by Patrick Durgin and Devin King, published for the second annual Festival of Poets Theater by Links Hall, Chicago.
A brief roving through class and creative writing. I abandoned these memoirs, but this excerpt wa... more A brief roving through class and creative writing. I abandoned these memoirs, but this excerpt was published in the 7th issue of P-QUEUE in 2010. See http://www.p-queue.org/
This text was written on the occasion of the new edition of Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah We... more This text was written on the occasion of the new edition of Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah Weiner, published by Bat in September 2014.
Poetry of the aughts, conceptual writing and autobiography, ecopoetics, reification. This paper i... more Poetry of the aughts, conceptual writing and autobiography, ecopoetics, reification. This paper is best viewed online. See the URL above, or http://jacket2.org/article/new-life-writing
This paper is about the 1969 "Street Works" of Scott Burton and Hannah Weiner, and it speculates ... more This paper is about the 1969 "Street Works" of Scott Burton and Hannah Weiner, and it speculates as to the relationship between their intermedial format--as a form of poets theater that anticipates the demands of contemporary new media--and the social practice latent in early conceptual writing. I call "milieu logic" a "prosody of social expectation," or, to quote Dick Higgins, a way to "mean" a "social situation."
This paper reads Jackson Mac Low’s work of the 1970s as a hinge between the intermedia and early ... more This paper reads Jackson Mac Low’s work of the 1970s as a hinge between the intermedia and early procedural practices for which he is best known and the work of the 1980s, where a self-consciously literary practice resonates with the ideo-linguistic experiments of Language Writing. Beginning with a hypothetical list of the common hallmarks of literariness from a Mac Lowian point of view, the article then reads the "Odes for Iris Lezak" and "Phone" comparatively. This reading is situated beside a debate between Mac Low and Silliman in the pages of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in order to illustrate the decade as pivotal with respect to the aesthetico-political predicates of literariness.
A talk prepared for the "Poetics of Presence" panel, Association for the Study of the Arts of the... more A talk prepared for the "Poetics of Presence" panel, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Conference, Knoxville, TN, 2009--using Gilles Deleuze's concept of "the encounter" as a theory of influence bordering on "imitation," as a way to read Robert Duncan's derivation of work from Gertrude Stein.
This paper is concerned with William Carlos Williams as a mediating force between Kenneth Burke a... more This paper is concerned with William Carlos Williams as a mediating force between Kenneth Burke and Louis Zukofsky in terms of the juncture of their poetics. Hence, I am using the figure of “company” as Robert Creeley did, which Bruce Jackson summarizes as “whom one is thinking in terms of.” So by “poetics” I mean the terms of one’s thinking and the intended or effected cleavages between such terms. Company is the privileged cleavage—or figure of betweeness—because it is more than just a figure. It is a mode, a way of making correspondences and meaning, and a specific kind of intentionality. By elaborating a way in which Williams' sense of contemporaneity, simultaneity, and intentionality articulate questions of critical agency and poetic form that emerge in his "company," I hope to illuminate the place of musicality in validating such questions. My approach is comparative and spurred by the tendentious correspondence between Burke and Zukofsky, regarding the formal “noise” of the latter’s long poem “A.” The middle-man, Williams quite literally conducted this correspondence by forwarding Burke’s response to the 9th “movement” of “A” to Zukofsky.
Only myth satisfies completely; heart, reason, taste for detail and wholeness, taste for the fals... more Only myth satisfies completely; heart, reason, taste for detail and wholeness, taste for the false and the true, since myth is all that at once. —Aimé Césaire, " Poetry and Knowledge " There are many conceptualisms, but no doubt what they have in common is a concept called the concept. Since concepts are made things, there is a poetics of any given conceptualism, each to its own. I want to make a particular beginning with a poetics for Afro‐Conceptualism by panning back to two precursors and an unlikely pairing of very specific practices that have in a common a sort of dreamwork. Dreams incubate concepts by describing them in narrative form. Take Césaire's definition of myth. Its rendering of totality is a foil for any master narrative; myth is conveyed as a story. Myth is the spawn of what cultural critics call social‐constructivism. It asserts a way of life. Add also that life of the mind that is self‐sufficient. By any other name, even proceduralism, dematerialization or non‐retinal art, you have what passes for conceptualism. Conceptual art and conceptual writing flagrantly perform social‐ constructivism, and that is their politics. We dream these things up. We are these things. Only we are self‐satisfied. But not independent of the beings we posit in the dreamwork we do.
Paper for a seminar I convened for the "Poetics (The Next) 25 Years" conference: poeticsthenext25... more Paper for a seminar I convened for the "Poetics (The Next) 25 Years" conference: poeticsthenext25years.wordpress.com/. On one hand, arguing that relative to conceptual writing, American experimental poetries are not in a phase analogous to the art history's post-conceptual phase but rather to that of post-minimalism. On the other hand, introducing the themes of the seminar as follows: Text in/as visual art that disregards distinctions: looking /reading, image / literature, subject / object, concept / percept. If the object-orientation of contemporary culture brackets linguistic material, we haven’t superseded the mediation of text. If “conceptual writing” or “post-internet poetry” leverages the social materials it appropriates, it is also embarrassed by them. With a variety of design platforms for writing and reading comes a new call upon the critical values of existing disciplines. And since writing is now a predominant studio activity for visual, performance and other non-literary artists, even studio objects that contain little or no text can be seen as in some way written.
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