Mappemunde

Intro for Charles Alexander (Zinc Bar)

(my intro for Charles from his terrific reading in February at Zinc Bar, with Tracie Morris)

Charles Alexander is the founder and director of Chax Press, in Tucson. His books include Hopeful Buildings (Chax 1990), Arc of Light / Dark Matter (Segue 1992), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse 2004), and Certain Slants (Junction 2007), which includes 30 sections of the ongoing work Pushing Water, which is expected to be published in its entirety in 2011. He is currently at work on a book about the pleasures of poetry. Chax Press has published some 120 books over the last two and a half decades.

In a new book of essays about the pleasures of poetry, Charles Alexander is making some long-awaited comments about the relationship between sound and the body that have guided his innovative and original work. At the center of these ideas is the deceptively simple argument that “speech is a physical pleasure,” yet the more closely we look at this claim the more interesting and unusual it becomes. He places emphasis on it as an annex to Zukofsky’s “sight, sound, and intellection,” fleshing out the ghostly materiality of words with that of the body’s connection to them. Whereas Charles Kraitsir in Glossology argued that there was a connection between a phoneme and its meaning, as well as the meaning of the word in which it appeared, Alexander claims that an important meaning of language lies in its tactile quality, its sounds. These sounds call up a kind of motor memory of pleasurable actions for us; they contain the possibility of a kind of deferred or implied body which is recreated, recovered, or reenacted in the process of reading. Poetry is pleasurable for us and it moves us because that basic experience of sounding syllables reminds us of other such experiences that we’ve had, and that we’ve given to others, with our mouths. Writing, reading, and sounding bring together this motor memory of sounds whether the words make sense or nonsense, whether they are a solid or a flowing liquid, whether they are translated from the Greek, greek to us, or simply greeked on the page. Please welcome one of my favorite poets and people, Charles Alexander.

Zinc Bar 4/22: Philippe Beck, Serge Gavronsky & Michael Heller

Zinc Bar Reading Series:
Philippe Beck, Serge Gavronsky & Michael Heller

Friday, April 22
at 5:30 PM

at Zinc Bar
82 W 3rd St
NYC

Philippe Beck, Ph.D, is a contemporary French poet, writer, and philosopher. In 1994, Mr. Beck received his Doctor of Philosophy at l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences socials in Paris under the direction of Jacques Derrida. Along with 14 published books of poetry, Beck has produced an intellectual biography titled Beck l'impersonnage (Beck the Impersonality, 2006) and a book of prose with the pithy title A Journal (Un Journal, 2008). To date, only two of Philippe Beck's books have been translated into English: Crude Marivaux: Critical Texts (Textes critiques, 1999) and Vault of the Dissolvable Novel (Chambre à roman fusible, 2002). Beck has received widespread recognition as a poet, philosopher, and writer in France and in literary communities throughout the world. Many of his poetic works have been translated into German, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Flemish, and Galacian.

Serge Gavronsky was born in Paris in 1932 and fled Hitler in 1941. He is Professor of French at Barnard College. A renowned author and translator, Gavronsky has published many books, including Lectures et compte-rendu (1973), Je le suis (1995) and many others. Amongst his translations are French renderings of Louis Zukofsky's A (1994, 2001) and of Joyce Mansour's Essential Poems and Writings (2008).

Michael Heller has published twenty volumes of poetry, essays and memoir. His most recent books are Eschaton (2009), a book of poems, and Beckmann Variations & Other Poems, a work in prose and poetry (2010). His collection of essays on George Oppen, Speaking the Estranged, was published in 2008. Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics,appeared in 2006. Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2003. His memoir, Living Root, was published by the State University of New York Press in the Fall of 2000. Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study, a collection of fiction, was published in 2009. His libretto for the opera, "Constellations of Waking," based on the life of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, has been set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His critical study, Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry, was published by Southern Illinois University Press. For many years, he was on the faculty of New York University and has taught at The Naropa University, The New School, San Francisco State, Notre Dame and other universities.

Like the very Gods in my sight is he who
sits where he can look in your CV, who marvels
at your gigantic list of reviews, its sweetness
        murmur at the buzz your career

accumulates, all for him. Hey, just noticed
it's National Poetry Month underneath my breast.
Let me only glance where you are, the voice dies
        I can say nothing.

Here are some photos of my peeps, stricken
underneath my skin the tenuous flame
my ears are muted and nothing shows
        we plug in thunderous content

in contrast to the dominant fever trend
but also complementary to it caveat, in case
my future tenure-track MFA boss reads this, I feel
        that death has come near me.

Tech Support Poetry

This new movement in poetics involves all embodied activities that occur while waiting for someone's flash file, mov file, or other multimedia presentation to load. A truly democratic form, Tech Support Poetry can be experienced and performed by anyone who is under pressure to make malfunctioning technology work given a tight deadline. Inhabiting momentarily the space of delay between the act of pressing a button and the experience of having something happen that is supposed to happen, the Tech Support Poet inhabits a radically anticipatory position among contemporary writers.

Critical of liberal humanist assumptions about technology such as the demand that we should always get what we want as quickly and conveniently as we want it, Tech Support Poetry valorizes witholding over delivering, loading over executing, waiting over reaching one's destination, anticipating a performance over actually performing. Possible manifestations include increased heart rate as technology refuses to cooperate, pacing back and forth, profuse sweating, extreme devaluing of the self, and a general feeling of pointlessness and ennui. Tech Support Poetry has read John Cage's Silence and has run laps around its claims to awareness and meditative enlightenment through meaninglessness. Tech Support Poetry is Kafka meets Godot meets Office Space meets Junkspace meets Igor in Frankenstein's laboratory meets Harold Bloom's weak poet meets every pop singer who needs to use pitch correction software meets Lewis Hine meets Sasquatch.

The in-between time conjured by Tech Support Poetry denigrates author-functions and reader-functions alike, acknowledging in the meantime that our state is not unlike that of fleshy automatons moving other people's content around until such time as a more equitable relationship between technology-related labor and our collective awareness of bodies can be achieved. Tech Support Poetry produces no poems, no authors, no readers, and especially no criticism or manifestos. Join us in this exciting new poetics.

As an additional caveat, Tech Support Poetry gives double tagbacks times infinity in advance to note that anyone who is not not writing non-poems that are not Tech Support Poetry is completely irrelevant and should be poo-pooed by everyone not writing non-poems which fall under the category of Tech Support Poetry.