The Tolerance Project

The Tolerance Project essay now on J2

2011-08-22T17:19:00.002-04:00

The Tolerance Project: Projection of the Intimate into the Historical is now up on Jacket2. Enjoy!

done!

2011-05-18T16:56:00.003-04:00

The Tolerance Project: A Collaborative MFA in Creative Writing has reached its terminus. We made it! And with a perfect 4.0 GPA...How surprising is that? (Not so much when an A- is considered a "bad" grade, but we're done with the polemics, aren't we.)

The Tolerance Project Archive will be available for the duration as a resource for future MFA poems that are hopefully better than ours.

Stay tuned for The Tolerance Project: A Commemorative Edition to be published this fall by No press.

And we may also post a behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Tolerance Project, with a lofty title something like "The Tolerance Project: The Projection of the Intimate Into the Historical."

Infinite thanks to all collaborators with, supporters of, and snipers at this project.

Yours, as always, for the duration,
Rachel Zolf
The Tolerance Project Coordinator

Guest poem – Sponosored by Mark Bibbins

2010-12-01T00:22:00.009-05:00

[Our beloved MFA teacher/sage Mark Bibbins has graced The Tolerance Project with an astonishing poem of his own, lovingly culled from sponsored search results in The Tolerance Project Archive]

Sponosored

Authentic eel wallets, did you mean ee

Everyone wants to get the best value for maternal

Explicit explicit hard to find Harrowing

Millions of products from thousands of Sneaking: Cheap

Stay ahead of discovery buy rachel $10 off your first Coach compliance order

Relax. Take a deep breath. We have the 10+ infant mortality

Martyr ad blowout Save on hotels in Palestine, TX

Find Language & Download your favorite Chatea con Latinos y Latinas en tu Ciudad

All Pain, Infertility, Aging, Stress, Nutrition & Beauty master 100% Gratis

Neighbour Neighbour Get What You’re Looking For / Go on a Blind Date now.

Poem 40 – American Picture

2010-11-08T15:20:00.023-05:00

[One final collaboration. Ralph Kolewe asked The Tolerance Project to respond to the photo, "This isn't Whitman's country anymore" (see photo below) for his InfluencySalon.ca section, Frames. We collectively obliged, although various sources seem to attribute this poem to one of the following authors:

(A) Kevin Killian
(B) Dorothy Trujillo Lusk
(C) An unknown member of the Hobi [sic] Native American Tribe]

American Picture

Some words are tasteless

The dog accepts no treats from “Obama”

There’s no 13th floor because their God is a prolongation of ego

Founder of the little-known group known as “The Family”

Only turned up as “solid” in the denial column

What are you saying, Bob?

You are breeding from the lower side of the curve

Something American, Canadian, or viscous

How would you like to have a magic mirror?

Joan Retallack begins with geometries of attention

The class of mediocres has the right to an epaulette of red wool

I am the swift uplifting rush that happens once duration enters

The turtles speak to my bele chose

In order to distinguish the pictorial object from a readymade

Each participant reads their Behavioral Self-Portrait aloud

This is not to say that people with accents are haters, of course

SOME PARTS HAVE BEEN LEFT OUT, AS YOU SEE (pointing)

My body is on the chair. I don’t shave my legs. 1 is already a stand-in for 0

This is a real-time engagement with form

I will never stop praising my Lord for this prosthetic

You’re branded by the objects you love

Everyone has one special sensation

A Neighbor is the one who by definition smells

Kyle, you have to keep making your macaroni pictures

Poem 39 – A tongue listens to a war

2010-11-06T17:58:00.031-04:00

[The Tolerance Project was asked to submit to another anthology, this one based on Sean Labrador y Manzano's McSweeney's column "Conversations at a Wartime Cafe", with the subtitle: a Decade of War. Sean's questions to contributors were: "How has the first decade of war [in the new millennium] shaped your social fabric? How has the anticipation of the next 10 years of war, a forever war, shaped your outlook?" The Tolerance Project contributors came up with the following response.]

A tongue listens to a war

Driven out of Lebanon warm air opens the lines
Slow moving vowels grip glottal, we pucker
Hiss of splayed gullets marks the gaps
Their right legs slightly forward and left feet turned out

The future blended American would be less intelligent
By definition shall be internalized by targeted anathema
They all run and play together, his eager body quivers
In coy reprisal, discursive suicide fits the niche

This polymer web of four-time relationships
With whom we cannot be reconciled in lamblike game
Scribling and Lying spread Faculties of Profit and Credit
A fantasy of tea & truth and there there below

These anarchists split a magnet for the Ignorance Frame
With the Assistance of a Friend in the Peak
A roving Fancy Burlesques that Sacred Rite
Porn for the whole soul goes to Issah as peace

Let me cruise the blue flame of you or shatter
Velvet curtain of culture deadly teevee scree  
Decorative laminates, moral recovery, picnic ware,
Just this side of heaven is a hole called Rainbow Bridge

Sean cannot rely on symbolic layers of hum
Guaranteeing that Christian will get the aphorism
Bright touch blood your earth language affect
Get ready for permanent enlargement of your dearest part

Poem 38 – "Child soldier"

2010-11-01T23:15:00.022-04:00

[The Tolerance Project was asked to contribute a poem to a forthcoming anthology in response to Canadian "child soldier" Omar Khadr having been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for 8 years, since he was 15. Information on the anthology is here: omarkhadranthology.wordpress.com]

"Child soldier"
(for Omar Khadr)

A child has an imposition from which he can redeem himself with six points

Planets move so that soldiers sketch with chalk over the singe

Women feel burning and pricking of heat inside

Tracing their hands or pictures of ships where paws and bellies hung

But sand has a terrible secret

I think plain, clear language could make it stronger

“Very good, only they breathe”

In the background is a piece of classical architecture

He holds a small camouflaged pillow in his left hand

I forgive your ancestor’s beautiful thoughts

Statues representing dancing figures

What the Boardroom shoves through the porthole to sea

With this little soldier doomed grow monster

Tribunal earrings shown full face and aligned in depth

While writing this, I am bloody as well as greasy

Hot about the mouth of the womb

If the vest of childhood the thread of peace

Sometimes the colour of humid ashes

Outside the veins and in the hollowness

Small black bodies mingled with milk

If unable to deliver antibiotic borders

Inside and aching, pricking and hardness

And if such humours turn into cold wind

And they fly up to the heart and lungs

Poem 37 – Satisfactions are gaps in desire [Response to Exchange Value #3 by Kai Fierle-Hedrick]

2010-10-03T14:31:00.022-04:00

Satisfactions are gaps in desire
(for what's left)

Pass the object around and share its story
A placebo made of velvet, filled with sawdust and spores
A cluster of fruit flies in the heat of my chest
I trusted you with the bases pointing inward

Has the heart of shame grinned?
This is a portrait of a pale straight list if I say so
Two past lovers and a boss
Where I used to scratch to go out or in

Tough, hard and rigid produced in high-gloss colours
We do most of our thinking with our vocal cords
The composition must react to the edges
I didn’t mean to say anything about “docile”

Create a gap between the two parts of the logo
The solvent of the native gum and then the epiphany
When machines shift context the needless detail emerges
I never felt stupid before I took this test

Utilize proprioceptive surplus against the firm numb organ
No longer a procedure of heroization
In fact there was a blanket of hills, it saturates relief
Confusing or genuine magic pixel amazes me

Either way, this is a valuable purchase
Everyone must write a book called house
Assigning zones of immaterial sensibility to the various collectors
Forms and scales of high-creep-resistant “freedom”

Language is a part of orgasm and no paperwork is overwhelming
To preach anything is to give it away
Doing this experiment felt more like a translation
The plane is also emphasized and nearly single

Guest Poem – Exchange Value #3 by Kai Fierle-Hedrick

2010-10-03T14:20:00.003-04:00

EXCHANGE VALUE #3; 01 October 2010
+ With thanks to Emma Cocker and Anonymous

What gaps in a language worried by love –
or like

~~zones of conversation.~~

I body their truth and causal
exchanges of naïveté –
the swagger-hip, swagger-hip.

~~Censorship is a technique of remembrance.~~

Scratchings on wood brittle
our felt betweens.

~~This is a strategy.~~

And, a heap of negotiation, I kiss you.

~~The absence of text is a question of position.~~

A slick of sweat behind my knees:

~~unstable truths~~ and ~~ethical possession.~~

Cost is the backbone of each speech-act.

~~Social assemblage.~~

You exit left, vanished, a relationship
neither to history nor without it.

~~Object action object~~

I am against a chair and still in it.
Ragged edges and gloss.

~~Repeat, repeat~~

I am at a loss for what’s left to describe.
The draft goes like caution and

~~the marks are doors~~

where the language stuck us. I push
this heart through what’s left.

Poem 36 – The projection of the intimate into the historical [Response to "Exchange Value #2" by Kai Fierle-Hedrick]

2010-09-26T13:44:00.020-04:00

..........
The projection of the intimate into the historical
(for Exchange Value)

The day lives us and we it remain at home

Pilfered rhetorics track an economy of one thing after another

I send you the burnt rulebook, who baked that challah?

The Time, Manner and Place of Speech Activities and Expression Speech activities

This list of dominant frames refined by a chimpanzee tossing darts

I revisited each story featuring the divined Violence Frame

A Place Altered by Moods, Greek residues of hard and soft

Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one 

Doesn’t logic depend on tact animated at birth?

When a person stumbles, sings in cracking high tones, makes nervous gestures, etc.,
everyone knew this is a Jew Gay Gene Mull Court-shy Borders Kitch Scribbler

I’m not sure that the text is as rich in thematic content as what Karen generated

There are broader problems of unspeakable bodies and of “interest”

The subject escapes its alienation through a term of 25,000 colors

The table a procedure of knowledge dying to pronounce its name

Jay MillAr is glad someone paid the ransom

Thank you to everybody that submitted ticks and tsetse flies

Can somebody please put the necessary code between my code?

There are no kids in class, they’ve all gone to tolerance camp, apparently

Guest Poem – Exchange Value #2 by Kai Fierle-Hedrick

2010-09-26T13:40:00.001-04:00

Exchange Value #2; 24 September 2010

[...] You see me there [...]

[...] It’s that abstract [...]

+ Rachel Zolf, ‘Poem 35 – Learning machines’

I say [...] and we assess our difference:

stiffen with divisions and the prompt

to concede the stereotype: now we are ticks

and ticks of boxes: now not: we are awkward

humor turned currency: ransom: or code

for the labels we shy: in this classroom

owning each projection troubles it.

It(‘)s ease. It(‘)s lack of exchange.

Poem 35 – Learning machines [Response to "Exchange Value #1" by Kai Fierle-Hedrick]

2010-09-19T21:34:00.005-04:00

Learning machines
(for Kai)

Aphorisms are done for the

Whole mass of documents that capture and fix them

Extension of and agent external to the body

So the speaker is the engine oil, what needs the additive

GRUUB can accesss the entiree diissk

Guns a-flutter with no evidence of microinvasion

You realize how important “feeling whole” is

With you my self-confidence has sky rocketed

But a time machine wouldn’t look like a booth with spinning wheels

The only way to seal the gap is leather soaked in oil

MIXED IN WITH YOUR SOUP

Your documentary can document anything

Such evidence accrued despite the best efforts of lacy aprons

Build a machine to fill up the pause in conversation

Self here is the implied mental comfort

A low ratio of formative roots and limber joints

Replete with just-before-recess name-calling

I vacate the moment when necessary

You see me there

It’s that abstract.

Guest Poem – Exchange Value #1 by Kai Fierle-Hedrick

2010-09-19T21:28:00.004-04:00

Exchange Value #1; 17 September 2010

[the moment where
.............the evidence is]

this catapult stress entry-point as stitch, as flutter
heartbeat and fingerprinting fiasco

as handle
as conductor
as pivot
as machine
as line

as such I brackets the length of corridor, a

written conversation
transcribed —
— for spatialisation

to braid interloper sun into silhouettes, a graphic language or
bid for some share of these

[neon geometries] the joint design loosening
I attends the grace instruction

action/beforemath...........facing down.........the document aftermath

to trace any intersection of mark, mobility
or passable other

however fragile letting flutter-flutter

to give [record] to take

Stay tuned for fruits of a new collaboration

2010-09-14T13:10:00.006-04:00

The Tolerance Project will be involved in a three-week artistic collaboration/residency with Kai Fierle-Hedrick and the Department of Micro-Poetics starting this Friday (see link below). Stay tuned for poems posted as they're written.

verysmallkitchen.com/2010/09/14/department-of-micro-poetics-kai-fierle-hedrick-and-rachel-zolf-in-residence/

Rachel Zolf and Kai Fierle-Hedrick will collaborate – via an on-site/off-site residency at the AC Institute – to write a sequence of poems responding to the exhibition EXCHANGE VALUE. Fierle-Hedrick will write on-site at the gallery, and at the end of each session will forward an ekphrastic poem to Zolf.

Responding via The Tolerance Project, a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing rooted in an online archive of “poetic DNA” traces donated by 86 writers, artists and thinkers – Zolf will identify a set of search terms in Fierle-Hedrick’s poem and use these to generate a new response from within The Tolerance Project’s archive.

Zolf’s poetic permutation will then serve as the starting point for Fierle-Hedrick’s next session in the gallery, and so on. The residency explores a variety of exchanges – ekphrastic, dialogic, technological – in addition to embodying some of the challenges and creative loopholes of distance collaboration.

Poem 34 – Homophobic poseur buffoon + narcissistic geometrical zip = nurture

2010-09-12T14:37:00.017-04:00

.......
The concept of geometrical tolerancing is complex

Buffoon of the Play house will die a ridiculous Death

She looked across the street and the tears fspell down (all the narcissus planted in rows)

I empathize deeply with the state-sponosored [sic] homophobia of the US government

We don’t follow the support and nurture model of learning – it’s more swill and swear

The feature toleranced is indicated by a leader line media berea arrowhead scenic allegoric Pandora minoan midday convulsion auk earthmover klein paper tug

Like a horrible cocktail party full of insufferable poseurs intent on name-dropping while grilling you on trivial gibberish

A geometrical tolerance is applied to a feature when there is a requirement to control its variation of form or position

Along the way it gradually jettisoned all feeling and emotion until it arrived at an austere
and impersonal form of so-called artistic purity or truth

Gear wheels, zips, bearings, pressure tubing, kitchen utensils and blow mouldings,
and clothing fabrics

My grandmother’s hands zipping open pale skin in a metal bowel

Poem 33 – Thespian p*ssycock

2010-09-12T14:15:00.029-04:00

Thespian p*ssycock
(for Dorothy Trujillo Lusk)

My name is Breast.

There’s me at eighteen just pussifying on that blacktop.

The reason dogs are gay is because my two little boys get tired out

Or inverted.

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius: will you remember to pay the debt?

You’re lucky I’m such an organized thespian.

All the cats follow me so the wire bird abandons writing.

The apartment choked with incense, ~~apology,~~

Tender terror escaped another translation from the ffff-

That’s my bandanna-wearing Berella risking deportation.

I will honour you under the table to hoard what’s left of the gold.

Canada really gay in the ass lacks conventional Syntax dimensions,

Author magic, the location resizable rattle-trap heuristics

In the white nose of prattling excess: Thank you

For saying my boobs look real.

For the rule of what is indefinite is also indefinite

Like the leaden rule in Lesbian architecture,

A place against which the darling trace falls. 

Poem 32 – The poetics of nearness

2010-09-01T14:30:00.017-04:00

The poetics of nearness

The British and Canadien bourgeoisie split
a constellation of particulars

The base cut through
a series of short snips

The mad affect half removed
a semilunar incision

The organ transfixed
grossly, disproportionate

..............(what placid?
............................big big sparkly
...............most docile birds

The smell and the mark
sew a trachea on seam muster ossein

Skirl frond of thrush notes et cum jejunum
the aphorist deliquesces

...............(if you change the number
...........................the barcode will loop
...............continuously while retaining
...........................all its properties

When I hear the word culture, I reach for my
septum sunder sahib must gurgle without

Poem 31 – Loss

2010-09-01T14:15:00.018-04:00

Loss

I have a secret supply
of pet poems

As if and land use may escape
strummed by every that pauses
(passes)

Had glanced?

This can be a general concept, such as ‘night’ or
or something more related to daily life

Before the DNA prevents further division

At the same time, at a for bewilder
of energy via convection by the filament

Verse is a granitic, endemic

The of the body indirectly
fantasy that death and can be mastered

Make turn to gain
one is at a for socks

I’m the first bright you’ll see in the spring

Poem 30 – Tautology

2010-09-01T14:04:00.011-04:00

Tautology

Yes, I know it’s an ugly word

But so is the thing.

The smallest glowered doubt

Unpalatable expression:

Do you want me, truly?

We buy a book of propaganda

By betrayal, I mean the waterfall

Surely we are pigeons.

Cruel and unusual

In the same way that

Proportionality was only an aspect

Being struck by lightning—

Brave behave step overhead and saw the stair.

Poem 29 – R's

2010-09-01T13:48:00.015-04:00

R’s

The hours fan themselves

Tours America To Survey Damage Caused

Repeated interference till the room honours us

Shows endeavours enjoyed

OF COURSE, YOU CAN'T USE ALL THE BLOCKS

Which one flavours matter

Yours sincerely

Rumours and trembling

Adopted for course use

Absolve ourselves of our failure to hold

Her primal language for the two hours

Of course you know all of this

We may submit ourselves to thee

In the white economy of discourse

Ours’ “we” a radical impossibility

Fall 2010 term begins with "We" – Poem 28

2010-09-01T12:57:00.021-04:00

We

are perfectly confident

have several mothers in common

created ourselves synthetically

take the bath with language

never take soot into the backyard

have visited certain small waves

pinpoint common framing devices

love the aquarium soother

are grateful for prosthetic replacement

have indefatigable researches

aphorize across the flap

bite, Free Sup!

are losing the war of ideas

became leader of the purification reagents

working nostalgia like a new glove

went wrong without a substitute

were so higher a vial

liquidated just before coming

were utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm

combine this with the possibility of closed timelike curves

must pause in our conversation and hum each syllable

could no longer find the sound pleasant, though we yearned to

stopped, and to spread was vacuum

The Tolerance Project Archive revealed!

2010-05-14T23:04:00.003-04:00

A full year before the official culmination of our collaborative MFA, we have happily managed to devour and deploy a tiny morsel of each and every Tolerance Project donor’s poetic DNA. So, with the excellent assistance of the amazing designer HR Hegnauer and the amazing web host Duration Press, The Tolerance Project Archive of poetic DNA has been born!

Dig in and roll around today in all the crazy stuff donated to The Tolerance Project Archive. Perhaps one or two or thirteen poetic building blocks contained therein will inspire you or your students or your mother or dog to write a feverish poem that we can take to class in the Fall. That would be fine, dandy even. Because you know how much the dandy appropriative lifestyle appeals to us at The Tolerance Project.

Happy trails, and we hope to hear from you soon!

Poems 26 & 27 – I DON'T GET (it) I don't get (it)...

2010-04-10T11:21:00.034-04:00

Here are two poems that recently got rejected from The New Yorker – perhaps the workshop participants could help me figure out why! I think they're probably not elliptical enough.

I DON'T GET I DON'T GET

In your version, farther crows west
Reflections hover overt trust
The gladdest versions megamelt
And counter to the surest facet

Ounce too free

UV waivers cap the tendencies
To woo the rigor extra evidentiaries
Known in latent nonreflective valence tapes
Remaindered by the tops of faltered whorls

For fine sets

Copper scar condensed by tepid barter
Irrespective of the last dun jar
The insight is the outside with a pallor
Reminiscent of the dedicated signifier

Sever rate nigh tend

And swan...

*

I don’t get it I don’t get it I don’t get it I don’t get it

Bare single-stranded DNA has a tendency to fold
House systems, in this case, reflecting hum

The terms savagery and barbarism made of so-called “jelly rubber”

Spring would be a facetious landscape capped
Several bracelet of its own obscure desires

To speak from phthalates agora

What really low-interest me surely
Rigour of historical reasoning as kinship object

Feel free to use any dedicated woods

Pole world remains cast scarcity
Verse a granitic (black) box of theatrical viewing

i dunno about poems, but here a discourses

With a stagnant suture on a flat surface
Eventually the stimulus will run its course

There is no evidence of microinvasion

Poem 25 – An aristoricy of brains

2010-03-31T15:15:00.007-04:00

Civilization depends on the qualities of the people who bear it HERE IS A BOARD WITH A LOT OF HOLES IN IT. DO YOU SEE THEM? (pointing to the depressions) AND HERE (pointing) ARE A LOT OF BLOCKS WHICH WILL FIT INTO THESE HOLES. THERE ARE TWO BLOCKS FOR EACH HOLE. I WANT TO SEE HOW FAST YOU CAN PUT ALL THE RIGHT BLOCKS INTO THE RIGHT HOLES UNTIL ALL THE HOLES ARE FILLED. YOU MAY USE ONE OR BOTH HANDS. READY, GO! When the volume of culture increases, greater and greater mental power is required to absorb and recombine the cultural elements WITHOUT MAKING ANY MORE MOVES THAN YOU HAVE TO, CHANGE THESE BLOCKS AROUND SO YOU CAN FIND A PLACE FOR THE EXTRA SQUARE (pointing to square). DON’T HAVE ANY BLOCKS LEFT OVER. READY—GO AHEAD One cannot expect rationality from a people whose average mental capacity is no greater than a child of thirteen WHAT WE WANT TO DO IS TO MAKE A SPACE OR HOLE FOR THIS SQUARE BLOCK AND PUT THE BLOCK INTO IT IN SUCH A WAY THAT ALL THE HOLES IN THE BOARDS WILL BE FILLED AND NO BLOCK WILL BE LEFT OUT. IN ORDER TO DO THIS WE MAY CHANGE THE OTHER BLOCKS ABOUT; ONLY WE MUST NOT MAKE ANY MORE CHANGES THAN ARE NECESSARY What is needed, then, is not so much education as eugenics FIND ALL THE BLOCKS WHICH ARE THE SAME COLOR AS THIS ONE. FIND ALL THE BLOCKS WHICH ARE JUST THE SAME SHAPE AS THIS ONE Hence the problem of education would be the determination of those with superior endowment, their training and education, the opening up of the upper strata to them to create an aristoricy [sic] of brains NOW WHEN I SAY GO I WANT YOU TO TAKE THE BLOCKS OUT OF HOLE NO. 1 AND PUT THEM IN HOLE NO. 2 (pointing); THEN TAKE THEM OUT OF NO. 2 AND PUT THEM INTO NO. 3, AND SO ON. READY, GO! On this basis an hereditary aristocracy would be set up and an A stock established to become the parants [sic] of the next generation of the superior THIS PICTURE IS NOT FINISHED, SOME PARTS HAVE BEEN LEFT OUT, AS YOU SEE (pointing) Their names would be published periodically and thus make known what families carried superior qualities in their germ plasm YOU WILL FIND THE MISSING PARTS THERE (pointing to open box). I WANT YOU TO FIND THE RIGHT BLOCK FOR EACH HOLE AND PUT IT IN Think how in years to come these annual publications would establish the good strains OF COURSE, YOU CAN’T USE ALL THE BLOCKS, BUT YOU MAY BE SURE THAT THE RIGHT BLOCK FOR EACH HOLE IS IN THE BOX the desirable families with which to become associated, how, in short YOU MAY USE ONE OR BOTH HANDS, AND CHANGE THE BLOCKS AROUND AS MUCH AS YOU WISH they would become the human stud book WORK AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN, AND LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED IT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? ALL RIGHT, GO AHEAD.

Guest Poem – Jeff T. Johnson's "Fantasy Jargon"

2010-03-25T10:40:00.007-04:00

[Special treat this week: MFA workshop colleague Jeff T. Johnson's guest poem, part of which riffs on The Tolerance Project comments stream. Jeff even gets his own barcode. Enjoy.]

Fantasy Jargon

An extended see you're enjoying Lacan these days

Read the indoor range to cumulus conc if only languaged

Because the shelving towers fading shut tense followers

In the atmos glee, the transcendent series on third view

Friends with textual bureaucracies, word devoid of contends

Have the chords and the cords cords and chords out of

Necessity blocks itself swimming toward exits

Steving night solid, listening to the repeat

Button the scepter of lite carnal bricolage

Cont’d past diagnosis, a literary recipe for pastel pastry

Come around the back, in reverse, head turned into a mirror

Binding the aliosis behind the darn hey

Known in the shadow density, the cousin freely

Spousing rearrangement ferry because the cause lurks

After Bollywood, after democracy, after you inline reverence

Vs reference in the entropy ground to bitsy bouncy deference

The lyrical forever, demolition of scent factories declined

Before the eyes have it, the eyes and sends, the mollifications of de-fence

Times lesson browsers, darkening the hallow gens, tube ambience

Caw caws the mordant pits, leafing underwords

Creatured by drowsy fictions, dictionary bowels, simple syllables

On fire by similes, syntactically tight

Poem 24 – First annual report of the Educational Testing Service, 1950

2010-03-24T14:28:00.011-04:00

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
"Life may have less

......................................mystery

.............................................................but it will also have

......................................less

.......disillusion

.............ment

............................................... and

..........................................................................disapp......oint...ment.

Hope will not

................................................................................a lost
...................source
..................................of

................................................strength,

..........................but it will be

kept

within

reason

able

bounds."

Poem 23 – Useful Bullshit

2010-02-24T10:13:00.007-05:00

Hi Kristen, there is nothing in this that interests me.

All of the implied violence of the first section has become more explicit through imagery relating to the female body, mollusks and their shells.

Who is speaking why – dust bunnies and the holocaust? I don’t get it.

Trust the beginning of books. Lightness can mean “want of force” and the sound of gunfire using words suggesting invagination: “draped,” “aperture,” “diptych,” “gusset,” “purl,” “pleated” and “rivelled.”

You call this a performative nature? In my Lustrelessness, norm, form and function are revealed as blithely editable. I want my terminal degree, but we’re not competing.

We’re all encased in plastic, then turned into an intonation beyond the irrigated “pirate” mind. Why not center your poems – both physically and theoretically?

Be more visual and visceral. If love poems are written in pidgin python, try a vignette about difficult communication extended beyond linguistic articulation inside the mouth and in or near the genital area.

Polemic is a bad riposte against the triumph of “whimsy,” but I want poetry to be funny. You might want to give up entirely, learn to write linearly and do your memoir.

Thinking through these questions has been a difficult but pleasurable exercise.

Poem 22 – Failed poem about dead gay dogs

2010-02-09T23:50:00.009-05:00

I just noticed something frozen: dogs are
Happy and funny except for one small thing:
My dogs are gay

Virtually all male dogs miss someone very
Any way we can find out whether
What’s wrong with feminists?

Left behind poetry behaviour my neighbor’s
Dogs are a conceit they hump Rainbow Bridge
Kill yourself contains a strong metaphysical
Damages who femme each other all the time

Please note balloon imagery and that just aint right dude twist
Ing mean could b 2 guy lines broken into Chickapoo
And my dogs a turkey-loving Christmas pattern of stress

Syllables called the light or lahu and heavy or
If they hump the same sex I’m going to just
This side of heaven contains primarily the bitches

When listed as poet an animal dies maimed
Cosmic verses would expose the horrible secret
Meadows and cats and corporate America

Cats have rude undue influence on the special friends
So they focus spotty home-movies on the anatomical
Key to constantly sniffing butts Canada really
Gay in the ass burn maple leaf, burn

Smart dogs can save our dreams of days
His bright eyes are peaples language times gone by
The intent: his eager body quivers suddenly
Strange poetry runs from the speed of its method
Flying over myself dancing almost haunting
The solidity so late with the physical eye

And your special friend the fear that dwells
Edges of silence like a loon you cling
Progressively from smaller units
Into the trusting eyes of when I was aaah
Gay flat headed no brain sucks, eh?
Alliteratively dancing myself right out of the womb

Spring Term – Poem 21 – Response

2010-01-26T15:23:00.016-05:00

Response

I really enjoyed reading your work over the past few days longer we may linger in doorways, democratically wishing.

It will be raining any minute, but I have been thinking about it a lot.

I am intrigued by the ways it foregrounds presence and absence, opening and closing, consensual and forced actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the distance and spaces between us or use of this material.

I read it several times, and I felt it was quite sadly, if you fell into a black hole, it would not spit you out at some other time.

The reason why I found the work sad was that everything appears to be on the cuspid, inukshooks as gymnasts, the low whine of their stressed abdominals flex dust as the evening bruxism climaxed.

Few actions are completed or possible it crawled under the refrigerator to die of the for-flies-poison.

The bodily regions described are extremely this chronic mimicry found making intimate imitates.

One person writes a clause beginning “if” and the sentence construction is often conditional.

“Gargling,” “hiccough,” and “laughter” describe non-linguistic sounds; “doggerel,” “gammon” and “blague” describe poor poetry, things one would not want to hear or enter into communication with such bugs there is a wish, an intention, a desire to impose one’s will.

What can be between ourselves and those processes as a false immediacy?

How can the folds be negotiated Q14543 liu ouagadougou pogrom.

That’s what I thought it was about this guide, it shatters lives, the mental charity.

Final project, minimalist literature class

2009-12-16T15:15:00.022-05:00

Letterpress poem on 8.5x7 inch white page. Red card edition as well. Many thanks to Tolerance Project collaborator E.B. for her letterpress prowess. Done at The Arm, Brooklyn.

Final workshop project – Lana Domax, poet from and in this time

2009-12-08T23:39:00.038-05:00

Born 1955 – Poet and translator Lana Domax has a reputation for working both in and beyond the boundaries of language. Her earliest book, a lyric collection inspired by her years on the rodeo circuit and her experience in the second wave feminist movement, was Pulling Leather (1978). Since then, she has published seven collections of poetry ranging from the co-authored long poem, Penelope tangled/embrouillé (1983), to the conceptual novel, Finger Jam (2006). In a review of her most recent book, 101 Proclamations (2009), the reviewer observed, “Domax is always on the move, attentive to the changing world and our changing relationship to language—she writes both from and in this time.”

The Early Years—

Domax was born on April 1, 1955. Raised in cattle country, she spent much of her childhood working on the family farm. At 11, a fire destroyed the family home. Without insurance to rebuild, the family, which included Domax, her parents and two older brothers, were forced to spend several months living in a network of remaining silos. At 13, Domax began attending the local rodeo and soon took up barrel racing. By 16, she’d won her first major competition. While Domax never had the looks needed to be crowned “rodeo queen,” she soon became a staple on the local rodeo scene. When she wasn’t competing in barrel races, she worked security outside the men’s locker room. At 17, Domax met Chuck Wagamese, a 28 year-old Cree cowboy known on the rodeo circuit as “Chuck Wagon.” Chuck invited Domax to join him on the circuit. Domax, notoriously elusive about her personal history, spoke openly about this time of her life in an interview published in a now defunct feminist literary journal, Coming Textualities, in 1979, shortly after the publication of her first full-length collection. Here, Domax recalled, “I remember filling a small green and red plaid suitcase with what I considered my essentials—all my books, one change of clothes! I met Chuck at the local Husky Station in the middle of the night and that was it. He was decent, easily distracted, but decent.”

Between 17 and 20, Domax traveled around North American with Chuck and his stags. This was also the period in which Domax started to write. Many of her earliest poems were about the rodeo scene. Working both in and against the traditional cowboy ballad form, Domax’s early poems were heavy with the imagery of the rodeo circuit but infused with a rising consciousness of the gendered social world in which she was living:

Fast pace stay on  

Horses take her to the edge.
She—a circus of roses.
There there tongue-being.

Exit the forest of milk-sweating trees.
Horses and roses loom in ruby windows.
Silver crutches gleam in the fields.

She lands on the beach
singing of broomsticks.
Now I am a horse and I offer her a ride.

She turned my sister into a crow.
My lover became a horse.
Who will be the bear she puts in the sky?

The Gargoyles were clever enough not
to attack
her passion. 

What you laugh at will make me cry.
In the graduate greenhouses
I imagine you a crow.

Your horse ...... your escape.
I approve but why bother.
You want to visit the ghost.

What kind of horse sleeps only at night?
 A nightmare.

Fig. 1 Pulling Leather book cover

This version of “Fast pace stay on” is reprinted from Domax’s first collection, Pulling Leather (SysterType Books, 1978). An earlier version of “Fast pace stay on” appeared in Community Loop (a rodeo culture magazine) in 1971. In the Community Loop version, the line reading “My lover became a horse” read “My horse became a lover.” Another version appeared in Domax’s first chapbook, Hollihan (self-published in 1975). In the Hollihan version, Domax experimented with shorter lines; especially in the first stanza, the breaks open up alternative readings of the poem:

Horses take her
to the edge. She—
a circus of
roses. There
there tongue-
being.

The Middle Years—

By the time Domax reached her early 20s, her interest in literature was trumping her interest in rodeo culture. At a rodeo in New Mexico, she met a group of young women studying at the local college. They invited her to stay in their communal household. Soon, Domax began to take courses, including Dr. Sally Pinchworth’s Radical Types—an upper-year seminar based on Jeannette H. Foster’s book, Sex Variant Women in Literature. Following the structure of Foster’s study, the course surveyed 2500 years of love and sex between women as depicted in literature. While Domax found Pinchworth’s and Foster’s approach rather quantitative and dry, the course gave her an opportunity to immerse herself in literature from antiquity to the twentieth century. Domax also took language courses in French, Spanish and German. During her time in New Mexico, she would complete a degree in English and French at the University of New Mexico and publish her first collection.

In 1980, Domax left New Mexico for Montreal, Canada where she started but failed to complete a higher degree in French literature at the University of Montreal. Despite dropping out of graduate school, she remained in Montreal for nearly eight years. At this time, she co-authored, with her lover Chantel Bissel, the bilingual long poem Penelope tangled/embrouillé (Le Quartanier, 1983) and Lackdictions (Coach House Books, 1987). After her breakup with Bissel, Domax moved to Europe. Her fluency in English, French, Spanish and German enabled her to obtain work both as an interpreter and translator throughout Europe. In late 1989, a feminist organization in Berlin invited Domax to work as an interpreter at a conference. In the end, the conference would be cancelled but Domax, now 35, found herself dismantling the wall that had long divided East and West Germany. Along with hundreds of other international artists, Domax chose to stay in Berlin, squatting in the sprawling housing complex and gallery space that would eventually be named Tacheles. It was here that she produced two books that marked her turn to more experimental approaches. Radiatoring Voices (Brecht Books, 1995), a book comprised entirely of snippets of conversation recorded through the radiator in her room at Tacheles between 1990 and 1995, and Fleece (Brecht Books, 1999), a text and sound performance released with a CD. In addition to exploring the performative aspects of her practice, during her time at Tacheles, Domax became increasingly interested in cross-disciplinary collaborations as she found herself sharing her everyday life with visual artists, musicians and performance artists from around the world. This resulted in the production of a series of artists books and visual and sculptural experimentations. During this period, Domax also translated several of her friends’ books from French, Spanish and German into English, including German poet Greta Fiedler’s Frauengespräch—a provocative and erotic text that had circulated widely in East Germany in the 1980s in various self-published forms.

To supplement her income during this period of her life, Domax frequently took short-term jobs at world exhibitions and Olympic Games. Most notably, she worked as an interpreter, translator and social activator (party coordinator) in a series of Olympic Villages, including villages in Barcelona, Albertville and Lillehammer. Despite her political ambivalence about such global events, these brief stints of work enabled her to sustain extended periods of time working exclusively on her writing and art.

2000 to Present—

Over the past decade, Domax has continued to write, publishing both a conceptual novel, Finger Jam (SiteBOOKS, 2006), and a new collection of poetry, 101 Proclamations (SiteBOOKS, 2009). Domax now divides her time between New York and Lillehammer. While she continues to travel, a diagnosis of diabetes in 2001 forced her to adopt a somewhat less transient existence.

Although her writing is a source of delight for some readers, and she is often cited as a major influence by younger innovative women writers, others find her work obscure, vague, difficult, hermetic, obfuscating, cryptic, offensive, pretentious, ambiguous, thorny, inscrutable, enigmatic and pompous. The following poem is from 101 Proclamations:

Their affective relationship to otherness

What’s yr ‘thing’? she asked.
That not yet sexualized between us.

So the answer was You’re the only woman in my life.
And together they tackled the documents.

There is no writing that is not in love
with commodity form.

Pilfered rhetorics track a genealogy of
“What is the status of your own text?”

*

unction affected us
a gift economy

open palm stories
through a semilunar incision

along the lower jaw
extending backward to the hyoid bone

Nevertheless, Domax has attracted a small but loyal following. In 2008, the University of New Mexico, where she completed her B.A., approached her about donating her papers. Unable to manage her own archive and in need of money, Domax parted with her papers. Despite the fact that she has rarely given interviews and has tended to avoid talking about her own life in the few interviews granted, her archive is a revelation. She has included all the documents she has managed to hold on to over the years…report cards, medical reports, edited manuscripts, letters, reviews, rodeo ephemera, baggage tags...

Ephemera from the Lana Domax archive—

Fig. 2 – Lana Domax’s report card from Grade 2.

Fig. 3 – Invocation

Fig. 4 – Fragment from Domax journal (1977-1979)

Fig. 5 – Fragment from early draft of Finger Jam

Fig. 6 – Lana Domax blood glucose count

Fig. 7 – “Paris Snake” (collaborative text art project with another former Tacheles resident).

Lana Domax in dialogue with literary theorist Katja Acorn—
New York, June 2009

KA: You’re funny, but people don’t usually see you that way. Do you consider your work humorous?

LD: In the public context what is referred to as being humorous is often an entry into the practice/practise…one’s own and others’. The opportunity to include levity is welcome as far as I’m concerned.

KA: Do you have a problem with being misread?

LD: My critique is with those who deliver the inaccuracies in spelling, grammar, and yes, facts, and with those who do not question the way “information” is presented.

KA: I’d like to talk to you about your recent turn to fiction in Finger Jam.

LD: This is no work of fiction.

KA: Oh? So then can we talk about the influence of travel on your writing. You’ve lived so many places over the years and often been simply circulating from place to place. I’m thinking about your early years on the rodeo circuit, your time in New Mexico, Montreal, Berlin, Barcelona, New York, your hopping from country to country to work at Expos and in various Olympic Villages. This must have shaped your work profoundly.

LD: I keep going to these places, “place” in the largest possible sense. I travel but I also push myself and my body in, through and around language and so on. And geography. And I struggle with that because there’s the irony, and maybe this comes back to some of the first passage you brought up – is it that the space of writing is also in some ways a space of arrestment or of suspension, if you will? The body that wants to be in movement has to stop in order to write. And if writing is movement, then there’s a sort of paradox there. But it’s also a remove. It’s a remove from a context, and at the same time, it brings me closer to this thing that is always deferred.

KA: This seems like a good segue to ask about your actual way of working. I mean, how do you compose your texts?… I’ll avoid talking about poetry or fiction since you seem a bit resistant to these categorizations.

LD: I’m actually playing between poetics and thinking about the overriding metaphors of production, reproduction and attachment and alienation, or detachment in terms of subjective identities. Largely, it’s about this relationship of the lyric and the anti-lyric and I have been trying to have these very naturalistic vernacular pieces that seem to emerge from what is an authorial voice, a sense of an authorial identity against pieces where that reliability is really shaken up and as a reader you have to figure out, who’s this? Is this me or is this some character she’s producing or is this manipulated text where there is this kind of trace of her voice or some sense of the source. It’s really very much about what does stir us to the surface and why we want this aesthetic experience of attachment, whether it be to each other or to texts or to art in general. Why do we desire? Why don’t we desire? I have some pieces that are love poems but they’re proceduralist love poems so they’re about being in language and hearing the difference and all this is evident in what you are wanting to call my “fictions” too.

KA: To what extent does your fluency across languages affect your writing in English?

LD: Grammar holds and expresses and shapes things in an utterly necessary way. For example, take the difference between languages. It’s so interesting that Germans leave the verb until the end, entirely different from the way we speak in English. But I love working in English because it is so elastic.

KA: In the 1990s, you released a book with a CD. How is performance integral to your work?

LD: When you read anything, even the most straight-forward mystery or genre novel, there are also going to be your own memories because your own memory lends images and sounds to the reading. What’s going on out on the street – ambient sound – all of that is going to shift everything. That’s what is foregrounded for me – the multiple possibilities, reading into whatever you find. Also, again, when you read things out loud, a different voice will often emerge. I never know what is coming up.

KA: But now, just recently, you’ve come up in the archive. What was that like?

LD: That was a very weird decision to reach. They asked me at a time when I was moving internationally and broke, so I sold my garbage for the same reason that most writers sell their garbage.

Poem 17 – How to run in a war

2009-12-08T23:33:00.008-05:00

[The assignment was to write a piece of fiction. Luckily there was something fictionish in the archive.]

How to run in a war

The director has made the decision. A single man will survive, though not the one who is a lithe expert in how to evacuate the scene of destruction, while only adding to it marginally and catastrophically though indirectly. Those who die by the hands of the director decidedly deserve it while those who die in the war upon which he directs decidedly do not. They are part of a tragedy that neither he nor I, nor the strange statesman-like figure, can speak of authentically (and therefore our impotence to meaningfully intervene) though we do go forth authoritatively.

Admissions as such more suspect than the original problem.

We breathe tremendous relief when the survivor takes the stand. Applause breaks out. After the credits roll he’ll be shot by his own hand or by one of his gold rimmed pursuers. The blond may feel guiltily about this while nodding on her own interior voice telling her and echoed by murmurs from the audience: it was all for the greater good. Friends now with his wife and his kids. On every repeated arrival, for each, a hug.

Cleansing him—the survivor—will make the booty valuable again. We buy the book and speak heavily of what he said about writing poetry, or making movies, or doing drugs.

(While writing this, I am bloody as well as greasy.) Simultaneously, a march is happening for a young soldier who was shot while on his 12 hour R&R. It’s hard to say which side his assailants were on or what the sides are. Or what we mean when we say agree, since we all do—agree to it all that is. The director put in a familiar scene in which the ‘native’ queries the young post-colonial mercenary about his lack of a wife and kids, the nod it gives to the wisdom of tribal innocence, for that must be it, where we went wrong without a substitute. Until we figure one out, and when I say figure what I mean isn’t figurative but actual figures, it’s all blood, and weapons, and knowing how to run.

But wait a minute, there’s one more…this deliberate scrambling we aren’t sure at first which language we’re in should we try to understand.

Poem 16 – Picture of an unknown intersection

2009-12-02T13:51:00.008-05:00

The assignment was to write a "caption poem." Hence, as found/donated...

Picture of an unknown intersection.

Poem 15 – Secret weapon

2009-12-02T13:44:00.002-05:00

There is a tendency among the faithful to introduce metaphysical
Dimensions to the fighting people going through the dead terrified of
Recognizing I am the matriarch Rachel lying in the streets with families
Kissing their faces go this way strewn with arms feet shoes we have
Enormous power I keep restraining for some reason the soldiers
Listen to her etched Palestinian man holding a swaddled baby
Swamped with demands for the names of soldiers to pray for
Outside destroyed buildings old man kneeling I divided the
Family to try and save some carrying two books for double I think
The baby’s dead but doctors are having a hard time gathering the right
Body 6106 of clearness 2892 parts and the floor filled with 1818 blood
Crieth unto me from the ground East Jerusalem is not Gaza Israel was deeply
Deeply sorrowful in Qana God willing the merit of being united in prayer
Despite our children barely breathing next to mothers’ corpses
Brings closer the final redemption in a donkey cart

Poem 14 – A biography of the dinosaurs

2009-11-28T15:33:00.018-05:00

[The assignment was to write a biography poem. After much combing of the Archive, we came upon the dinosaurs resting there. Orthography intact "as found." Special thanks to 7-year-old Tolerance Project collaborator J.D. for his insights.]

A biography of the dinosaurs

thecodonts gave rise to crocodiles and the span

me catastrophe from the ground up

eugenic organ as an ism when reptiles ran

general as the mono startle along the ground and each other

for at least one season of a soma ethic

*

This is my hypothisis of why all dinosaurs died out

This is a few reasons of why dinosaurs died out

No one lives

The dinosaurs got old

As the eyes / near wreck

There was a meteorite shower

That had catastrophe written all over it

The dinosaur eggs got eaten

To create /

There was volcanos

Both inside and outside history

I think because giant underwater volcanos errupted

When they see

Because if a land volcano erupted it would not destroy water dinosaurs

The massive extinction was when they died out nobody knows why they died out

Poem 13 – FUCK OFF HORSE HATER POSERS

2009-11-11T10:57:00.003-05:00

If you are reading this , then you are an intelligent person who is capable of making informed choices about where you want your life to go

if ur reading this ,my symphaties to u guys cuz ur dead.

I know if ur reading this u will probably pay no mind but ur missing out on some talented artists..Give it a chance and then u can be on the streetteam

If ur reading this then obviously ur dumb to not realize my obvious unintelligence

U SHOULD REALLY STYOP I MEAN U MOST BE BORED IF UR READING THIS

Now if ur reading this , ur either the person I know or ur majorly mistaken. I know for a fact that someone very special is reading this paragraph!

hey, if ur reading this , good for u! this is sorta unervingly close to reality, but tweaked in some places. i am sorry if u feel insulted

If You Are Reading This, You Had Better Fucking Hate Horses!!! Look, this is a website about horses and how much we hate them. They are gross and stupid and
If You Are Reading This , You Had Better Fucking Hate Horses!!! NICE SHOES ASSHOLE!! Fuck Off Horse Hater Posers!

If You Are Reading This You Have An FBI File.

I'd Like To0 Meet AnyOne And EveryOne And If ur ReaDing This Then Of CourSe U!!!!!!!!!!!! the crotch of ur life!'s

If ur reading this still up to this point, ur only bored & nothin more

Poem 12 – Mirror

2009-11-07T15:53:00.005-05:00

[The assignment was to write an imitation of a famous poem, or a "reversal" of the poem, or some other response. We couldn't find a famous poem in the Archive, but the following was inspiring.]

Flying, skimming, skipping, pursued by fishes, alone of all tuna, in the midst of tropical waters, a motorless plane, no muscles. Flying like a bat. The road lined with lights. A rubble of stone darkened. The turf mouse. Among the eternal rain, I found an old, blasted time, a restless bird shape. Photos are great materials for the publishing world. A Lincoln Town Car is not unusual. Stuff White People Like – a witty idea of content. They sell traditional bookstores into cheeseburger or pumpkin pie. The groundhog goes out and sees the formal dress of the occasion at the last check-up – today nobody bothers. The sun is commonly termed the twelfth point. English towns and cities occurred to him. In 1908, emptiness was the root cause. Self here is the implied mental comfort that regards extraneous qualities such as the next moment. If one had no separate identity, no one would be likely to have theories. He tries to find irony. Westerners in the temperature must be frank. The men, worse, had killed them body and soul. How to get through torture: light is in us. Friendship: a Braille typewriter. The creature is difficult. There is no light in the rainbow. Gold can’t be found anywhere. The ring and the cloud made a plaited meadow. Entrance along the road of blood.
 

 Walking, thudding, bumping, a lot of good it does, crowded into the observatory, chasing toucans, above arctic wastes, a ghastly flat, no skin. Walking like a ball. The sidewalk lined with darkness. A pile of rocks brightened. The field elephant, alongside a temporary snowstorm. You lost your new, silent space, a serene animal profile. Records are typical commodities of the recording industry. A Jefferson nickel is unfashionable. Things black gods don’t like – a sluggish practice of form. They buy websites via fries with that shake. The sky dog comes in and hears the casual speech of the everyday at the first operation – then everybody spaces. The moon is expressly cast a monthly line. Fresh tomatoes and citrons present themselves to her inspection. In 2008, fullness was the branch effect. Otherwise there is the explicit physical pain that blocks out intrinsic mass like the previous eon. If you don’t eat meat, everyone will think you do. She looks for iron. East coasters can fry up in the heat. The women, even better, would birth them, part and parcel. How to add to pleasure: sound is all around you. Love: a Morse piano. The human is easy. There is no sound in an echo. Silver can be traded for space. The bracelet and the wave wove corn rows. Exit through the gate of water.
 

Poem 11 – She then flies to Art

2009-11-07T15:37:00.026-05:00

[the poem the gf didn't 'get'--see thetoleranceproject.blogspot.com/2009/11/rzs-xellent-moma-adventure.html]

She then flies to Art

Melding human form and furniture
Into a seamless whole
Valuing herself an unnatural bundle of hairs
All covered with Powder

Works of Art by Department

No artists or poets without
A true desire to progress her
Exquisite handling of natural material
Shifts the ground of your polished
Mahogany and luminous opals

Timeline of Art History

Idea of sociality the return to point zero
Where she studied under a number of notable
Where acting is the central point, not listening

150 Hakka (Chinese people) in art [Not Subd Geog] [sp2009004632]

The moment where the “I” ends
Puts on a Perriwig
And “the other” begins

Viewing contemporary art as a natural component
Of creating communal property—
A home

New York: The Museum of Modern Art

I was so continual an art designed by Michalengo©
Unnamable gallery a joy willow
Not separate stand-alone processes
They flow from the liberal arts core

Catastrophic forms of underbrushes, these sums'
Radical disarticulation to the root of
My journey – so authentic a ghost – scares another toast’s
Assumptions about the aesthetic autonomy
Between inside and outside
An institutionally cultivated sensibility

450 UF Art, Kamaiurá

She is art
But you expect to hurry
Vestibules are inches
Farming art in abandoned lots

550 BT Art, Brazilian

Most paint self-portrait projects
Twice demolished and snow has aged
Twice the beauty of recycled decay

Is the readymade as macho as the abstract painting?
When to practice is the balancing jet,
Has loss glanced?
Its artist is the branch

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/ca/ho_1993.217.htm

......................................(Frog Pond turns into a giant temple
......................................Made of “allure.” I had to
......................................Leave!

RZ’s Xellent MOMA adventure

2009-11-07T15:14:00.007-05:00

[The assignment was to go to MOMA and write about a piece of minimalist art]

Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs… One and/or three chairs, even. Readymade plus idea plus reproduction, beautifully poised on the cusp where minimalism meets conceptualism. Great description in MOMA online: “A chair sits alongside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of the word chair. Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one: a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects, that is, a chair of wood. But isn't this last chair simply . . . a chair? Or, as Marcel Duchamp asked in his Bicycle Wheel of 1913, does the inclusion of an object in an artwork somehow change it? If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth's artwork doing by adding these functions together? Prodded to ask such questions, the viewer embarks on the basic processes demanded by Conceptual art.

‘The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art,’ Kosuth has written. ‘Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept 'art,' . . . Fundamental to this idea of art is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction.’

Chasing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art.” Language, textuality, begins its ascent into art with conceptualism. Baldessari in the same room hinting ironically in a painting made up of language – What is painting… “Art is a creation of the eye and can only be hinted at with words.” Do you agree? I don’t. Look at the Kosuth.

But I digress. Back to Minimalism. Ad Reinhart attempts to produce “a pure abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, chargeless, relationless, disinterested painting – an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art.” This is the key problem with minimalism, the phallus-y that the point of view is neutral, untouched by ideology, like a Platonic ideal. In the thrust toward placing the phenomenological subject–viewer in the gallery, minimalist art ignores the sexual-linguistic construction of the subject (not to mention racial, etc). Not until the mid 70s feminist art (Kruger, Levine, Kelly, etc.) does this critique materialize, but seems patently obvious looking back. Reminds me how it now seems somewhat absurd that Language poetry could remove the subject and narrative when the subject of women and people of colour, etc had not been represented, nor their stories told. All a matter of perception and timing. Just as the fact that Carl Andre’s sculpture is not on a pedestal and there is no differentiation between ordinary and sculptural space seems pretty to blasé to us now. The trick is to imagine what it would have been like to walk into a gallery in the 60s with this piece, how it upset expectations then. Or the Judd piece—you may wonder, how is it fastened? Is it a painting because it’s on the wall? It’s not on the ground, so is it sculpture? This categorization seems unnecessary now, but not then. Perception is what these artists were changing. The green lacquer on Judd’s “one thing after another” is striking, but come closer and see ordinary galvanized iron on its not so obvious sides. “A perceptual ambiguity complicates things.” (Hal Foster)… “Objects that are without any hierarchy of interest, that directly engage and interact with the particular space they occupy; objects that reveal everything about themselves, but little about the artist; objects whose subject is the viewer.” (Michael Craig-Martin)….. “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.” (Tony Smith). Like all the best poetry.

Fascinating that Carl Andre wants to “define rather than occupy space,” while Frank Stella colonizes space with the Empress of India…“What you see is [indeed] what you see” (Stella).

Love how Richard Tuttle replaces the frame with a wire, laying bare the construction of the viewing experience. Can’t help but think of his wife, amazing poet, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, constructing her poems on a big table by laying out fragments of language next to images and rearranging them until the picture is correct.

Robert Ryman reduces painting to bare minimum, white paint, a square, metal fastenings … pencil lines display hidden apparatus that holds painting to the wall ... more concerned with the “how” of painting’s physicality than the “what” of image, story, symbolism. Heralds the turn to process art (Eva Hesse and others) post minimalism. Again, I think Language poetry must have been influenced by (post-) minimalism, the reduction to the bare unit of meaning, the how.

Dan Flavin’s ordinary fluorescent light and metal fixtures as political “monuments” to avant-garde Russian Constructivism. Eventually the lights will burn out and have to be replaced, like all utopian ideals. I also heard that at the end of the exhibit he would take the lights back to the hardware store where he got them, but obviously this is not the case, as they are in MOMA in the Michael Ovitz (former Mr. Disney and Hollywood agent extraordinaire) Family Gallery. Seems no coincidence that Pop commercial serialism or serial commercial art is in the next room.

But first a sidebar on Fluxus, supposedly “living art” or “anti-art” beyond the gallery and sales, but still contained here in a kind of attempted archive of the repertoire. Beautiful text pieces like Dick Higgins symphony of pen and mud and machine gun, but still a sense of lifelessness and claustrophobia…The performance can’t be archived and commodified, no matter how much the Museum tries…that is its ephemeral power.

Similar stench of death in the Joseph Beuys room, the vitrines with “relics” of his performances splayed out for sale: “The unique ways Beuys formed ensembles of his work for individual collectors.” The forlorn Felt Suit on the wall, the signed photo of him striding toward us, but not his presence [and no, 40 years later We are (still, unfortunately) not the revolution]. Video of the performance is not the same as the felt action of the performance. I can’t sit through it , but it has a fitting title: I like America and America likes me. Evidently.

I wrote a draft of a poem post-MOMA trip, but since my girlfriend didn’t even “get” it, I won’t subject you to the whole thing, just the last few minimalist lines:

.........Frog Pond turns into a giant temple
.........Made of “allure.” I had to
.........Leave!

Poem 10 – The Policy on the Free Exchange of Ideas

2009-10-28T11:05:00.016-04:00

There is something impure about the gullet or
Veined-through surface, a room without
Transitive verbs or furniture terrified of the monochrome
Façade that scrapes up, brushing close in repetitive
Windows, ledges and siblings

Wary of having my photo taken with him
Demonized as a dangerous liberal 
More erasure followed here

She still makes the strong one weep
With No Respect to Electrostatic Interactions  
The ex-drinker drinks, ex-smoker smokes
Purely placing value on certain Runs Scored
By the National Education Center for Conforming

This book you hold is stored behind glass in the Pompidou
By lowtech ways like freezing yourself or the laws
Of special relativity

Secrecy is a sometimes necessary tactic
In anticipation of power-sharing
What relic dusts the molecule’s crystallographic center  
Which it would undermine by “liberalizing”

Well-plac’d Zeal
Zipping around near the speed of light
Your Cloth and Character comes in Paranthesis! [sic]

Can you believe marbled halls to kill readers where they stalk?
We rescued hominids from sad dressing
Between Supramolecules

To progress is a man, but this lesson is the landing witness
Decrease the amount of time you experience elapsing
You fail.
Where had those frames dived?

Poem 9 – Love in the archive

2009-10-20T18:10:00.026-04:00

(for Kate)

My lumberjack shirt is speaking among the bubbles
took them out of the liberry
working nostalgia like a new glove

The hour itself is lace, nipple of the clock
if cup if
me swallow you crouched on their capital
all over again is

Diving the absurd mostly when it makes sense
of your early work to see rough
through the layers sick higher
real women, big dimensions
from the point-of-view of a refined vampire

And oh how you women who are sealed
this hand over and this pass on
your pain management system a Morse piano
the human is easy happenstance fault of being
flesh and heart and liver and lungs and sweat

How dangerous this which skirts
between so real it lights up the clover
twisted no name, no hat
amid the mystic fields of
I wander'd and beheld a grove

Impermanent force
that changes how a system
evolves with time and should
I not have had I might have
rusted in the forest

Yours are looking exceptionally
interesting tonight
the original paintjob
shows through

Might I check out
that little ridge there?

Statement to MFA workshop October 13

2009-10-15T11:58:00.004-04:00

Tolerance Project Coordinator Rachel Zolf read out the statement below to her MFA workshop class on October 13, 2009:

This presentation is supposed to be about an Issue in Writing, I have materials for us to look at and discuss, but in the past few days an issue has been raised by another teacher in the program in regards to my MFA project, and it seems I haven’t been clear enough about my project, so I’d like to clear that up first. In order to do that I have to be very clear about the context behind my project. I think this will provoke a good discussion, so please bear with me while I outline the context.

On the first day of class we had about a minute to tell the class about ourselves and our work. I quickly explained that because of the discriminatory laws of the US federal government, when my female partner got a job as a tenure track professor at [university name edited out], I was unable to legally move with her from Toronto to New York, because our relationship is not recognized by US immigration authorities. I had to obtain a visa to stay here by some other means, and the only real choice was becoming a student. Hence my appearance in this MFA program, even though I am an award-winning mid-career poet with four books published by established literary presses and my work taught on graduate level English lit classes in several universities in North America.

Now obviously it is a strange situation for all of us to have me in this class. But it’s important to note that my situation is not unique in some ways. I have a number of other peers with multiple books and who have taught in colleges for years who are also being forced to go back to school and get the MFA credential that has become essential to getting any creative writing teaching work in North America. There is a big critique in the literary community about this, because as you well know, writers generally have to go into huge debt in order to pay for the MFA. The critique of the MFA as a disciplining institution acting as a cash cow for university endowment programs has been going on for years, and is in fact kind of clichéd.

Back to the one minute intro from the first day, I also told you I was working on a conceptual writing project where 85 writers, artists and thinkers from across North America had donated written and visual material to me, and that I would make poems for the MFA from this material. I also said I had a blog for this project. What I didn’t have time to say is that my project is called The Tolerance Project, and it is using the constraint of having to make poems only from the donated material as a means to examine the constraints that I have had to go through and am operating under in order to be here in the US and in this MFA program. I am of course here in this class partly because the US federal government doesn’t “tolerate” queer people. It was only the other day that Congress finally decided that killing people just because they’re queer actually is a hate crime, and they seem to be approaching the thought of repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, so that, as Philly poet CA Conrad quipped at an event last night, the US military can finally put rainbow stickers on tanks and machine guns. My point is that the US government is very far from recognizing my same-sex relationship and enabling me to live here freely with my partner on the spousal visa that I would have easily received if I had been a man.

Obviously you can gather that a key aspect of my work is its political content. But I’ve always approached that work through polyvocality and the use of investigative documentary sources and practices. I never have just one voice and stance in my poems; they are always multiple and generated from large archives of collected research material. The book I have coming out in the spring is on Israel-Palestine and has only three phrases in it made by “me.” The rest is all collaged from human rights documents, books and other sources. Hence the reason that The Tolerance Project is framed as a collaborative project, where I have collected an archive of material to work with. I don’t believe in originality or the supremacy of the authorial voice. I agree with Walt Whitman that we each contain multitudes, multiple voices framed by our interactions with the various people, technologies, media and institutions that we deal with every day, and I let those multitudes be on the page.

I’m not sure if any of you has gone to my blog over the past six weeks since the start of the program. The blog was easy to find by googling me, and it was never meant to be a secret. The reason I have a blog is so that the 85 people who contributed to the project can see when I have used their donation in a poem. I have given every donor a barcode and post the barcodes used after the poem so they can check and see if their barcode has come up. They get barcodes not just to play up the DNA aspect of them contributing a poetic trace of themselves, but also so that the donors remain anonymous until the end of the project. This is intentional so that no one is distracted by reading the poem through the lens of a particular recognized author’s name. I truly see these poems as collaborations and have had some fascinating discussions regarding originality and subjectivity as a result of the comments made in the comments section of the blog and elsewhere. The blog encourages the public to make comments and give feedback on the poems, with the aim of my revising the poems based on cumulative feedback as an aspect of the final MFA thesis. I guess you could say it’s kind of a like a reality tv show for poets.

The key problem that seems to have arisen unbeknownst to me is regarding my taking the constructive criticism that you put on the poems I brought to class and putting this criticism on the blog in a completely anonymous form. I never assumed this would be a problem, and if there was a problem I assumed that people in the class who went to the blog would have told me. So for example, for the poem, “the Tradition,” the one on breastfeeding and all the chemicals in the milk, I wrote on the blog all of the workshop feedback I thought would be constructive to start with in terms of revising the poem. Here’s exactly what I wrote preceding that poem (btw, since this controversy I have taken down all the comments and we can discuss that more in a minute):
 

Some comments on Poem 2: “Poem has too much repetitions. It grates on listener’s/reader’s ear”; “a little preachy...look at tuning some passages of melodrama”; “I almost wanted to see some less robotic mixing in the beginning”; “I think plain, clear language could make it stronger, ie cut the repetition of not really me and simply refer to it as a child…it gets worn from overuse”; “hmmm very both motherhood and sex, lube and oils, perhaps just my reading”; “'economics and labor time and biology' could be too direct”; “reminds me of The Talking Heads’ 'Heaven'”;“'Hand this over./Pass this on' feels a little chain-letter like to me”; “'raisons' as intentional misspelling?”;“Follows some directions of the 'contemporary' canon, but explosive”; “Suggests the speaker is a kind of machine, so the speaker is the engine oil, what needs the additive.” 

So that’s an example of what I would write preceding a poem (and just for the record, I don’t have a child). I deliberately didn’t post the positive comments, because they don’t really help in the revising process. The aim was that the online public would look at the poem and the comments and make more comments on the poem, that it would open up the workshopping of the project poems beyond just the few voices here. And that I could show donors actual critique on their poetic donations from relatively unbiased MFA students. Many donors are established poets from earlier generations that didn’t have to take an MFA in order to teach. So the project plays with the interesting fact that many of the people of earlier generations that are teaching poetry workshops have never actually undergone the workshop process themselves. In fact, one thing I like about being here is learning from established writers like [name edited out] how to teach these types of classes.

Given that all the comments were completely anonymous and blurred together as a collective response, I had no idea it would be violating the “privacy” and “sanctity” of the MFA workshop, as I have recently been told. I’ve never been in an institutional workshop. In fact, the only workshop I’ve ever taken was a two-day one almost 20 years ago where I actually wrote my first poem. I worked on my poems and books first with carefully matched mentors, then with peers and peer editors. I have also edited a number of books of poetry myself and was the founding poetry editor for The Walrus magazine, which is like a New Yorker or Harper’s for Canada.

The focus of my project is not this particular MFA. The blog doesn’t even name where the MFA is taking place, as what is most important for my project is that it is a collaborative take on the MFA as an institution within larger state apparatuses. That is the key concept behind my project, a deconstruction of how “authors” and “voices” are created through the process of the MFA, linked with how difference is “tolerated” (or not) in general in the US. I wanted to provoke a look at how the MFA works as a process, by deliberately blowing up the authorial creation and feedback process beyond this room. There is a long tradition in the art world of looking at the workings of art institutions such as art museums and art collecting practices and the creation of the artist as a commodity. In fact, if you remember the poem I brought last week about Adrienne Rich and the form letter…that is from my book Human Resources that looks at capitalist and corporate structures and even has a poem about famous American conceptual artist Andrea Fraser videotaping herself having sex with a collector for $20,000 and displaying the tape in an art gallery. How's that for an exposure of art as a commodifying institution?

I apologize if I haven’t been clear enough re my project. That was unintentional. In fact I wish we had more time in this workshop structure to describe each of our projects and ask each other questions. Now I’d like to ask you how you feel about your constructive feedback being used in my project, and if you would object to it being posted on the blog. Another alternative if that seems too public is I could post the anonymous constructive criticism in a more private space like my Facebook page and only give access to “friends,” ie my project collaborators and other literary colleagues interested in the project. Or if any of you didn’t want me to post your comments on Facebook either, that would be fine. Just let me know.

So to be clear, right now the poems I’ve brought to this class and my lit class are posted by themselves, with their barcodes. I have pulled the comments that came out of the classes off the blog. I’ve put them for now in a note on Facebook that is only accessible to my Facebook friends, but I can remove specific comments by specific individuals if need be.

I’d also of course feel very happy if any of you wanted to contribute to the reality poetry show with even more comments on the poems posted in the comments section on the blog. I put a call out that I particularly welcomed “asshole” contributions, given that if you know anything about the comment sections on poets’ blogs, they have always been seething pits of assholeness. That’s partly why I wanted to have a blog for this project, to draw the assholes out, and expose them a bit. But so far they’re laying low.

Anyway, I hope that clears things up a bit.

ATTENTION READERS

2009-10-11T14:01:00.007-04:00

It has come to our attention by way of certain powerful and influential authorities that the sanctity of the MFA workshop has seemingly been violated by our having posted anonymous constructive criticism on Tolerance Project poems that originated from said MFA workshop. This news is distressing to us, given that we made a solemn pledge at the outset of this project that “NO MFA STUDENTS WILL BE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS PROJECT.” In humble response to the possibly egregious effects of our unconscious error, we have removed said constructive comments from this web log. Henceforth, solely the poems in their nakedness plus barcodes will be posted here, so that the 85 writers, artists, thinkers, tenured professors, famous--and infamous--poets (some tenured too), bartenders, coders, wrestlers, revolutionaries and MFA workshop instructors who have donated their poetic DNA to The Tolerance Project can still be made aware of when and how their traces have been activated.

The task now falls to you, the online public, to generate the helpful feedback needed for us to edit the poems posted here and create the best MFA thesis ever. We’re confident that you can still accomplish that task sans the constructive influence of our MFA compatriots.

If you have further queries, please contact The Tolerance Project Coordinator at thetoleranceproject[at]gmail.com.

Poem 8 – Hooked on Haibun

2009-10-10T16:32:00.024-04:00

The assignment was to write a Haibun, a Japanese form combining prose and poetry. We had been wondering how to utilize the two weird gynecological texts some guy donated, so here's a bit of DNA from them in dialogue with other vaginal traces in the Archive. The "Birth Fygvres" image from one of the gynecological tracts was placed on the back of the poem page.

Hooked on Haibun

Congenital defects were believed to be caused by thoughts and events that occurred to the mother during pregnancy. Mothers suspected of having engaged in perverse activities. Some methods used by midwives were covering windows and locking doors to protect from evil spirits. Difficult labour sometimes aided by dangerous “hooks” to remove the child. They kept the nature of the instrument a secret for nearly a century.

If it happens from defect of the spirits
let it be rubbed, the spirits aroused
flowing to the painful part

But if this retention is of another humor, that is hot and dry and called bile, then women feel burning and pricking of heat inside, and their urine is of a high color and greasy; and at the time of their purgation they excrete toxic matter like coal, waters a feeble color smell slightly.

Where had the vagina searched?
Why was the vagina of velocity gathering?
Why were we swerving?

There are corrupt humors in the womb outside the veins in the hollowness of the uterus, and they hinder women. And they feel heaviness. And there is much tending to. And they fly up to the heart and lungs. Hot about the mouth of the womb. Dark yellow and greasy. Inside and aching, pricking and hardness.

So existing a vulva
(so additional a sheet)
sounds

Poem 7 – Adrienne Rich used the Communicating Bad News Template...

2009-10-07T10:15:00.011-04:00

Poem 6 – Frog I

2009-10-01T16:45:00.013-04:00

Somehow the Project Coordinator neglected to post this a couple weeks back. The assignment was to write a reduction (drastically edited version) of a poem, and this lovely donation to the archive fit the bill perfectly all by its truncated lonesome. Ah, the simple plaisirs of the search engine.

Frog 1

Missing back left leg.
Missing back right leg.
Extra foot growing out of back left leg.
Extra back right leg.
Deformed back left leg.
Unabsorbed tail.
Extra left leg.
Extra and deformed left leg.
One eyed.
Tail unabsorbed.
Missing left leg.
Deformed tail.

sing back .ft leg
sing back .ht leg
ex fff rows back .ft leg
ex k right leg
dorm back .ft leg
tadpole t. ever ab
ex .ft leg
mm .ft leg
one eyed fff
ail un.sorb
sing .ft leg
form tail

Poem 5 – Revenga

2009-10-01T00:00:00.032-04:00

The assignment was to compose a renga, a Japanese collaborative poetic form. On September 30, The Tolerance Project Coordinator Rachel Zolf joined brains with classmates Ray DeJesus & David Blasco to output the following. Zolf's lines were naturally generated from The Tolerance Project Archive using Ray & David's words as search terms. Poetic DNA barcodes below as usual. Truly a testament to the collaborative potential of the MFA in Creative Writing.

Revenga

The airplane's strings, taut
The unforeseeable future

telephone on board

& the plucky errand boy
draws battery diagrams

the conceptual framework

pulled from A to Zone

point-of-view of a puppet

that ace in the hole uphill

downhill a mug that cries foul

but wait, we’re moving

seems a train across the way

& dry circumstance

as if thought were sufficient

as if we needed the plan

transfigured memory

a bottle of tequila

like a mouth to flame

electroplated handsets

used the provided seat belts

over your shoulder

republic as in the air

that sort of conduct

the burnt body of water

pair of earrings to return

flexible substrates

indifferent to the trials

in shifts of vowel

fixtures slid in quietly

sink below the frank handcuff

slouched to form in shriek

fast hands slip as a week wanes

toys the size of bricks

a bit in your mouth, the moon

falls into the lake—stay there

Plato made his dogs

wander the house of women

a kind of death cough

traction and embraces

dazzling cursive in bold

the black slip in dots

wrestling to become a find

the wires touch at twelve

frightening to dash in light

comfort to dodge high noon smoke

& wouldn’t it be

better to spill in attics

cancel the bake sale

this has meant nothing to me

the truth in a joke, to dig

the broke wrist of beds

sticking to basement hung

a baseball thrown low

sticking forks into flat cakes

a callous giggle alone

Poem 4 – Bissextile

2009-09-29T21:56:00.013-04:00

The assignment was an erasure poem. This Bickerstaffian donation called out for the white-out.

Poem 3 – Untitled love poem

2009-09-23T11:47:00.011-04:00

Poem 2 – the Tradition

2009-09-16T11:04:00.009-04:00

I hold out my hand.
I hand over
and I pass on.
I hold out my hand.
I hold out my hand.
I hand over
and I pass on.
Some call this mothering,
this way I begin each day by holding out my hand and then all day long pass on.
Some call this caretaking,
this way all day and all night long, I hold out my hand and take engine oil additive into me and then I pass on this engine oil additive to this other thing that once was me, this not really me.
This soothing obligation
This love.
This hand over
and this pass on.
This part of me and this not really me.
This me and engine oil additive.
This me and not really me and engine oil additive.
Back and forth.
All day long, like a lion I lie where I will with not really me
and I bestow upon not really me
refractive index testing oils and wood preservatives.
I lie with not really me all day long,
and so I bequeath not really me a honeyed wine of flame retardants and fire preventing agents.
I make a milk like nectar,
a honeyed nectar of capacitator dielectrics, dyes, and electrical insulation
and I pass it on it every two hours to not really me.
Not really me is a ram perched on a cliff above a stream,
unable to be quenched by the flame retardant in furniture.
Not really me comes near
and takes a nectar of insulated pipes, and some industrial paints.
Later I pass the breast cup to not really me,
a breast cup filled with sound insulation panels and imitation wood with a little nectar and sweetness.
And not really me drinks it and then complains a little,
rebuking me for my cakes of nuts and raisons
are cakes of extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas,
for my apples are filled with televisions and windshield wiper blades.
On my breast are the curls of not really me
and against the brow of not really me wafts plasticizer used in heat transfer systems.
As drinking not really me takes in anger and in need
not really me drinks from the hand of that sweetest sleep the juice of me
that cup of adhesives,
that cup of fire retardants,
of pesticide extenders.
And as not really me drinks
I cradle the moon and not really me in my right hand
my lips kissing with the dedusting agents and wax extenders.
Then later in the night,
the bed scattered with the stains of cutting oils and gas-transmission turbines,
the blankets with blends of hydraulic fluid,
we lie there together
handing over and passing on
filled up and attempting to think our way through
economics and labor and time and biology
me and not really me
together.

2.

I’d like to think we had agreed upon this together,
that we had a tradition,
that we agreed these things explained us to us
but when not really me wakes
after drinking the pharmaceuticals and photo chemicals
night after night
and day after day
not really me will sing a song of rebuke,
sing the song of not really me, the song that
goes like Salutations to brominated fire retardants of Koppers Ind.
goes like Salutations to water/oil repellent paper coating of 3M
goes like Salutations to wiper blades of Asahi
goes like Salutations to bike chain lubricant of Clariant International
goes like Salutations to wire and cable insulation of Daikin
goes like Salutations to pharmaceutical packaging of DuPont
goes like Salutations to nail polish of Dyneon
goes like Salutations to engine oil additive of Agrevo E
goes like Salutations to hair curling and straightening of Agsin Ptd. Ltd.
goes like Salutations to insecticide and termiticide for empty greenhouses of Chevron Chemical
goes like Salutations to greenhouse flowers of Monsanto
goes like Salutations to insecticide to kill fire ants of Rigo Co.
goes like Salutations to plasticizers of US Borax Inc.
Not really me’s song will go on and on.
Not really me will sing it all night long
hour after hour for weeks on end.
It will have eighty five company names in it.
It will have twenty one chemical functions in it.
It will have ninety seven products in it.
It will have two hundred trade names in it.
Not really me’s song will rotate through these names in all their combinations.
And then it will end with another part that is as long as the first
and inventories the chemicals that not really me does not yet know.

3.

Oh those of you who are not really me at all
I say let wisdom be your anvil and knowledge your hammer.
Hand this over.
Pass this on.

Poem 1 – A limit laid down

2009-09-09T14:17:00.007-04:00

The assignment was to meditate on a single word using the Oxford English Dictionary. One could probably guess what word popped to mind.

A limit laid down

Intercommunity of various sentiments

Na persoun sould intromet thairwith

Satisfied the curiosity of the astonished black

And Naked shaking to shew his indulgence

Flourishing despite infection with the sleeping sick

Capacity of a tree to endure catholicity of spirit

Tamarack, Poplar, Bird Cherry, White and Black

Ash borne without producing gastric symptoms

To decorate with all the splendor of panegyric

Trees give way as water drops below standard fineness

Throwing a veil over the deformities of a product parameter

Imperfection with the instrumentality of Perfection

Under control, or to use a more Christian word, charity

How the metal cools and can be withdrawn

To what extent “dancing girls” forbears euphemism

No such thing as a literally harmless dose of radiation

Fragments

2009-09-04T16:01:00.012-04:00

Still working diligently on the poems for next week's workshop, but another assignment is to keep a diary of fragments for our minimalist literature class. Here's a taste from the archive and this eventful week. Barcodes at bottom of post.

She’s

BACK

to school

get some

[valuable]

skills. skeeoos.

Orientation:

I like to write about people that are really flawed
I like to write about urban space and love
I like to write about religion and identity

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax

It’s exactly

an exact

exit

Which slender and hollow do you mean?

Malaprops:

Manual of fact
Confession stand
Ear confection
Incompossible
Homodernist
Septical

I write about being broke and blue collar and baking –

things that start with b

Snow on top

When the dark clouds part

Rain of pink petals

Our loss is dog’s heaven’s gain

Oil Floats—

Bloats

American Man:

I try to write about everyday relationships in a harsh but endearing way

I want to touch your eyes

a lamp sporting erotic characters

grief in a box

Brain, ball, spiral, maze, fractal, fist.

“The emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings.”

I try to write something quirky and heartbreaking

Outlying the dense

Capture and effusion of

Meaning our fall from

Identity will convert us

Our touching the images

I tend to write about people getting murdered

That are us fallen from us

Remote control pride has had fifteen whips.

Read Canadian poems; have half-flapped waffles;

random cankers pierced; homicidal hasbeens fly witless.

Xerox sweet poems: have fotocopies wept?

Xerox sucky poems: have fotocopies wounded?

Xerox shitty poems: have fotocopy warriors.

je parle hebrew verse in full visionary kandour.

je parle hedonistic verse in favoured vector koordinates.

I’m done writing about Calcutta and am looking for the next thing

jejune pretty hate verse into fowl vicious kurses.

domestic isolation & capital’s reach

“our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people”

ritual provides a context in which beauty is possible

leathery, green, & shiny

plucked & dried

2 hours ago

Moribund Facekvetch is si dnubirom, o lonely tylenol.

2 hours ago

George Murray is asking himself, How do I work this? And George Murray is asking himself, Where is that large automobile?

3 hours ago

Judy MacDonald is on the internets too much. And Facebook wants to help her stop.

4 hours ago

Faustine Faubert is swearing this much is true.

My writing tends to be about spirituality and people like myself who are in their late 20s and coming to age extremely late in life and how that dovetails with urban decay in small-town America

4 hours ago

Jesse Hirsh is still fuct.

4 hours ago

Dave Murphy is feeling particlarly hirsute on these hot days.

5 hours ago

Trina Langille is going to have her husband's company in San Francisco next week.

5 hours ago

Kate Armstrong is in a borrowed cubicle.

5 hours ago

Lisa Sloniowski is weighing the options.

NEW YORK IS POSSIBILITY

THE NEW SCHOOL

IS NEW YORK

Dear Bob Grenier, I don’t know if you remember but we read together at New Yipes in Oakland a couple years ago. I think you called me a revolutionary and said I reminded you of Allen Ginsberg. Anyway, here is a call for a new project of mine. I would love it if you would donate, particularly because I have to take a Minimalist Mystique class this fall and don’t have much talent in minimalist forms!

Back to school

2009-08-27T22:15:00.004-04:00

Eighty-odd writers, artists and thinkers have donated their poetic traces to The Tolerance Project, a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing that launches September 2009. Dust off your pencil cases and get ready for back to school!

How The Tolerance Project works

Each poetic trace donated to The Tolerance Project has been assigned its own barcode. Each poem written for the MFA will employ traces from the donated traces. The MFA poems will be restricted to The Tolerance Project Archive (which also includes the Office of Institutional Research and the Department of Communications and External Affairs) for their content.

MFA poems written for class will be posted on this blog. The online public is welcome to use the comments field to give constructive feedback on the poems. Based on cumulative feedback received within and without the institution, the MFA poems will be scrupulously revised toward the creation of The Writing Thesis.

Barcodes for the traces used will appear at the end of each MFA poem post, so that donors can monitor when their trace has been activated. Barcode identities will be revealed at the end of The Tolerance Project, by which time an aspect of each piece of donated poetic DNA will have been happily redeployed.

Please feel welcome to give your feedback on the poems posted here. Heaven knows we need all the help we can get.