Poeting Readerty: 7+1

Come join us for a mashup of poems, batteries included.

Hosted by Inter(media)te Poetry
@ Hillel Building
on Brown St. next to English Dept.
on May 12th 2008
@ 3:30p-5:30p

Reception to follow..so Holler.

So How's the Chappy?!

Dear everybody,
Lets spend the rest of our
last days together working
on the chapbook, individual
meetings, and tightening the
work. If you have any concerns
regarding format--this seems
to be the overall concern: how
to organize the work into sections
even if they seem totally unrelated.
Thats ok, that's why there's a table
of contents to warn whoever has
their eyes on it. If you feel the need
to keep writing, do so and I can give
feedback through email as we will
not longer be critiquing poems in class.
For this Monday we'll meet at the usual
classroom and walk over to RISD to check
out Kenneth Goldsmith's collection of trash,
more like found poetic scraps on the street for
your pleasure. Then we can also head over
to the RISD Fleet Library & take a peek at the
"Text-Message poetry" collection though it
doesn't involve cellphones. We could disperse
throughout the library and send each other
text-messages if u like.

yours,
feliz

The Gilles Poems: Winter 2006 Collection by Sabrina Calle

Dear Class,
Being that we meet only 3 more times,
once during reading period, I thought
it'd be better to go through all the work
you've written so far in the semester
and possibly edit and/or continue.
Also, organize your writing and bring
in copies of drafts or what you consider
final pieces for next class. Bring just one
copy to me for review and for our individual
meetings we'll take a look at them to see
where parts can use tightening. We'll use
the two meetings times to prepare for
the culmination of a "chapbook" or consider
it hardcopy bundle of writings for reference,
something to build from if you decide to go
further into poetry for practice and/or pleasure.
So for the next two class meetings we'll continue
to critique your work and for the final meeting.
Spend the rest of this time revising and writing.

Also, there is one last proposal if you are interested,
which we'll talk about in class.

So basically:

1. Gather your work from this semester.
2. Start revising & continue writing.
3. Bring in one copy to class of all your work so far.
4. We will go over your work during individual meetings.
5. Don't stress out!!
6. Let it be fun, its poetry.
7. Start reading Sabrina Calle's "The Gilles Poems: Winter 2006 Collection"
8. optional: Text-message a small poem to someone, wait for reply.

yours,
Feliz

What's a Readable Life?: write in front or around the TV.

some background from Rankine:
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Rankine/Rankine-Claudia_Major-Jackson_Lunch-Talk_UPenn_4-07-06.mp3

from Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely:

"My mother tells me I am just biding time. She means it as a push towards not biding time. She wants me to lead a readable life- one that can be read as worthwhile...".

Assignment: these are mere options. If you come come up with a constraint or other way please feel free and share the process in class.


"Mr. Tools had the ultimate tool in his body. He felt its heaviness. The weight on his heart was his heart. All his apparatus--artificial heart, energy coil, battery, and controller--weighed more than four pounds. The whirr if you are not Mr. Tools is detectable only with a stethoscope. For Mr. Tools, that whirr was his sign that he was alive."

a.)
1. Select a part of the writing you've underlined or can imagine underlining.
2. Deconstruct this line/paragraph and write further into it: take the content and get "behind the scenes" of it by stretching any concept and/or image. Create another surface based on line or paragraph.
3. This would be an attempt to internalize the text by creating another layer.
4. Incorporate the material functions of the TV that make its phenomenon possible and enfold them into feelings, perceptions, memories that involved TV at any time in your life.
5. Find a way to "soften the hard scientific mechanics of the TV" by pairing feeling or emotions with its physical properties.

* If you have a stethoscope or can get your hands on one, listen to your heartbeat.
Listen to your heartbeat and write with it.

b.)
1. Write an "Ode to TV"
2. In however form you think appropriate.

c.)
1. Watch any sport.
2. Play with classical music or a poem.
3. Maybe this would help to inspire any poetic shocks.

d.)
Write whatever comes to mind with or without a TV.

Getting Back Into the Page

For next class Ben, Brice, and Mike will
present their projects for the first part
of it. Afterwards we will look at poems.
For this week there will be no constraints.
Simply write a poem. Just thought it'd be
a good move away from the weekly writing
exercises and into a place where you can
walk around without being told how to do so.
Also refer to the given chapters of
Chogyam Trungpa's "Dharma Art". I was
hoping that this simple reading would encourage
you to think about what motivates your writing,
to be somewhat conscious of what influences the
form and content. Also try reading the poem aloud
alone or to someone whom you think would be able
to give you a second thought on how it sounds.
Write for yourself, write for someone you love,
write to whatever it is that moves you and follow
the line wherever it goes. I think we've gone far
enough for now involving other medias or what
not, through constraints and the mid-term. So now
we're going to find our way back onto plain paper..

yours,
Feliz

Just something to enjoy on Mute.

Midterm: Make an audio or visual Object out of what a Poem is trying to say.

an image of build it yourself 3-d printer at:
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/03/cheap-3d-printer-update.html
playdoh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play-Doh

"... by a continual unbroken investigation he releases from within himself what is already there; creation is self-multiplication[...] To reach utterance, all speech envelops itself in the unspoken[...] This moment of absence founds the speech of the work. Silence shapes all speech. Banality? Can we say that silence is hidden?[...] a point of departure[...] culmination[...] Can we make this silence speak? What is the unspoken saying? What does it mean?[...] Can something that has hidden itself be recalled to our presence? Silence is the source of expression. Is really what I am not saying what I am not saying? [...] Yet the unspoken has many other resources: it assigns speech to its exact position, designating its domain. By speech, silence becomes the center and principle of expression, its vanishing point. Speech eventually has nothing more to tell us: we investigate the silence, for it is the silence that is doing the speaking[...] It is not the sole meaning, but that which endows meaning with meaning: it is this silence which tells us- not just anything[...] informs us of the the conditions for the appearance of an utterance[...] What is important in the work is what it does not say[...] a method might be built on it, with the task of measuring silences, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged. But rather than this, what the work cannot say is important, because there the elaboration of of the utterance is acted out, in a sort of journey to silence."
-Pierre Macherey

The idea is to make an object (audio or visual or both) from a specific poem or as a culmination of a poet's work. Consider the attempt as its own genre within literary production. The kind of production we've been looking at and practicing so far has been limited to what is considered poetry. Instead of having to produce any or write anything more, make an object as either 1.) an extension of a poem. 2.) reflection of a poem. 3.) echo of poem. 4.) a limited accumulation of a poet's body of work. 5.) an interpretation of a poem or poet's style. 6.) an attempt to physically solidify form and/or content of a poem. 7.) give physical or abstract dimension, texture, shape to the form and/or content of a poem. 8.) attribute physical characteristics to a poem or line. 9.) replace every word in a poem with an object. 10.) listen to the cadence and pitch of the verse and replace every vowel with a musical note; a notation based strictly on the range of vowels. If you'd like to add to the list of possibilties, please feel free. You may also construct your own contraint without having to justify it--simply use it as a field to make an object. The structure is inasmuch a property of the object which can be considered an imitation or interpretation of the poem itself. However way you choose to designate the drive behind the attempt to construct an object directly from the language of a poem. In using the language, consider it through its basic progressive gears: alphabet, syllables, vowels, sentence, punctuation, syntax, and so forth. How might an object function as a center of silence? Let the materials to make an object serve as individial types of utterances during the construction. Choose the materials the way you would words to write a poem. Perhaps texture= utterance.

*For presentations we'll display the objects and look at them. First, we'll talk about the process and if you'd like, reveal to us the poet or poem.

Have a Lovely Spring Break..

yours,
Feliz