Alvin Lucier:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

Listen to it.

via Kottke

Ron Silliman posits some interesting notes for future reference:

So I have no idea what the Teens will involve, nor even how long they might last. But I think we’re taking the first small step forward later this month – Rick Warren or no Rick Warren – and it promises to be one hell of a luge ride.

The poetry we will have once it’s over will turn out to be completely adequate to that world then. Which probably means that flarf will look quite dated & that conceptual poetics will be its own cul-de-sac of retro-sentimentalism. Langpo will seem as distant as Imagism. And the School of Quietude will act as if nothing has happened. But I think for any poet in their twenties or thirties – and for us oldsters who are still awake – there are tremendous challenges ahead. The Chinese may have intended it as a curse, but we live in interesting times indeed. And they’re about to get curiouser.

Read the full post to get an idea of the context of this summation. The 60s, those damn 60s, like nothing ever happened since, or like everything happened, or like nothing ever happened ever, depending who you talk to.

Posted all the way back in 2001 according to the website. Contains poetry from:

• Paul Celan
• Steve McCaffery
• Pablo Picasso
• Jerome Rothenberg

It’s great stumbling across such things on the internet, just like walking into a library with no fixed purpose, letting the aisles guide you to hidden treasures.

Marcus Slease’s thoughts on what 2009 could hold. Yes, it does mention Openned, and very kindly too, but it’s the ideas about community and what could be created that interest me most.

Primary Information is a non-profit organization devoted to printing artists books, artist writings, out of print publications and editions. Primary Information was founded by James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff, who met while working at Printed Matter, a non-profit artist bookstore in New York. United by their mutual interest in artist publications, they formed Primary Information to foster intergenerational dialogue as well as to aid in the creation of new publications and editions.

Al Filreis, fast becoming one of my favourite bloggers, on the notion of non-commercial:

Is the key quality (number 1 in the attributes list in dictionary definition, e.g.) of “noncommercial” expression that it be unremunerative or that it be out of the mainstream? (This is a more difficult question than it seems to be at first.)

A short but intriguing post that I’d like to hear more about.

This is by Márton Koppány. You can read Geof Huth’s reading of it over on dbqp, but I’d recommend spending some time with it yourself first.

It appears that the festive period does not apply to poetry, with feverish blog posting and site updating occurring even on Christmas Day. Below is a summary of the most interesting fings what ‘appened between Christmas and New Year.

• Goodbye Harold Pinter
• Playing games (video games?)
• The Other Room (video of December’s reading) and some feedback
• Holocaust love
• Happy Birthday JD Salinger
• Cell-phone fiction
• Rumours, rumours, rumours, and more on the rumours
• Al Filreis on David Bunn
• K. Silem Mohammad reads at Columbia University in December 2008
• Source Material
• Visual poetry
• Jean Dubuffet at IBM
• Celan, Celan

Normal service resumes on Openned from today, so expect a flurry of posts in the coming week to catch up with all that’s been missed.

Eat the meat.

Someone got paid to make this. In the Whitehouse.

Then we’d see who does it because they love it:

Western governments have spent many billions bailing out the banks in these crunched-up-credit days; and the US motor car industry is, even as I blog, begging the US govt for billions more in similar subvention. The next move? Paul Greenberg, writing for the New York Times, thinks that governments should put billions into paying writers not to write.

via RHUL Creative Writers Weblog

enemy6

Sweet Old Etcetera

gamegame6

via Vispo

By Bill Drennan, over at Otoliths.

An absolutely massive thing edited by Eileen Tablos:

Presenting engagements (including reviews) of poetry projects. Some issues also offer Featured Poets selected primarily by guest editors, a “The Critic Writes Poems” series, and/or Feature Articles.

Index to issues.