Thursday 8 January, 2009 E·ratio 11. Poetry by:
Thursday 8 January, 2009 Sunday 18th January, 3 - 5pm
Wednesday 7 January, 2009 in Allen Fisher [wpvideo r9k4DyMG] Download edited transcript (PDF, 44KB) Extract 3: Edited Transcript Steve: It might be interesting to phrase this question from Paige in relation to what we've been talking about. Alex: ‘You are Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, and as a mature student trained formally as an artist. You began making visual work long before then, from the beginning of your career as an artist-printer. But your artwork is rarely seen and is probably only accessible as illustrations in or covers for books by other poets. Can you tell us a little about the relationships between your written and visual work, especially with reference to the concepts 'facture' and ‘collage’? What are the aesthetic links, if any, between your conceptual art, such as 'Printing Days', visual publications such as 'Amnesic Instant' and more recent work, such as the big painting series, 'Views of the City', and works on paper such as the 'Meditation Traps' and the 'Scattered Studies'? Who are the artists who have most influenced your aesthetic development?’ Allen: First of all talking about the relationship between writing and visual work is quite hard and [there’s] a wide range of questions that need to be asked. One is a sort of day to day energetic question. What I find is that at certain times I feel in a better mood to write than to paint or vice versa, and that is to do with energy. I can actually be too exhausted to write, but I can stand up and paint, because the physicality is quite different. Even though the mental activity might be similar, there's a physical difference which is important. That's one of the relationships that I find important. Alex: Do you literally mean in terms of your body position? Allen: Yeah, it's to do with posture and muscles.
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Allen: Then there's another relationship which is to do with... which is hard for me to articulate - it needs others to help me. I've got a whole series of paintings that relate to Gravity, and then all of a sudden you go 'just a minute I've used vocabularies that crop up in the writing' and there must be a relationship here that I haven't analysed.✂
Steve: I've been working with a musician recently, and he talks a lot about non-verbal concepts. As a poet that's incredibly hard for me to get my head around. Is that the level you work at with your painting? Allen: Yeah, I do. However, because I'm a poet I still maintain it is verbalising - although I wouldn't use a terrible word like that again. But it's not in a way that you first of all expect, not as an explanation or as an event of that kind, it might just be a parallel experience, but in writing. It's difficult. Just trying to grab up this question - one of things Paige mentions here is 'Printing Days'. That's not easily reproducible. It's a set of, let’s say, A2 sheets. Every time I finished printing on a letter press, which was late 60s, early 70s, I rolled out the roller, cleaned up what I’d done so the roller was clean, and I got attracted to that movement - the roller creates this sort of mark as the ink's running out. So every time I did it I dated it, and just had a whole set of them, and it was contemporary with or just after I'd seen work by Barnett Newman, called 'Cantos', which is a series of prints that have a similar shape to them... probably don't look anything like them - but I sort of don't remember whether they do or not. That answers two parts. I was influenced by people who do things in series, and I quite enjoy that. It's not the only way I've been influenced by art, but I enjoy the way Jasper Johns uses series... other examples - there must be hundreds. Steve: There's book arts as well, like Ed Ruscha. Allen: I'm quite keen on series of paintings. The term might be 'project-ing'. I think that's where my best work is, always, it's organised that way, planned as a series. [Goes back to the question] The relationship between the written and the visual, concepts of ‘facture’ and ‘collage’... I think we've touched collage pretty well, so let's not reiterate that unless you think we should. Alex: Give us something about 'facture'. Allen: Facture came out of a discussion with constructivists, not that I was having them - I wasn't born! - and they'd understood a difficulty with using words like 'make' and 'produce'. It was partly to do with the fact that they didn't want the religious association with making, and they didn't want those god-like feelings about it, and they were trying to prevent that politically. And the idea of production, for me at least, meant completion, it meant the end of it: that's it. I think I said earlier that I'm really quite keen to recognise that you and I, when we're looking at a piece of work, are producing it. Therefore that's part of the production, therefore how can the artist be the producer: full stop? And so the terminology cropped up by using the word manufacture. The word ‘facture’ cropped up as meaning you're the person involved in facilitating the process that brings about production.✂
Allen: 'Amnesic Instant' is a publication I put out from Spanner which was taking off from something Charles Olson said. He was at [inaudible] lecture and he talks about the universe being like a rubber band, so I've taken his rubber bands and enlarged them on photocopies and it starts to fragment. Oh, look at this. [At this point a group of protesters walked past the Cornerhouse, carrying placards deriding news coverage and perception of China. In particular, the BBC were singled out.] Steve: It's a pro-China protest. Allen: 'Stop the media distortion. So that's why it's Oxford Road, it's the BBC.’Wednesday 7 January, 2009 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
Wednesday 7 January, 2009 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.
Wednesday 7 January, 2009 Posted all the way back in 2001 according to the website. Contains poetry from:
Tuesday 6 January, 2009 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.
Tuesday 6 January, 2009 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.
Tuesday 6 January, 2009 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.
Tuesday 6 January, 2009 
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.