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Gertrude Stein
We think of the great avant garde coming out of France and England in
terms of their art in this time. (early 1900s). Painters such as Matisse and
Gaunguin were seen as crude and shocking. Modernist people felt that
something profound had happened, that there was a frightening
discontinuity between the traditional past and the shaken present (Idea
of the Modern). Stein says Picasso is so interesting because he paints
human beings as seen from an airplane, she was convinced that Picasso
was painting people like a sort of patchwork, in the same way that the
Impressionists had painted people as though from a fast moving train ie
the blurried spots, ie no one had moved that fast before.
The Idea of the Modern (back of syllabus)

Notion that artists take objects and by distorting them, engaging

with them, returns the object from recognition to seeing. When
we view objects in our physical world, we dont notice them so
much as recognize them as usual things in our surroundings.
One reason why Picasso might break up objects in his paintings
is because thats how we perceive things generally. Recognizing
is something you just do, seeing requires some sort of sensible
engagement with the object. We can use these sort of ideas to
frame the way we perceive art. Stein is very convinced shes at
the conception of a new way of writing, seeing, etc.

Stein
Picasso painted a portrait of Stein, which incorporated elements of his
cubism and nuances of African masks in her facial structure. His paintings
were seen as radical as his African nuances returned to the primal kinds
of images and ways of thinking of ones selves, there was a fascination
with this primitive base, Freud for one saw it as a necessary means to
realizing ones basic impulses. Philosophers Brothel shows threatening
nude women, the scene is shown from two completely opposite angles
simultaneously. Not only did Picasso go back to the African primality of
facial structure, he was also playing around with perception, and the way

people interpreted paintings from one angle as opposed to one from many
angles.
Goes against the traditional notion that art should be like a mirror
reflecting the dimensions of ones self back. Picasso and Braque make this
kind of painting obsolete, they uphold the integrity of the subject more so
than upholding the integrity of mirroring the subject. The fact of the
matter of the paint itself is more important than the accuracy of its
physical measurements. They were famous for contorting the portrayal of
subjects in a warped manner which was actually truer to how our eyes
focus on them than how they really are in the material world.
Tender Buttons
What appears to be a title is actually just a line, because no title has ever
been punctuated with a period.
A carafe, that is a blind glass.
The subject isnt the carafe, the subject is that.
Stein is heavily interested in grammar, not interested in automatic
writing, shes very cautious as a writer. The comma that is present makes
the subject that. It is intentionally placed after carafe. that is not
used to mean which. This is thus a sentence about that, not about the
carafe.
Stein loves the little words, she hates the nouns.
that is a diactic pronoun. It is used in pointing. We learn this and
that as one of the first words as a child. Other diectic pronouns include
now, here, then, these are used to help us construct space and
time. They stick in for various kinds of nouns. She thus wants us to view
the word that as a carafe, it operates the same way a carafe operates.
To what extent do we use language to inform us about the world, and to
what extent do we use it to build a world?
and nothing strange there isnt a word in her sentence that isnt
easy to understand. Its very teasing, provocative.
The difference is spreading. The perspective in her poetry is expanding.

A Box.
Out of kindness comes redness.
it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again
Green and red usually symbolize peace vs violence etc etc. What if we
had a language without other associations?
Cubist paintings arent really portraits, theyre really just activities for
the eye. By defamiliarizing the oject that is being painted, we dont
recognize it anymore We have to see it for what it is, it provokes us to
stare at it for a while and figure it out. With Picasso we are constantly
being invited to make sense of what he paints. Stein manipulates the
Western conventions of writing just as Picasso does so with painting,
Stein does this with sentences and grammar Language is anti-mimetic
for Stein, its supposed to be its own creation. The loss of single
perspective, loss of transparency in a Cubist painting the same thing
happens with Stein. Ie. Stein breaking up sentences into units where we
dont recognize them anymore, a sentence where it is faceted, where it
doesnt normally go. The poems in Steins book arent ekphrastic, it is just
attempting to operate along the same principles that Picasso does in art.
Steinss Poetry & Grammar Article
Pg 210 I like the feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.. The
way one comes to possess ones self is the way one comes to possess
ones langauge. The idea that people actually make their world with
language. We could potentially use language to build our world, and if we
actually understood grammar fully, we could ultimately come to
understand ourselves in unimaginable ways.
A Cubist painting is decentred entirely, everything is spread, so a text
that does this too has spread its sentential center, it does not act as if
there is no centre, but it acts as though there is a centre without there
being one.

Stein doesnt like nouns because theyre just names and they dont do
anything. Nouns just sit there until you put them into some linguistic
environment surrounded by particles and verbs and conjunctions and
prepositions. Nouns cant ever be mistaken, but all other words can be.
Nouns mean a concrete thing, whereas other words do not. She likes
working with the other words more, those that can be mistaken easily,
because theyre more open to experimentation, to exploration, ie verbs,
prepositions are nothing but mistakes.
Dance a clean dream translate more than translate the authority..
As if shes addressing a female audience, do more than simply translating
authority, asking us to interrogate authority, ie the way authority
announces itself through language ie taking nouns which have always
meant specific things and putting them in another world where women
would have a certain kind of authority,
Steins Tender Buttons
Larger themes: Very specific domestic woman setting, tasks typed as
female tasks ie fixing & washing. A lot of eating, a lot of dining, theres a
wedding going on,
When the center cant hold anymore, it is not chaos for Stein,

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Mina Loy Futurist Poet

Futurists often tried to distinguish themselves from the Cubists,

as they felt that cubism was too static, there were no dynamics,
futurists concerned themselved with the speeded up tempo of
the modernist disposition, they would dynamize their sculptures.
They would stress dynamism, the physiological motion of a
humanbody, and would often try to paint the passage of time,
where youd get very explosive attempts to get the modern
world into motion.
Futurists loved cars, trains, and anything that would go fast,
depicting everything from vibrations, sounds, noise, ie
granularity of time and smoke in Manets Impressionist painting
of the train station. Futurism is said by Ezra Pound to be
accelerated Impressionism.
Modern ppl often felt that they were perpetually changing, they
were interested in the energies within things. So how would
you paint energy?
They were advocates of the idea that humans would one day
become all powerful beings, no longer needing centaurs and
angels anymore, becoming those very beings ourselves. Ie. Wed
one day sprout wings and fly etc.
Revokes any sort of nostalgia should break open the floodgates
and drown all of Venice in order to build a brave new world
Within a Futurist Manifesto The mathematics of geometric
splendor.
Cubism was deemed too still and dull for the Futurists as Cubists
failed to knowledge that the world was constantly changing
Ie Futurist music is about cacophonies of noise its about
another way of thinking about music

Mina Loy vs Marinetti and his brand of futurism

Her aphorism of futurism: die in the past, live in the future.
Similar to Marinetti
Interested in dumping certain bits of the past particularly where
it concerns women, her writing is very much torqued towards
feminist issues as opposed to other futurists (who tend to diss
women etc)

Both share an elevated, and often scientific rhetoric, concerned

with the future, not the future of robotic men and technological
advancements, but its this up in your face tone which because
of the gender difference between Marinetti and Loy has a
different sort of resonance.
Loys poetry is full of medical terminology, and a philosophical
and scienfic vocabulary.
the velocity of velocities arise from starting
she takes these ideas of velocity and complicates them, which is
something that the Futurists never got to doing

we say the world has been beautified with something like

speed
time and space died yesterday Marinetti, violence of futurism
is brought out in the modern spirit, humans seem poised on the
edge of being able to do anything
the future is limitless the past a trail of insidious reactions
life is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you
cease to be at the mercy of yourself.
The Loy futurist is somehow able to comprehend time
Loy isnt interested in creating a string of robotic techy trons,
instead delves into the female body.
for Mina Loy, Marinettis scorn is taken in the negative light. She
twists his scorn for women. Marinetti and the futurists are just
against the romanticized notion of the female figure, which is
actually similar to what Loy is intending to do.
Human cylinder the idea of innervation, where theres no
conflict anymore. Where men needed some sort of stimulation or
motivation to become true men. (where we needed the Great
War in 1914 just to get men up and running again)
Talks about casual contacts between men and women, she talks
about wanting an emotional intellectual, real intrapenetrating
conscious relationship with someone as opposed as simply being
an occasion for a mans orgasm
She wants the surgical destruction of virginity throughout female
society. Idea that if you cant have virginity, then you cant
own a woman (have a woman for your property)

Interested in the future of free women, in a world where women

can have their virginity removed surgically, and to be free from
being a mans property.
Consciousness: love the hideous, love the sublime core of it
open your arms to the debilitated, in order to rehabilitate them
The future Loy envisions is where the consciousness is
expanded.
Marinetti would never advocate Love of Others as much as Loy
does
Consciousness has no climax, let the world flow into your
consciousness
Poetry is not about building all kinds of robots, its about opening
yourself up to various modes of consciousness
Shes looking for poetry thats not brutal but brutally frank, to
talk about things that arent normally talked about, and thats
how language should evolve in the future
Parturition: not just about women giving birth to children, but
about women giving birth to consciousness (stretching
consciousness in the most interesting way)
Contraction to a point, dilation, consciousness aside of ones self
This is the very first collage of poetry, taking the lines of poetry
and situated them as such so we are not quite sure how to read
them. Poetry here becomes some sort of icon. Loy is trying to
get to the excrutiating consciousness that comes with giving
birth, ie how it feels to lose ones boundaries of consciousness at
childbirth, ie blasting out and coming in.
Consciousness in crisis: about a certain kind of activity deeply
involved with a womans body. The sensitivity of the area The
extensity of intention: philosophical language

Marinetti
scorn for women as they were being understood and
constructed by Victorian mores, the idea that women are
somehow passive, hooked up with romanticism etc

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Vorticism, Literary and artistic movement that flourished in England
191215. Founded by Wyndham Lewis, it attempted to relate art to
industrialization. It opposed 19th-century sentimentality and extolled the
energy of the machine and machine-made products, and it promoted
something of a cult of sheer violence. In the visual arts, Vorticist
compositions were abstract and sharp-planed, showing the influence
of Cubism and Futurism.
Vortex: the point of maximum energy, it represents the point of greatest
efficiency. The vorticist relies on primary pigment. It seeks to be art of
first intensity. Man can either be seen as the one who receives an
impression (toward which perception moves), or the one directing a force
against circumstance, and conceiving rather than observing passively.
Pound once wrote a 30 line poem and destroyed it because he felt it was
of second intensity. His hokku like poem: Wet black bough A poem of
super position; of one idea set on top of another where one is trying to
record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms
itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective. It captures a particular
mode of consciousness.
Vorticism is an intensive art, it expresses the relative intensities of
varying expressions, those that are more intense are more dynamic. It is
an organization of forms, exhibits every conception, every emotion in its
primary form. the most highly energized statements. That takes
hundreds of other works of art to explain. It is art without elaboration and
without secondary applications.
Futurism is accelerated impressionism, both Futurism and Impressionism
deny the vortex. Imagism is part of Vorticism: but an art of critique
rather than art of creation. Imagism is the branch of poetry that is divided
from lyical poetry; it is the sort of poetry where painting/art seems as if it
were just coming over into speech. Opposite of rhetoric; which is the art
of dressing up unnecessary unimportant matters to fool audiences for a
time being. Imagism set out to bring poetry up to the level of prose.
Pounds ideogrammic method: based on Chinese characters, where each
character represented an image or pictograph, based on sight, not sound.
The Cantos by Pound is described to be objective presentation of material
which he believed could stand on its own" without use of symbolism or
romanticism. Pound's use of counterpoint is integral to the structure and

cohesion of The Cantos, which show multi-voiced counterpoint and, with

the juxtaposition of images, non-linear themes. The pieces are presented
in fragments "which taken together, can be seen to unfold in time as
music does". The nature of The Cantos is to compare and measure among
historical periods and cultures and against "a Poundian standard" of
modernism.
The Companion to the Cantos gives: "Robert Browning: 1812 - 1889,
author of the epic poem, Sordello, based on the life of the Italian
troubadour of that name who wrote in Provencal. Browning gives an
unconventional image of the troubadour as a lyrical persona or mask of
himself (a "dramatic monologue"):just as Pound later uses him and other
historical characters. The point is that there is no way of seeing the
personality of Sordello objectively but only of seeing subjective
perspectives of the facts. Browning's Sordello is, for Pound, the last
instance of the epic tradition in the English language, which he intends to
take up from there on. Pound traces his personal literary lineage back to
Browning in L [letter to R. Taupin of May 1928 ("Und uberhaupt ich
stamm aus Browning. Pourquoi nier son pere?")], but he intends to
include the mythological dimension as well. In introducing the persona
"Sordello" and the epic of Browning, he is recycling material from the
discarded cantos which is now subsumed into the persona of Odysseus
and the epic of Homer."
Compound words like ship-work, bird-cry, green-gray, sea-worn
and gull cry are a realization of his ideas of image, vortex and
ideogram. Theyre the ultimate form of the condensation of metaphor that
characterizes the style of the Cantos. Pound isolates concrete elements
from a given perception or experience and presenting, them juxtaposed
against one another, to form a new and this entity an image. He omits
any linguistic rendering of their relation (any verb or prepositions). A
shorthand way of presenting the intellectual and emotional complex, a
radiant node/cluster. These ideograms are powerful creators of
phanopeia. He uses compound words as a foundation unit for the building
of extended metaphoric statements.

Imagism:
1: direct treatment of the thing itself, whether objective or subjective.
2: to use absolutely no word that doesnt contribute to the presentation.
3: As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase,
not in sequence of the metronome.
Imagism differs from symbolism in that symbolism relies on allegories
and words by association, imagism seeks to remove all associative
connotations and focus on the thing itself. The image is the painters
pigment. The image is not an idea, it is rather a radiant node or cluster
where through a vortex these ideas rush through.
Imagism evolved as a reaction against abstraction ... replacing Victorian
generalities with the clarity in Japanese haiku and ancient Greek lyrics.

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Imagism
Vorticism
Ideogrammatic poetry
Poetic inversion: making English read like Latin
Ezra Pound: The Cantos

Kind of mathematics in his poetry, youre never told anything

you just see a lot of stuff.
His poetry is written in ideograms like the chinese characters
Greatly admired vorticism.
From Robert Browning, he learns about the persona, hes not a
poet of his own subjectivity but of others ie in the Second Catos.
The vortex is a point of maximum energy, this makes for great
flowing velocities of visual art, an attempt to extrapolate nature
into art.
He uses luminous details (the two or three details you can
extract from other writers work and extrapolate into artwork, as
things you can do dynamic things with and give them a form).
These could then be made into ideograms, and combined into a
phantastikon (sort of like a kaleidescope)
He talks about this as ply over ply (ie. A line over one thing..
over another thing like turning a dial on the radio..
His purpose for doing this: he wanted to write a modern epic,
saw Browning as the last writer of the British epic tradition but
how dyou write an epic of the modern world? Combining another
thousand years of everything since classical greek culture in

Homers time.
The Inferno was one epic, it wasnt just aboue 13th century Italy,
it included Adam and Eve even An epic was hence encyclopedic
When pound says the modern mind is the medieval mind, its
because medieval culture is where classicism comes in little
washes and still maintains its own identity.
An epic is a poem containing history.

Im writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization is

going hell
He masters all the rest of the poetic forms, including Anglo
Saxon, Greeks, and even Ancient Chinese poetic forms.

Canto 1

Operates as a historical ideogram

Homer and Pound seem to be equated
Going into the underworld and giving blood to the dead
Accurate to the Odyssey (book 11) but turns it into a different
thing
He modulates in his poetry because hes really interested in the
history.
The mood of Cantos 1: the ideogram shows archaic poetic
visions coming together to combine Homer, Pound, the Odyssey,
Latin & Renaissance elements, anglo saxon meter

Canto 3
Every canto has its own historical vortex

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Spring and All

TS Eliots The Wasteland is essentially about the dilemmas that

people are going through, in social relations that are heavily
degraded and compromised in the post WWI period; the
melancholic broodings of Europe
In contrast, Williams writes Spring and All (thinking about the
depressing nature of The Wasteland and how not to do the same
thing with his own work). Saw The Wasteland as rehashing the
past, throwing us back into classical culture when he really
wanted to delve into new art forms and the future.
Williams revives the theme of imagination from the 18th century,
and brings it into modernism really interested in the trope of
imagination
The imagination does all sorts of things heals things, puts
things together, its what is closest to God within you, its the
closest thing to creation, it permitted you not just to reorganize
things in the world with your creative faculty, but also construct
new things.
Williams attempts to break the barrier between the reader and
the world (the barrier it seems, affects your comprehension)
Loved to strip meaning from traditional word associations (in
their cliched forms) ie red roses linked to love.. getting rid of
demoted meaning of the object.. such work is empty, typical of
the writers who have done so..
These word associations are essentially symbolism, and what is
unique about Williams work is his lack of symbolism
You also dont find similes or metaphors as these can also
include cliches, writers have traditionally used these devices as
an obstacle between you and the thing itself (since it acts as an

intermediary idealized form of the object)

Thinks of poems as objects themselves, they dont refer to
anything, readers often dont get what hes talking about,
interested in authenticity,

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Olson and Black Mountain
Projective verse
Open field poetics
Form is never more than an extension of content
Content as its coming out of the poet, will necessarily find its
own form. There cant be pre-established forms, the poet cant
force the form of what hes going to say before he knows what
hes going to say.
Art seeks not to describe but to enact.
Olson

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass.

There are only eyes and all heads to be looked out at. Takes us
out of civilization and back to looking out from our skin
This is similar to abstract expressionism in the visual arts; which
was the milieu that Olson was working on
What on earth was projectivism? Odd little projective vs non
projective Comes directly out of Pound, and was very close to
Williams
Composition of field as opposed to overall form
Olson wants a kind of poetry thats an open field, where every
element and dynamic can be exploited by the poet and turned
over to the energy to the reader, he wipes out all previous forms
(no sonnets, no traditional metrics, no weird architectural lumber
inherited from English), Olson opens the field up even wider than
Williams.. From pound, Olson learnt how to compose with
typewriter (no grid of the page anymore, you could use multiple
tabs.. indentations.. no strict margins)

Kineticism: a poem is transferred from the poet to the reader, be

a high energy construct and high energy discharge at all points.
Has to be explicitly designed as a moment of the man thinking
up a glimmer of an idea, or an energy equivalent to this unique
to verse alone.
From the moment the poet ventures into field composition, with
no sense of what theyre going to write about.

Writing in the moment of the thinking as youre going, the poem

will necessarily find itself construing in certain ways

The process of this can be accomplished through one perception
will lead to a further perception
Works on the absolute cutting edge of time here, pays exquisite
attention to whats going on as his perceptions are going
He doesnt monitor himself, he watches the words come out,
pays attention to the sounds and the words and the meaning and
lets the poem find its form.
None of this is taken from Eliot or Pound; different from stream

of consciousness writing which is Surrealism. Stream of

consciousness means theres no separation: you write whatever
youre thinking, exactly in your head.
You pay attention to how you as a person uses and mixes

language, where you pause, where a thought starts, where you

stop, and you record
We start from the smallest unit of all the syllable: its not the
metrics of the mind, its not the shape of syntax necessarily, its
the king and pin of versification
The poet needs to be paye excrutiating pain to the syllable in the
word - judge the sound as much as the choice of words, as the
choice of words depend very much on how it sounds to the ear
At the level of the syllable, the place of the elements is where
speech is least careless and least logical. It is arbitrary, the ear
when it is so close to the mind becomes the mind.. your mind
and ear seem to be connected by the syllable, the syllable
becomes their interface.
Olson wants to write poetry that locates there ^, not the poetry
of particular sorts of culture, but the poetry literally at the level
of where the sound engages the mind

The syllable and the lines make the poem: the mind comes from
the breath of the man who writes who can declare its metrics
and lines, and determination
You let the syllables of the words rip as you write projective
verse, you have to pay attention to where the lines stop
Olson is not fond of similes, because you have to sit there and
make it up, you should project it. The descriptive functions
have to be watched you should not stop to describe, with

projective verse you seek to get your own projected dynamic

and energies brought across to the reader in the red hot moment
For these poets the poems are an act, you dont have description
which is different from Williams, what you have here is art that
seeks to enact, moving
A poem for Olson is a constellation of tensions between objects
(images, syllables and lines and sounds and senses). His poetry
does not resolve, these tensions are made to hold within the
context of the poem. These objects must be handled as a
series of objects infield and not with any preconceptions
The poet no longer fully controls the poem, the poem somehow
write itself, the language that comes out will insist on certain
things, Olson wants to think of elements in poetry as solid
objects (Objectism) with dynamic energies that comes in and
goes back out
His poems should read like speaking through a voice, the idea
that youd return poetry to the voice and the speaking body of
the poet means that language is something he sees as coming
out of you as opposed to just coming out of a plain page
Suspending the syllable at the end of line, means that its part of
the breath of a pause, unlike prose, which doesnt have any
spaces.
Projective verse gets rid of the symbol, the ego and the soul, as
the interface between you and the world. To the point where
youre just

Olson doesnt construct like Pound does with his ply over ply
method.

He sees people as post modern people, Olson is the first deal

with in a sustained way the Holocaust

Hes not interested in making poetry about things youve never

seen before like Williams
Hes very different from futurists and imagists, Olson was a
politician and worked under the Roosevelt administration under
the department of propaganda,
Olson hung out with artists such as Pollock. Pollock believes hes
simply helping his painting articulate what its trying to
communicate. It only becomes a mess when he loses contact

with the painting. A fine line between a great abstract painting

and a mess, its the ongoing attentiveness that makes a
difference where the painter looks carefully at what hes doing.
We see the world a certain way because were taught to see it a
certain way. Definition is a form of discrimination. He says
One must possess intent in his life in order to make art that seeks not to describe but to enact.

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Ashbery

Surrealist Art: Putting together of images that dont belong with

one another, 1924, respoding to World War I.
Freudian references to ego and the subconscious in this type of
art
Surrealism is the combination of the conscious and unconscious
theres control even though theres a dream like quality in its art
Miro as the most surreal of the Surrealists, surrealism is so great
because it gives us the permission to do as we please. The art of
the Surrealist gives us permission to break the shackles of
bourgeouise sensibility, for greater freedom.
Surrealism comes out of Dadaist art, Dada started in 1916 in
Germany Dada was the first anti-art, art that was deliberately
ugly, stupid, gross, took collage away from high art cubist
collage,at the time was considered completely objectionable,
completely anti-futurist Dada is often simple, childlike,
somewhat abstract out of this surrealism came.
Breton, the founder of Surrealism, had freudian psychology
merged Dada with it. Ie pillars with a bowling pin in it, it had a
dreamlike space.
When trying to mimic this in poetry, you try to drive a collision
between things that dont fit ie syntax.
How do I write like a surrealist? Words seem to have meanings
attached to them while spots and lines do not. How do I bring
vocabulary into the mix?
Surrealists felt poised on an outer most brink There was no
tradition, you somehow had to forge ahead, if one wanted to
depart even moderately from the norm, one was gambling away
his life as an artist.
Ie pollock and his drip painting

Cornell brings something together with narrative and art

(through his collage and boxed collections of art), this blending
turns into a grid in Ashberys poetry, a dichotomy between
abstraction and story.

The Tennis Court Oath positions as a revolutionary work, named

after the episode in the French Revolution in its radical upheaval

of commoners against the state until Louis the XVI had to write a

constitution stating otherwise.

Pollock started at a point of vulnerality as opposed to a point of
conviction, post modern art embraces failure, in a way modern
art does not.
Ashbery saw surrealism as the art the world could not live
without. Its the art that people look to as they develop abstract
expressionism, pop art etc. Deep freudian subtext to these
paintings, the primary gesture of the surrealists is to put things
that dont belong together together, under a pretense of a

dream.
He loved Dalis meticulous handling of infitessimal brush strokes.
He loved Cornells autonomous experience of narrative story and
abstraction. Evokes nostalgia, we get to keep the asceticism.

The collage aesthetic in surrealism is articulated, ashbery puts

togther in his poems a kind of collage similar to this art. Cornell
puts together images that have a formal resonance with each
other, even though they do not have a real significance with
each other.
Rachenburg

With Ashbery, the Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery does not write
from his persona, he culls and sculpts items he has found, the
range in his poetry can come from lyric poetry to literary tropes

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Language as the circumstance they operate under
Talks about the impact of language and that theres a complicated
relationship between language and you. You are the product of every
sentence youve spoken
Page 47
Everythings carefully numbered in this book, the poetry is wihtin the
measured number of lines (the artifice of measure).
Surrealism lets us do whatever we want. Dont need to fit anythign into
the poem, no preconceived notion on what the poem ought to be, what it
ought to sound like.

1/23/2014 1:15:00 PM
Transbluesency by Amrit Baraka

Insanely poisonous and very furious (almost like a rant), poetry

is about exploring limits and pushing limits
He pushes the limitations of art, contorting the meaning of the
aesthetic, the avant garde, the pushing here becomes explicitly
about racial politics
In projected verse, you indent the line and inflex it through jazz
when the line is a sign of progress from its previous line
Comes through the nihilists, the dadaists and Olson
Black art (a poem seen as very offensive)
Projected verse: Staggers syntactical reason that the poet wants
to formalize (waves, sun, I like I like, the beat, of the clock) the
end of the verse brings you back to the start. (beat of the clock
brings you back to beat of my heart)
Hes very clear about how he organizes his poetry
Who are you, listening to me? Who are you, listening to yourself?
He questions the black readers as such to figure out who they
really are. How dyou sound? Are your words yours? Can you
swear youre not an imitation of someone else?

1/23/2014 1:15:00 PM
Craig Dworkin

Strand

Conceptual artists in the 60s and 70s

Looking for a thinkership, not a readership
Has to do with the culture of sampling (the internet) the remix
culture and all that
The idea of procedure and restraints
OULIPO: french avant garde writing group (ie never using the
letter a) when people restrict letters like that, they have to
become wildly inventive
Defamiliarization: ostrannenic (art)

Legion
Using a prepublished piece of work to determine your
psychological complexion (statements you agree /disagree with)
and take it completely out of context by reorganizing it
Its not a direct copy, but a copy thats been reshuffled
Becomes some dark insight into the deeply troubled minds of
American people. If these are the statements we have to
acquiesce or deny, then its a pretty weird culture with crazy
neuroses.
This is how conceptualism is different from flarf. Flarf takes a
prexisting texts and plug it into the search engine and then cull
it. Conceptualism simply takes the prewritten language and
organizes it. The conceptualist will simply take the prewritten
thing, reshape it, and not interpret it much.
Read chapter one on Tectonic grammar
Shift is a result of replacing grammar in a geology textbook with
grammar from a linguistics textbook. Ie transcoding
postmodernism
Strand
Page 31: Aragon and argon merged (poetry is a kind of gas)