the all new sell, bathos vs. failure, etc.

"There is a world by negation, then, and it presses on us. Bathos and failure are both crucial here, and their differences subtly but keenly felt: as bathos necessitates a bifurcation of value and its appropriate distribution, here and there, cross-hatched in the shadow of the cosmic faux pas, failure tends irredeemably towards a linear end-stop of utter cancellation; where bathos has the potential to act prosodically and diagnostically as the mark of an experience that derives its legitimacy from a latent truthfulness hardly yet disbanded, failure cannot be so easily or comfortably entrained into the services of measure-taking because so relentlessly immeasurable; we are the progenitors of bathos, it is performative and alive to the possibility of its success, but failure is the very opposite of success, and does not thus shed the light of understanding any more than it confers the historical weight of the tragi-comic; bathos must have its object, but failure is merely viral; failure is the pit that opens up beneath the limpid cloud of bathos."

- from the insert to Hi Zero 6, which is out now, featuring poems by Samuel Solomon, Adam Weg, Ian Heames, Amy De'Ath, Justin Katko, Eric Linsker, Tom Bamford, Tim Atkins, Luke Roberts, Emily Critchley, Jeff Nagy and Richard Owens.

Reply to Helen Bridwell

Since Blogger seems to have disabled commenting on comments, this goes here for now, in reply to Helen Bridwell's comment on the original post, below. If anyone knows how to fix my internets, please let me know. Yours incapably, etc.

So,

That bit about net utopianism, that is the single most torturous sentence in the whole thing, Timothy Thornton picked me up on those objects too, and in fact suggested "phantom" as a means of distinguishing them as the most ghostly part of the whole set-up. By me, that is. They are the significant lack of the whole thing. What are the objects that net utopianism purports to critique? Tim was right to say that they are at least phantom, because the "critique" of some of this stuff is non-existent. Still, the sentence felt *right* to me, in a way that perhaps only scrolling down some of the comment sections on Art Fag City blog posts could ever attest to. For example, this from a year ago in response to Price's piece:

"Hi, Seth. It seems you are more interested in books than the Net. Many of your references to the Net are negative or written in a dry, anthropological tone. ("Self-consciously generous transparency," "an infantilizing rationality," "circumvent[ing] traditional ethical standards," and so on.) You sound at times like a threatened print writer criticizing bloggers. Your collection is also a disconnected hoard of images but the subject matter is books and magazines. Is having the fingers in each shot to distance yourself, as the antiquarian lover of one type of medium, from the complained-about effects of the medium in which you are communicating? The idea of showing books as a retro "hoard" page is great but could probably do without the accompanying talking down to Internet users. Books and magazines have their limitations and pathologies as well. (Maybe that's the point you're making--if so it could be clearer.)"

The same astonishing distinction between being, like, "negative" about the innernet, but having a "positive" outlook crops up everywhere, which is slightly alarming, a kind of binary code dialectics for schmucks. In "Kool-Aid Man in Second Life" Jon Rafman / Kool-Aid Man bats off this exact nonsense when his interviewer poses the question: "Yeah, a lot of this sounds very pessimistic, yet the work...seems very optimistic", to which Rafman / Kool-Aid Man responds: "Yeah that's a good question, how can we take so much pleasure in a movie in which all humankind is completely annihilated?".

It's a speculative piece, so in a sense I'm creating a version of "net utopianism" out of all the bad net art and half-baked London shows I've seen over the last year and a half or so and then lambasting it with an impossibly shit parody of itself. Those "objects of critique" are actually just what bad net art ignores, or rather, what feels to me is being deliberately and scathingly dispensed with when I'm enjoined to celebrate amorphous and nebulous concepts like "multiplicity" and "plurality". That's what got my goat about the Vierkant article. Consider his:

"The use of “We” is not to advocate solely for participatory structures of art but to insist on a participatory view of culture at large, and ultimately of taking iconoclasm itself as a quotidian activity. Whereas in previous times it was legitimate to conceive of culture as a greater system with impassible barriers to entry and a finitude of possibilities, culture after the Internet offers a radically different paradigm which our “They” idiom does not allow for. This is not to say that we have entered a fully utopian age of endless possibilities but simply to claim that culture and language are fundamentally changed by the ability for anyone to gain free access to the same image-creation tools used by mass-media workers, utilize the same or better structures to disseminate those images, and gain free access to the majority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of higher learning."

So what, we haven't quite got to the "fully utopian age of endless possibilities" yet, but since regular folk can freely torrent a cracked version of the latest Photoshop and spam away we're at least on the right track? The necessary but unspoken corollary to this thinking is utopia as image management, the point at which the best of all possible worlds is not one without any advertisements but one in which we all make our own advertisements, and they're all equally as effective and equally as fucking massive. This is what Ciscso Systems is telling us, if only we could all listen at once. Net utopianism, insofar as I've constructed it, can't critique anything, let alone an object, because what it wants is for us all to imagine that a free online community is interesting to the world at large for anything other than selling discount Xanax. It's a necessarily gross speculative construct, because I wanted to argue against an extreme side of things that probably doesn't really take effect outside of a general tendency not to think too hard about what the work is doing.

Next I want to have a go at this:

"my best guess is that they/it are the real world of commodities, which is to say infinite plurality of virtual worlds, which is to say RL?"

Because I think what you've written there, and what you infer, and what happens when I read that, are all different and competing things, the structures of contradiction inherent in every object virtual or otherwise, the snake eating its own tail in the animated .gif of fetishized transcendence.

xj

Joel Stern at Apiary Studios, London, 12/07/11

P'Kard's gonna be there

Coming soon: What I see in Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job!

Statement for YBT (Harry Sanderson, Riyo Nemeth, Dominik Dvorak)

The following was written for the Your Body is a Temple collective of artists, whose work, amongst others, will be the subject of discussion at the South London Gallery in Peckham on Wednesday night.

The internet is a giant pun.

When Marx describes, in the first chapter of Das Kapital, the religious world as the reflex of the real world, he does not demand that we eradicate the former in order to better understand the latter. Rather, he suggests that only with recourse to the mist-enveloped world of religion might we find a suitable analogy with which to understand the fetish-character of commodities, in which a definite social relation between men assumes, in our eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. [Marx, K., Capital (London, Lawrence & Wishart,1967), pp.76-87, and see esp. p.77. The full text of Vol. 1 is also available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm] In the religious world, says Marx, “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.” The infinite plurality of virtual worlds has arguably superseded the religious one in Marx’s formulation whilst maintaining a degree of mysticism necessary to their self-replicating evanescence; the internet is the utopian refuge of the fetish-character, wherein Marx’s satire of our propensity to equate as values the products of specific social labour by their exchange becomes a form of triumphant, perpetual dissolution of “character” itself. Fetish unbound and free from any hyphenated attachment to social state or being might instantiate itself at infinity speed across the length, breadth and scope of the living net, no longer merely prescribed in aspect; life endowed with independent being is grateful for your traffic, and wistfully imagines that your heart will beat forever in the silver lining of the chat-box panelling the screen. The internet is a giant pun, whose giddy shimmering between life and realism might at any point tip ruthlessly into either of those de-mystifying dead-ends, but whose imperial magnanimity is in any case the pre-condition for both. "What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain". [Bataille, G., Eroticism (London, Marion Boyars, 1962), p.19] But then again, we can always just create another world.

The viral strain of net utopianism -- that assumes, with lethal cupidity, that the instantiation of the screen as site and sound of a radical participatory mass-media culture of constant prosumer re-definition is the means by which the image is freed from its authenticity of presence in some backwater post-Benjaminian dungeon -- is as blithely and reductively universalist as the phantom objects it purports to critique. The internet has done more than any other invention in human history to instigate an ersatz universal equivalence of experience and subjectivity disguised as the harmonious interaction of endless and immutable particularity. Advertisement logic as profile stimulator. Meme extraction. This is why the internet is so profoundly at home in the New Age, or whichever cultus of abstract man is lashed to its latest masthead banner ad for freshly bottled emotive water. The internet is brilliant at producing the wholeness we desire to extract from it because it is built on the sale of a radically interactive egalitarianism which alleviates political and economic reality into its very own neo-sincere celebration of utopian avatar expressionism.



Someone has recently said:

In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author.

[Vierkant, A., The Image Object Post-Internet http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html]

So as the distance between us is forever annihilated into the barest intimation of formal intersubjective fantasy, the image accelerates farther away from us than ever before – the dialectical tendency of the limitless re-deployment of an image across multi-platform occurrences is that we may never finally approach anything except the knowledge that we have encountered an artwork, and the proliferation of pure image becomes the merest coded announcement of its own narcissistic predilections for display. Seth Price has referred to “the embarrassing and stupid demands of interactivity itself, which foists an infantilizing rationality on all “Internet art,” and possibly Internet use generally, by prioritizing the logic of the connection, thereby endorsing smooth functioning and well-greased transit” [Price, S., Teen Image www.distributedhistory.com/Teen_Image.pdf], although this assumes that what is at stake is the completion of the artwork, rather than any specifically diagnostic claim about what might happen to physicality in a network of remote, as opposed to tangible, experience - what about the logic of the dial-up, the logic of the bad connection, the logic of the YouTube faith-healing account? How does a participatory structure distinguish between credit card fraud and facial recognition? How can I look into your eyes on Skype and know that you see my eyes looking back at you? How can we enjoy intimacy with an infinitely deferred other? If your body is a temple, who (or what) is worshipping inside you?

“In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race”. At the crux of that interaction now is the formation of the “human race” itself as the magnanimous progenitor of its own global and technological refresh-rate. Together, you are told by Cisco Systems Incorporated, we are the human network, in the blissful rhetoric of implied corporate idealism that says, because it does not say it, that without Cisco Systems Incorporated we are the dismembered faceless backwards-looking monads in helpless disarray. What we need now is an art that is as far removed from the ersatz utopianism of the Cisco Corporation as it is deeply cognizant of the social conditions and structures through which that logic arises. If there is any chance of a critique of the limitless technological and cultural expansion that might also engender the hopefulness in particularity of the experience of virtuality as becoming more real than it yet remains possible to be, it will emerge here, in this world, right at the heart of my refusal not to accept the data that does flow through my bloodstream like desire.



Click here for the gallery site, and here for more YBT.

from finer branding

Think of stupid people – what the fuck?
Some men there are love not a gaping pig
But stuck it; last night my friend was pissed

On. But blind are able to see anything in
The world, whenever they want to see it
In the future, a total bean to cup experience

Lifts me from the trauma at the station, –
A kiosk is a violent thing, hurling coffee
At the other one that simply shouts a

Thousand times at rush-hour. They are
Absolutely trying to kill us and I am
Wholly entrained into the gorgeous

And imperial magnanimity of the
Escalator entering my face, O speck
Of truth you everywhere, a kiosk of

Pure light, expanding in the world sung
Diegetically. Your destiny, if you choose
To flake it, is for your children

To be born inside bad jokes about the
Frappuccino and to be pissed on by the
Sea, whose steely resolve is < 1%

Of the total empire of harm that wants
To kill you, where you will drown in
The massive fight off Ship Street, you

Will drown as the cops pull out, slowly
You will raise your joke about the mocha
To the level of a social critique so damning

You will not even become punched, and
You will punch yourself in the eye to make
Clear that you are never going to die

In the latencied disservice of a latte shitstorm
Surrounded by your friends off Ship Street
Beaming with the thrill of live violence

Equal to the size of you ... #London’s home
Less invade our streets; I wish wholeheartedly
The homeless were an army and this were true.

Hi Zero 4

jack my swag

I mean, I have a long slow fear that starts with the pause button and coagulates to my best impression of a sinking pig. I've been re-tweeting you for months and all I get is this lousy shipping? And Dr. Freud said: "The very thing, then, that she only sought to hint at quietly because she was really supposed to conceal it from him completely, that she is actually all his before the choice is made, and that she loves him, all this the poet allows to emerge into the open with admirable psychological sensitivity in the slip of the tongue, and by so doing he is able to assuage the unbearable uncertainty of the lover as well as the similar excitement of the audience about the outcome of the choice." The thing here then is the proxy certainty of the jeans in question, worn by any number of admirable celebrities, but not yet mine; at least the manufacture of this particular slippage, or smear, is the overburdening of the debt to style that the ode to leg-wear itself omits thanks to its all-too-passionate declaration of true love's material reflex. Recovery.



If you listen to both of these at the same time, something incredible happens. Peter, if you think this is one of those banalities you mentioned, I beg to differ. This is a portal into the very heart of the world. Point it at the sun.



I just can't believe she wore those jeans like me. This is, of course, eminently believable; but in the dream economy of passionate consumer affect, where emphatic utterance is the non qua sine of the perfect object's post-aural effervescence, the emotion merely slides back round the globular surface of the song to impregnate itself with the desire for its own gleaming smudge tool. The fact that the jeans in question aren't named in the lyrics is even better - their archetypal phantom presence flags up the gaping lack at the heart of the tautology. What we end up with is a pop song so brutally naked in both love and barbarism that it was always already the rape of itself. ARK should run for the presidency of the IMF.

On girt co-ordinates

NEWNEWNEWNEWNEW

SWAG

Hi Zero ONE

AKB-Henry Green

The wreckage beneath standing beeches was lit at this place by a glare of sunlight concerted on flat, dying leaves which hung onto life by what was broken off, the small branches joining those larger that met the arms, which in their turn grew from the fallen column of the beech, all now an expiring gold of faded green. A world through which the young man and his girl had been meandering, in dreaming shade through which sticks of sunlight slanted to spill upon the ground, had at this point been struck to a blaze, and where their way had been dim, on a sea bed past grave trunks, was now this dying, brilliant mass which lay exposed, a hidden world of spiders working on its gold, the webs these made a field of wheels and spokes of wet silver. The sudden sunlight on Elizabeth and Sebastian as, arms about one another's waists, they halted to wonder and surmise, was a load, a great cloak to clothe them, like a depth of warm water that turned the man's brown city outfit to a drowned man's clothes, the sun was so heavy, so encompassing betimes.



A knee which, brilliantly polished over or beneath, shone in this sort of pool she had made for herself in the fallen world of birds, burned there like a piece of tusk burnished by shifting sands, or else a wheel revolving at such speed that it had no edges and was white, thus communicating life to ivory, a heart to the still, and the sensation of a crash to this girl who lay quiet, reposed.

In next to no time that bath was run, with Merode stretched out under electric light and water, like the roots of a gross water lily which had flowered to her floating head and hands. This green transparency was so just right, so matched the temperature of the hidden bliss, that she half closed her eyes in a satisfied contemplation of a chalk white body. She felt it seemed to sway as to light winds, as though she were bathing by floodlight in the night steaming lake, beech shadowed, mystically warmed.



She took a whole azalea right into her mouth.

Quadralectics

Worshiping a Word God will destroy the USA, for life is composed of cubed opposites. Simple Cube Divinity is the most perfect and life-supporting form existing in the universe and on Earth - including Earth itself. Do you realize that a 4 corner square rotating 1/4 turn creates a full circle? A full rotated square will create 16 corners, 96 hours and 4 simultaneous 24 hour Day circles within only a single imaginary cubed Earth rotation. This amounts to a spiraling quad helix of Earth as it revolves around the Sun - rotating as it revolves around the Sun, to induce the value of the Sun revolving about the Earth. This act demonstrates that both Sun and Earth rotate around each other simultaneously - thus creating Opposites existing only as Opposites with a zero value existence between the binary and cancelling to nothing as One or God theism. All Creation occurs between Opposites, and exists only as Opposites - with a zero value existence. As One or as a Godism, all Opposite values cancel out to nothing. The Circle you see around Earth divides Earth into Opposite values equal to a zero existence. As One or God, both Earth and Human cancel to nothing. The whole of the Universe is composed of Opposites - with a zero value existence - that cancels to nothing as One or a God. Humans worship ONEness of DEATH, thus they are destroying the LIFE of all Opposites by which all Creation exists. I have found Evil lies in the Bible that will rock religious and academic values to their primitive origin. There is no Human or God who can match my Cube Wisdom as a Cube Phenomenologist - The Cube God Measurer. While the Circle of Earth rotation is a perpetual embodiment as it is void of the Corner Time notches that accumulate as aging Life for the 4 corner residents. Have you mentality to know 4 Days rotating simultaneously on Earth?

Ray has wagered $10,000 that his theories cannot be proven wrong. The site has been criticised for the "centered 30-point type" of its design and the "endless blather" of its content.

endless in both directions

my villi caress your face, learning the soft curves of your cheeks, the bridge of the nose. i introduce my friends, a couple of belligerent stick figures. you seem bored and disengage from my hose station with a yawn, filling out the required forms as you rollercoaster stomach drop into the oblivious void of bliss at our feet, squawking like a wounded gull. the bridge is silent now, as mitochondria dance in the bellies of beasts below, the green, greasy stench rising to dance in my nostrils.

I need to feel endless in both directions. It's personal.

the co-ordinaters of the future

albumblatt

Fucking Hell

Forever outside unseeming misdirection parse
un-useable arid Ars. invalid O I exculpate so freely
chusing him by town light. Owning all of the prick
condom petals lite unstable helio, bullet nose dread
from error crank everybody holler seismic interlude
voiding the pops. Mum screws back liniments evilly

No totally no baby endofuck resolute : : he speaka
good Ingrish              I love you so hardened quite
sublimely right, I still completely love you so my
febrile waif was ever so just love me please of shit
banana cake, Hippolytus trump the binary gouache.

Or before dawn when they blaze unbelievably bright
with vivid and slowly shifting iridescent colours. They
are filmy sheets slowly curling and uncurling, stretching
and contracting in the semi-dark sky. Compared with
dark scudding low altitude shitcanned tinnitus fire

ten past nine

Is relentless and self-immolating honesty any useful barometer of the immediate, or does it merely slide back into the chasm of colonial lyric desire spreading out from my fingertips? I feel that at the moment, which is really at the very moment, that the only possible ethics of writing is to impale an immediacy into passion that is at least the truth of the next second of writing - is this the precision of mortality I think it is. I want to be utterly definitive this second, to trust the voracious temporal greed that is the only useful form of greed at my disposal. What is honesty in poetry, what is the call to arms, what is the invocation of poetry to do with itself, how can what I write do everything that I do *not* want it to do because *that* in itself would be the only possible realism? But then a poetry such as that would perhaps resemble the most risible chance-based nonchalance. When is a surfeit of passionate response USEFUL to anything other than a lyric demand for clarity of expression? Its vaunted uselessness is not enough, and in any case I am creating poems which are then sent to people to be read as objects of work, any uselessness is quickly inverted even in the moment of its conception. I twist. Is the point, why is love commendable in and of itself - why should it be? How fucked up is your love, see me pirouette and land in flames, can we allow ourselves that much trust? What do I risk by writing that is not just a failure of or in the writing? I want to feel actual movement feeling, real flesh, language conspires in the meaning flesh to alter its state, to elect it, simultaneously grounded in how is your body local to me, how do I keep my skin soft, how do I make my skin shine, how can you love me. That must be the question now, not how can I love you, that's all too easy, I can slam the brakes on whilst loving you to death, but how can you love me if I love you that much? And does it even matter? Do I finally care as long as I can get a poem out of the night? Is the immediacy of experience forever lost through its mediation by exchange and the virtual insistence on an ersatz immediacy of ease and profit? You can make $400 an hour from home! Click here now! It is not enough to hate that, although that must be loved, the hatred of exploitation. Poetry should match the New-Age insistence on the transformation of consciousness but make it work through attention to the particular, and what is more particular than the next second - there must be a social instance, poetry, of the responsibility of denying oneself "the ideological misuse of one's own existence". I will perform this for you now, a remote healing, watch my hands, the contradiction of me helping you the reader to overcome the ideological misuse of your own existence whilst appealing to an ideology of literary trust, how can you love me? From "On the morality of thinking" (MM 46): "Knowledge can only widen horizons by abiding so insistently with the particular that its isolation is dispelled. This admittedly presupposes a relation to the general, though not one of subsumption, but rather the reverse. Dialectical mediation is not a recourse to the more abstract, but a process of resolution of the concrete in itself." Do that. Now get out.

The Gnostic Cartography of Desire: aphorisms on Olson

What I come down to is that Maximus is the poetics of temporality, laid bare. I think finally that’s how the poem ACTS, and I think only, or at least certainly by, insisting upon temporality as the primary figure of the poems in particular, can all the booming, phallocentric, thetic rhetoric of the essays be put to good use. But finally, because I always want to skip, to go straight for the jugular with Olson, can there truly be a poetics of temporality, or is such a thing only ever destined to merely describe the passage of time, as Ashbery ends up so pathetically, whimsically doing? But to go back to jumping the gun – I think it’s a real danger in reading Olson, and a fear which seems to have been born out in the whole style of the recent film Polis is This, that if you take any single one of Olson’s theoretical touchstones from Projective Verse, Human Universe, Against Wisdom as Such, or wherever, and you apply it wholeheartedly, and you look at Maximus through that one lens, you end up with just that, the end of the picture you wanted to start with, and that’s when the project segues, not without struggle, but segues relentlessly into a kind of corny mysticism. Olson is not mystic, not in the way, say, Duncan was. He got his theory of myth and muthos from Harrison, and he stuck with that actionable language, as was passed onto Ed Dorn, who has a whole other folk ontology going on. But what still bothers me is the way in. Perhaps this has come about simply because of the historical weight P.V. bears, and that Olson seems only ever to be read as living up to his constructs (which in any case are filled with wild humour, puns, the kinds of twists he practices in the verse). The essays and the poems seem to me to be both purely textual, that he was constantly practicing praxis, and that nothing else would ever do – his letters too, especially to Creeley and Bolderoff.

The hugeness of Olson – that the poetry does deal with the “primitive” (as he had it) condition, the prime conditioning, in the case of the “pejorocracy”, of man, philosophical, economic. But even these categories aren’t somehow sufficient. It’s not that they’re not wide enough, but that to describe the primary writing of Maximus as layered in philosophical, mythical (which is emphatically not mystic, because it obeys rules of perception and history), economic, personal, geographical, I mean, these things are there, but they’re not there for the sake of being aspects of the text. The text does these things, that we can call philosophical, or economic – or it should do, and it doesn’t, not all the time. There is the sense, whenever I approach Olson from anything more than a distanced, tuned imbibing (which in any case always flicks me onto a sharper rumination) of: where to start, how to get to grips with the enormity of these instances of cognitive, etc, perception that are laid out before us. And I think it important to recognize that to a large extent, the poetry itself enacts this same process of finding, exploring, receiving, is itself the taking stock of its own procedure, which is not to say it is purely auto-enacting – cf. Stephen Thompson’s excellent and articulate essay in the Ladkin/Purves Edinburgh Review 14 on American Poetry – and therefore un-usable, but precisely to pinpoint the actual condition of form AS content that so pre-occupied Olson.

The complex simplicity of the Maximus project is that this is process as pedagogy – that the alienation of man/being/breath/muthologos, that for Olson are all part of the same historical schema, the pejorocracy & logocentricism – must be rectified by a poetics of temporality that puts man squarely in the driving seat. Gloucester is not microcosm, but simultaneously micro & macro – “life spills out”, every instance in Maximus is an image of the whole, transcending (but grounding) the lyric condition. It is an instruction manual of how to get out of onself and one’s debilitating culture – by appropriating history as what one does & says – and it is precisely this removal of the pejorocracy, this insistence on distancing oneself from it, which we can probably assert is the point at which Prynne, around 1970, begins to believe that such a project is too top-heavy, that the important thing to do is it collide with the pejorocracy head-on, to no longer avoid it in favour of an appeal to the Polis, which was never quite as dialectical as Thompson almost reads it, in Letter 6.

“For Olson, reality is the missionary position.” – Tomas Weber

The gnostic cartography of desire is: LIFE – which wants to abstract itself out // AND // my LIFE – which wants the particular to stand in for the whole, but stays particular. This is the lyric thrust that Prynne talks about in that most beautiful piece of friendship disguised as pedagogy, his address to the folks at Simon Fraser University in 1971. That lecture is, I know, hugely important to many people writing excellent and worthwhile poetry today, and I think perhaps more so than Maximus IV, V, VI is, or will be. But the image of desire that Prynne traces in that essay is, I think, couched in the temporal hi-jinks of Maximus as text, not as abstractable conceit, or any discourse of historical seismic shift in the space of post-modern American poetry, which I’ve no doubt Olson would have dismissed with some sort of misogynistic disparagement of the progenitors of discourse in general.

“that we act somewhere / at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucidides, or / the latest finest tape-recorder, or any form or record on the spot / - live television or what – is a lie / as against what we know went on, the dream : the dream being / self-action with Whitehead’s important corollary: that no event / is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal / event

The poetics of such a situation / are yet to be found out”

Which is Maximus finding them out, not on the spot, but through the course of the epic. Now this passage throws up any number of concerns, not least the phallocentric cosmic boner of the reading of Whitehead, and of course mythic genealogical penetration is everywhere in Maximus, and also that “self-action” is dangerously un-coupled from Polis, so that here it is assumed that if everyone had the Polis in their eyes, then Polis is this, that segues uncomfortably into tautology, unless we keep reading, unless we keep wanting it, which is the poem’s real beauty. That it only makes sense in the actual act of reading it is both Maximus’ supreme achievement and also its galactic faceplant. It’s no good making language ACTUAL if it only appears actual when you’re reading it? (I get a similar feeling from some of The White Stones, another whole schooner of fish, right, but just the hell of it). But then how else might a poetics make sense, how else can life spill out of a poem? How else but by the spillage from percept to example, by how you take literature to act in the space of LIFE. That is, if you define them separately as such. Because if you stick with it, Maximus nearly actually becomes LIFE, it’s grandiose colonial projections unstick because the condition of colonialism is to subjugate and condense, to temper the environment and to make it micro, whereas Olson is continually opening it all up, including himself, especially including himself. It is the most generous un-auto-biographical use of biography, because, Letter 27 [withheld], he does propose a dialectical relationship between the lived experience of a personal history, the eternal event crossing him like a secant, and the instances of time that budge a life into itself continually to form the ever-present tense within which Maximus operates, nudging it forward, “than that which is, / call it a nest, around the head of, call it / the next second / than that which you / can do!”.

This is the sense in which, for me, Maximus is not like life, is too particular to be anything so grossly universalized as “like life” – “I am a ward / and precinct / man myself and hate / universalization, believe / it only feeds into a class of deteriorated / personal lives anyway, given them / what they can buy, a cheap / belief” – but rather, as the 3rd Letter on Georges has it, “makes it with me, and I want that sense / here, of this fellow going home”, but as I compare my feelings, or write my feelings on this poem by putting a line in my mouth from a unwritten poem, from the “sense” that Olson could not write himself, of this fisherman, “of this fellow going home” that he was not, I seem to trip across the whole metonymic twist of the poems and get lost. If the best I can do (which it isn’t, in any case, but let’s investigate this for now) is allow my appreciation of the poem to rest in a sentiment that Olson wanted to express himself but could not, is that the most personal commitment to home as the condition that any one of us has access to, on Earth, or is that too much like Battleship Earth? “I want that sense / here, of this fellow going home”. Desire and deitics headbutt as Olson demands that we make it with him – I want that sense too, but “here”, slammed across the enjambment’s wet deck, is already out of the picture, is already moving off out of our reach, and we have to keep running the course of the want itself to get there, as the cadence does not slow but similarly slams into the italicised square bracket, making us instanter stop still wanting. Not much more good may now come of this tonight, but hopefully this’ll run on further. This is still the best tattoo ever:

o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)