Kent Shaw's Blog, page 17
October 4, 2013
Rachel Khedoori. A little room, please. With a view.
Rachel Khedoori. A little room, please. With a view.
October 2, 2013
moma:
Check out this quirky little display of objects in an...
October 1, 2013
"There are many reasons why the Language poets, and their fellow travelers, like Palmer, shift the..."
“There are many reasons why the Language poets, and their fellow travelers, like Palmer, shift the terms of their analogies to linguistics from a Spicerian investigation of language as magic to a newer investigation of scale-shifting and juxtaposition as tests of literacy. One has to do with a sense that capital itself had both extended its reach and intensified its encroachments into psychic existence, that capital itself had grown both ‘bigger’ and better able to reach into the crawl spaces of individual citizen-consumers’ psyches.”
- from “Language” in Spicer and After (excerpted from The Matter of Capital, by Christopher Nealon) Nealon has made a consistent argument about the invasive nature of capital in American culture. And, most interesting to me, has traced it from a Pound/Auden collision of approaches through Ashbery and up to the Language poets. His argument is that poetry has been colliding with the vastly powerful American capitalism throughout the 20th Century. And I am especially interested in this place where poets push back in a Spicerian way (“Language is magical! Stay off my kind of language!”) or a Langpo way (“You, capitalism, disrupt my complacent use my language!”). It is to Nealon’s credit that these arguments feel naturally fit to the tradition preceding them.
- from “Language” in Spicer and After (excerpted from The Matter of Capital, by Christopher Nealon) Nealon has made a consistent argument about the invasive nature of capital in American culture. And, most interesting to me, has traced it from a Pound/Auden collision of approaches through Ashbery and up to the Language poets. His argument is that poetry has been colliding with the vastly powerful American capitalism throughout the 20th Century. And I am especially interested in this place where poets push back in a Spicerian way (“Language is magical! Stay off my kind of language!”) or a Langpo way (“You, capitalism, disrupt my complacent use my language!”). It is to Nealon’s credit that these arguments feel naturally fit to the tradition preceding them.
September 25, 2013
sfmoma:
From the SFMOMA video archives: Sol LeWitt and curator...
From the SFMOMA video archives: Sol LeWitt and curator Gary Garrels discuss LeWitt’s installation Incomplete Open Cubes (1974).
Sol LeWitt. Sol LeWitt make me disordered! Please!
September 24, 2013
"A store with a shelf made of a strip," by Kimihiko Okada. You...
"A store with a shelf made of a strip," by Kimihiko Okada. You could sell many things here. Like shoelaces. Spaghetti. Akimbo (like the posture akimbo). Maybe the people are for sale.
"WE BURNED THE HEADDRESS IN THE FOG
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I am playing gin rummy with your mother. I am staring down..."
“WE BURNED THE HEADDRESS IN THE FOG
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I am playing gin rummy with your mother. I am staring down her pink bathrobe at her tits. On the cards there are pictures of your mother crying and the cards are crying on the table which has no legs. They are wet and crying and she is crying too because you are fourteen and behind a dumpster with other fourteen year olds getting high because being fourteen is hard. Because being fourteen is an abandoned building of SORRY, mine shafts of CARE, is one touch too soon. Because being fourteen is a tatter of open eyes, one whole year of dirty hair, mesh and voicemails and condensed music that has nothing to do with the awkward way you talk. Because being fourteen is like being a billboard in a forest of sinking trees that advertises trees and blinks a tree time at every hour. Only the trees know what it means and whatever it means is sad like staring down your mother’s bathrobe. She wins every hand. Nothing has changed.”
- from Man vs. Sky, by Corey Zeller. My strongest response to this poem is the comparisons of 14 years old to a building and mine shafts. All that stuff about 14 years old is exactly what you would think it is. But it feels like it gets at that subtle yet pervasive dissatisfaction that just takes over your life. Many of the poems in this book propose a similar dynamic, where the speaker has some imaginative insight into some other figure (usually referred to in the second person, like this poem does). Here that other figure feels more concrete to me. I like that. I like when there’s this wise one who just has something to say about someone’s life, but it doesn’t feel like it will amount to anything consequential for that person’s life.
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I am playing gin rummy with your mother. I am staring down her pink bathrobe at her tits. On the cards there are pictures of your mother crying and the cards are crying on the table which has no legs. They are wet and crying and she is crying too because you are fourteen and behind a dumpster with other fourteen year olds getting high because being fourteen is hard. Because being fourteen is an abandoned building of SORRY, mine shafts of CARE, is one touch too soon. Because being fourteen is a tatter of open eyes, one whole year of dirty hair, mesh and voicemails and condensed music that has nothing to do with the awkward way you talk. Because being fourteen is like being a billboard in a forest of sinking trees that advertises trees and blinks a tree time at every hour. Only the trees know what it means and whatever it means is sad like staring down your mother’s bathrobe. She wins every hand. Nothing has changed.”
- from Man vs. Sky, by Corey Zeller. My strongest response to this poem is the comparisons of 14 years old to a building and mine shafts. All that stuff about 14 years old is exactly what you would think it is. But it feels like it gets at that subtle yet pervasive dissatisfaction that just takes over your life. Many of the poems in this book propose a similar dynamic, where the speaker has some imaginative insight into some other figure (usually referred to in the second person, like this poem does). Here that other figure feels more concrete to me. I like that. I like when there’s this wise one who just has something to say about someone’s life, but it doesn’t feel like it will amount to anything consequential for that person’s life.
September 22, 2013
September 20, 2013
Urs Fischer taking it to the symmetry house. Is there anything...
Urs Fischer taking it to the symmetry house. Is there anything about this guy that doesn’t scream ‘IN YOUR FACE’!
