The Performance of Poetry
Holiday Inn, Room 204, Helena, Montana
I'm in the middle of my first of three trips I'll take over the course of three consecutive weeks. First, there is this trip to Montana (with an unexpected layover in Salt Lake City yesterday) to give a workshop on managing electronic records. Next week is the Text Festival, one of the biggest events in my year. The week after I return from England to travel to Virginia to give another workshop on electronic records and to give a presentation at a professional conference. I may be tired by the end of all this traveling.
The Site of My WorkshopToday, though, was a good day. The flight to Helena was unremarkable. I gave a seven-hour workshop in four and a half hours, which was probably better for all of us, and afterwards I spent a few good hours talking to colleagues, first at a reception at the Montana Club, an exclusive club for Montana's nineteenth-century gold rush millionaires, and then at a local brewpub.
One interesting part of the day was my planned meeting with Devin Becker, who is a poet and archivist (not as rare a combination as you might imagine, or hope) and who is also one of the two archivists who organized the recent survey of the digital archiving practices of writers. Devin told me that he had been reading my blog for a while but had only recently determined that I was not the British academic he had already assumed I was. (Apparently, my first name and my connection to the Text Festival were the source of this confusion.) Along with Devin was his girlfriend Kristin (whose last name I don't know), who is an artist who has produced visual-textual works, and his supervisor Garth Reese.
I was dead tired from my travels, lack of sleep last night, and hours standing giving a presentation, so my body and personality responded as they usually do: with manic and animated talking about what I have a passion for. I talked way too much, using spoken words to expel the tiredness from my body. Devin wanted me to talk to Kristin and him about my work as a visual poet anyway, so I obliged, launching into too many details, thinking out my ways of being, my work as an artist-poet-archivist, which brought me eventually to a discussion of a recent poem of mine that I'd carved out of two ex-lover's letters to each other in 1812. I told the story of the letters, the archival story of the breakup of an engagement, and the man's desperately sad letter explaining why he didn't understand the woman, which was a letter he never sent, a letter he ended in the middle of the word "love" (with an unexpected "lo"), in the phrase "evil consequences of lo."
This story and poem bring together my life as a poet and archivist, my amazement at how an archival record can revive the long-dead reality of an ancient act, and my similar amazement at how a good poem can give a body a sense of life. All of this comes down to the word and the image, the working parts of the visual poet. These are the messages from the past that work best on us, that pass the most information through our bodies.
And I tried to say something about this today, in my workshop, in my conversations with my friends, and two good friends, Terry Baxter and Donna McCrea, joined us for the conversation (along with Anne, an archivist for Yellowstone National Park). It made for a good evening, though I still talked too much, and though I couldn't really seem to convince anyone of what a great artist the performance artist Marina Abramović actually is.
Still, I spoke passionately about her work, passionately about poetry (visual and otherwise), and passionately about archives. It was a good day, tiring and successful, and fun, and I had the chance to meet Devin, who is the archivist who processed Mary Ellen Solt's records for her famous anthology of mid-century concrete poetry, Concrete Poetry: A World View, and the chance to answer his questions about my friend Christian Bök and the spelling of his last name.
The Entrance to the Montana Club (the swastikas of which are not nefarious)
ecr. l'inf.
I'm in the middle of my first of three trips I'll take over the course of three consecutive weeks. First, there is this trip to Montana (with an unexpected layover in Salt Lake City yesterday) to give a workshop on managing electronic records. Next week is the Text Festival, one of the biggest events in my year. The week after I return from England to travel to Virginia to give another workshop on electronic records and to give a presentation at a professional conference. I may be tired by the end of all this traveling.
The Site of My WorkshopToday, though, was a good day. The flight to Helena was unremarkable. I gave a seven-hour workshop in four and a half hours, which was probably better for all of us, and afterwards I spent a few good hours talking to colleagues, first at a reception at the Montana Club, an exclusive club for Montana's nineteenth-century gold rush millionaires, and then at a local brewpub.One interesting part of the day was my planned meeting with Devin Becker, who is a poet and archivist (not as rare a combination as you might imagine, or hope) and who is also one of the two archivists who organized the recent survey of the digital archiving practices of writers. Devin told me that he had been reading my blog for a while but had only recently determined that I was not the British academic he had already assumed I was. (Apparently, my first name and my connection to the Text Festival were the source of this confusion.) Along with Devin was his girlfriend Kristin (whose last name I don't know), who is an artist who has produced visual-textual works, and his supervisor Garth Reese.
I was dead tired from my travels, lack of sleep last night, and hours standing giving a presentation, so my body and personality responded as they usually do: with manic and animated talking about what I have a passion for. I talked way too much, using spoken words to expel the tiredness from my body. Devin wanted me to talk to Kristin and him about my work as a visual poet anyway, so I obliged, launching into too many details, thinking out my ways of being, my work as an artist-poet-archivist, which brought me eventually to a discussion of a recent poem of mine that I'd carved out of two ex-lover's letters to each other in 1812. I told the story of the letters, the archival story of the breakup of an engagement, and the man's desperately sad letter explaining why he didn't understand the woman, which was a letter he never sent, a letter he ended in the middle of the word "love" (with an unexpected "lo"), in the phrase "evil consequences of lo."
This story and poem bring together my life as a poet and archivist, my amazement at how an archival record can revive the long-dead reality of an ancient act, and my similar amazement at how a good poem can give a body a sense of life. All of this comes down to the word and the image, the working parts of the visual poet. These are the messages from the past that work best on us, that pass the most information through our bodies.
And I tried to say something about this today, in my workshop, in my conversations with my friends, and two good friends, Terry Baxter and Donna McCrea, joined us for the conversation (along with Anne, an archivist for Yellowstone National Park). It made for a good evening, though I still talked too much, and though I couldn't really seem to convince anyone of what a great artist the performance artist Marina Abramović actually is.
Still, I spoke passionately about her work, passionately about poetry (visual and otherwise), and passionately about archives. It was a good day, tiring and successful, and fun, and I had the chance to meet Devin, who is the archivist who processed Mary Ellen Solt's records for her famous anthology of mid-century concrete poetry, Concrete Poetry: A World View, and the chance to answer his questions about my friend Christian Bök and the spelling of his last name.
The Entrance to the Montana Club (the swastikas of which are not nefarious)ecr. l'inf.
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