limits

I have a big interest in outsider texts, founds and or
finds...This piece is a terrible/heartfelt so raw.

So called' outsiders' bless their/our souls
have alot of room to work/write/be in....























Emma Hauk's (the other one is by??)
works, above, are incredibly moving,
This piece has 'darling come soon'
written over and over and over and over on it
These two pieces belong together I think. or not.
They both about big stuff.

soundings

Soundings....the sounds in language and language or experimental writing
are a source of big interest to me. As a frame for experience that is less mediated than written text, I am interested in exploring more of what can be shifted, slipped into and opened out in language though a concentration on the sounds in it.

















Ruth Salvaggio in The Sound of Feminist Theory suggests that we pay attention to the sound of language -- something she insists is neither "voice," nor the spoken word, nor metaphor: "I mean the actual effects of sounding, wavering language in critical and theoretical writing -- a distinctive turn toward the oral within the panorama of contemporary thought". Her project is to trace these effects through feminist critical and theoretical writings, which she believes are particularly attuned to the resonances and possibilities of language. Feminist theory, she argues, offers an "indulgence in the transmutive potential of words, their ability to affirm and question and resist and endlessly suggest meanings, to be used for everything they are worth, and more"
I'm interested in seeing it explored in theory yes yes, more please, but also in texts themselves and 'other ' language pieces ie film/sound works. I've been making sound recordings of voice clearings...small films. Interested in seeing how these can be expanded.

I am not deaf-forgetting

Repository and Critical Artists Books Online

Found this fantastic and critical artists books online web...
http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/index.html
An online repository of facsimiles, meta-data and criticism. Joanna Drucker Against Fiction is great but so are most every 'other'. Really worth a look into. I've been making artist books for a while now and find the freedom to shape the look of the whole thing really opens me to thinking what is possible for extending writing.

mouth stuff

click here...
Rafael Rozendaal, Much Better Than This, 2006

x grrrl

Is xxperimental a better term for this area of writing, experimental is problematic so is innovative, so is contemporary... we need a new word.

cow-grrrl

'call out' for women experimental writers

Hi, I've decided to take this interest/blog of mine a bit further... within 24 hours I have had a surprising amount of feedback to this site, so I've decided to go a step further.

I'm would like to put out the call to women who write with an experimental/
innovative/
avant-garde/
post-modern
framework...(I know these terms are problematic, and each term needs an essay or two written on what I mean-but they will do for now) to see who we are and what we are doing. This is both a larger international call and a local one...as Emily Kngwarreye said I paint "the whole lot".

An invitation to make some links between us and us ...
The US leads as the place for this type of exploration into language/writing by women…but I’m pretty determined though to get a community of like minded exploration started here and connected to the writing ideas coming out of the US.

This work needs good conversation, and lots of it and that’s what’s so lacking in the Australian literary scene. Isolation is like silence and so not very helpful. And not the truth (what ever that is) Anyway its not flowing...

I’m thinking that experimental women’s writing coming from the margins of the margins (here) might be able to contribute to the fruitful project, I would like to build connections between us if possible… Any leads… contacts, conferences, connections and comments oh so gratefully collected here…Cheers Majena

ps..."This is emily dressed up...Emily turned the aesthetics of Aboriginal art inside out (or more appropriately outside in). Her revolutionary breakthrough involved a radical change in emphasis—in making the iconography of her stories of secondary importance to their "overall" abstraction. Emily choose to highlight the “emotional content” of her Dreaming stories rather than their specifics, suffusing both symbols and structure beneath sensual passages of dots. The grid of lines, which had served as the bones of her earlier paintings, was gradually obscured altogether, but remained as the inner logic of these middle period compositions". http://www.aboriginal-art.com/desert_pages/utopia

&Now Festival for Innovative Literature and Art April 2008

&NOW gathers together two things in their constant motion: writers inventing form, and the forms that are already “the past” as soon as those writers move on to their next invention. To gather the moving requires the grace of contingency.

We are a conference that calls itself a festival because we festivate the confrereity of our common difference. &NOW comes together to give meaning to words or ask words to give meaning to us, both of which always fail!

In that failure, resides the richness of our ignorance.
Even its radiance.The product of radiant ignorance is art. This is not new. How we do it is &NOW.
The product of ignorant radiance is the unpronounceable word: human.

&NOW is the not then that never passes.

&NOW is the letters of the names of all its conferees scrambled into a zetabet.

&NOW is not an anti-conference because transgression defers recognition.

&NOW stands in the danger zone between popular culture & the elitism of native intuition.

&NOW has fun at no expense; for free, like words are, no charge.

&NOW is the ampersand that signs a sign for a sign signaturing the presence of the present in the past.

&NOW is a message to narrativity signifying that all is well

&NOW is a message from narrativity simplifying that nothing ends, well or ill.

&NOW: a sentence that contradicts itself/ /&/, so contradicting, sets a standard for comprehending love /&/ religion /&/ nature /&/ politics as portrayed by the fictionalists beginning this year two thousand seven anno domini.

&NOW is a literary movement without authors that comes into view for 3 days biennially -0041067% of time- so that those authors without whom this literary movement does exist gather to keep literature in motion.

&NOW is theater that has moved off the stage but continues in search of the seven props it needs to make the emotion of the action live to make live action mind

&NOW redefines the halls of academe that they be no longer safe from the fear of the ampersand and/or the chaos of a now.

&NOW arrives 200 years after Ivahoe, 100 years after Freud, 50 years after Picasso, Elvis & Faulkner, and fourteen years after www., it arrives kicking its limbs screaming its lungs in voice & gesture that articulate arrival.

&NOW includes all those art•lit•ists from New York to Los Angeles for whom the medium is the muscle but traveling eastward from New York eastward with a sweep spread from 0° North to 180° South to catch every language in its net woven of the pre-linguistic thought of the world’s current 250,000 child-soldiers as they sleep.

&NOW exists that the gag of terror not create silence.

&NOW recalls commerce as a form of interaction outside the monetary systems while it rings the bell.

&NOW rings the bell to open trading on each day’s aesthetic market then listens all day to the bellringing echo /&/ then goes home after the dayclosing bell reinaugurates the sound•syllable that begins the invocation at the outset of each fiction-act.

&NOW, recognizing that its murderer’s lurk in the shadows turn on the darkness to expose them to a fright.

&NOW is ’04(NotreDame)•’06(Lake Forest)’08 (Chapman) toward infinitum: a quantum equation designed to utter irresolution.

Rebecca Goodman
Martin Nakell
Vahid Norouzalibeik
Davis Schneiderman
Sophocles
Steve Tomasula

http://andnowfestival.com/

THE MATERIAL POEM
an e-anthology of text-based art & inter-media writing

The Material Poem is a new e-anthology, edited by James Stuart and published by non-generic productions. It features the work of some 28 Australian poets, artists and critics, all of whom are engaged with poetry, and more broadly language, as a material form.

This body of work is inter-disciplinary, inter-media and often collaborative, spanning a wide variety of formal contexts – page, screen, canvas, space, book, performance and more. The Material Poem showcases the vibrancy of experimental writing in Australia, demonstrating how writing functions as a practice that is never purely literary.

DOWNLOAD FOR FREE NOW

The Material Poem is available as a free PDF download. File size: 46.9mb. For best results, right-click on link and select "Save link as", "Download linked file" or "Save target as"

http://www.nongeneric.net/

Sucking Words

Ed Goldsmith sucking words on ubu. Web...great film talking about 'the world having enough sentences in it.. he is reassembling the ones he find...wonderful text pieces...

http://www.ubu.com/film/goldsmith_sucking.html

OOps-i-Daisy from objects for talking www.majenamafe.com

Rhubarb is Susan and color

http://rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/ has a bit to say re the Youg/Spahr debate and experimental women's writing an essentialism, hes asking for a consideration/inclusion of women of color... (don't forget the who-evers).

Your so right mr Rhubarb is Susan, how can we talk about this and include everyone and not exclude any point, still that old essentialist point gets thrown up again and again...and people get so feisty about it.

There is so much exclusion around womens and womens writing, its a shame to see it in the community or at the edges of it. Writing, in Australia, innovative experimental stuff is almost all invisible, without a voice...Stephanie Young's call for opening to include a broader range of women writers into the community, quote below...is something I would like to get behind.

Dear Poet or Friend of Poets,

In the last year, we have co-written a paper that deals with representation of women in the US experimental poetry scene. (This paper was recently published in the Chicago Review as “Numbers Trouble” and we’ve put a draft of it and some supporting documents here. Right now, this is accessible only to users outside of North America. So, North Americans, get the Chicago Review issue here.)

One of the things our paper does is end up being a catalogue of what’s missing; a catalogue of some of the limits of a mostly white, mainstream US feminism in experimental poetry scenes. We see a myopic lack of attention to women’s issues outside of the US and a lack of collective action. We need more feminisms.

We end this paper asking people to write to us with suggestions about how to overcome this. Our intention is to try and compile a bunch of these suggestions for publication in order to start a conversation.

Would you be interested in being a part of this conversation?

Our plan right now is to start this conversation outside of the US.

There are several ways you could help us.

We are looking for local co-editors for different regions (right now, regions outside of North America) to gather brief statements from local writers about feminisms in their communities. Would you be willing to be one? What this means is that you would gather together some responses from writers in your area around this issue. You could gather as few as two or as many as twenty. It would be up to you. We like the idea of more but we’re flexible.

If you are not interested, do you think you could suggest someone who is?

If we were to get these responses, we then would need to get them translated. If you wanted to do this work with us (like if you translated these into an English that we could then smooth as necessary), that would be great. We might be able to pay you a small fee. If you don’t want to do it, we can probably pay someone else to translate it.

There are two ways we think it might be easiest for co-editors to get these responses. One is to just ask friends. The other is to put an ad in a local paper or journal like Jen Hofer did when she was editing her anthology of Mexican writing. If you are interested in putting an ad, again, we might be able to pay for the ad. It depends on how much it costs.

We think an ad might say something like this:

“FEMINISTS: TELL U.S. POETS
We’re a group of feminist writers who are curious what it is like to be a woman poet in _____. What should U.S. poets know about the living and working conditions of ____ women poets? What can be done? Is there anything to be done together? Send an email to telluspoets[at]gmail.com.”

But you could do whatever you thought was most appropriate.

We’d also like to know if there is anything you think we should say to US poets. At some point we will probably do a similar process-solicit responses from our friends and place ads to reach those we do not yet know-inside the US and any feedback you can share would be helpful.

If all of this seems too much, then can we talk you into just sending us a response? Or if you think of anyone you know who might be interested in doing this work, forward this and let us know.

Our deadline on this is somewhat flexible but not infinite. Our goal is to get this material into book form sometime in 2009. We would like to start getting responses sometime between now and spring of 2008.

Hope to hear from you.

Best,

Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young

Well Nourished Moon

http://www.stephanieyoung.org/blog/

To Work

There is an interesting squabble happening in literary circles as they attempt to talk about elements of women and feminist womens writing in particular, its value seems the big question. This is interesting in itself. It seems outdated by 50 years or so. I stumbled onto it, when looking for analysis of what innovative/
avant-garde writing and womens writing in particular was doing at the moment in the US, because it is extremely hard to see whats happening in Australian womens writing because the demographic is even smaller, minuscule in comparison.

The debate as articles was published in the Chicago Review Autumn 2007 so just a few weeks ago. It goes something like this, WACK, an Art and the Feminist Revolution big blockbuster show was held at MOCA in the states, http://www.moca.org/wack, earlier this year. It was a good show, I think great, but I only saw it second hand... the response was varied, lots of criticism for the work as being essentialist and so not worth much or anything by 'general' (whatever that is) standards. Anyway to some extent the show gave rise to lots of juicy debate and articles, and an article by Jennifer Aston titled "Our Bodies our Poems". In it she said "the recent commitment to women as formal innovators...is utterly and literally essentialist...

Then followed this article by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young who argue obliquely that the system is still excluding women... they have some extensive statistics to demonstrate this...worth a read. Then Jennifer Aston replies and lastly Joshua Kohin and Robert P. Baird add their perspective.

“Numbers Trouble” by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young

“The Numbers Trouble with ‘Numbers Trouble’” by Jennifer Ashton

“Poetry Magazines & Women Poets” by Joshua Kotin and Robert P. Baird

This debate is so interesting because it reveals the literal stuck-ness in this sort of perspective. Both sides are right and there is no room for them working together. I think it points to a very real need for more analysis of what exactly innovative, experimental women writers working on as ...So I thought I'd start to try and map that a bit here, for my own benefit and for anyone who would like to look over my shoulder.

I do not have a agenda at this point except that coming from a visual art and a writing perspective, I have seen similar debates in visual art arena for decades and writers could benefit from some of the perspectives that have been initiated through the debate ... I think it would move things alone at a more interesting pace...

Over the next few months I'm going to explore things like what innovation and experimental are in light of Modernisms frames and the re-reading of those ideas all these years on. What then constitutes innovative work... the role of repetition in work, the value in nuance and the marginalization of it. How women are writing what they are writing, what the ideas are behind this work, what aren't they interested in, what the shifts in that are and then the impacts that has on writing but also thinking in general. I'm a real stickler for living the 'good' theory...
Comments and input greatly appreciated experimental/innovative/postmodern/avant-garde writing

online text by Bergvall

Online text by Bergvall

http://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/bergvall_eclat.pdf

Noting as a frame of flimsy- miss Odysseys

The frame of flimsy courtesies the big nothing like a tooth over a whale hole in the gum that is waiting for a break in orangerinds and peelings of lime green syphilis, on the Mondays after. On Tuesdays the frame will probably fall incomplete over a gap in the consistency of memory in the woman as pink chenille ain’t taffeta to Wednesday. The day after is the one because of the frame of calender days that hold histories as hostage and opened up tomorrow as the time already had. So it was no surprise that the place of broad plains collapsed into shower curtains at the end of the week. That month just gone was conspiratored into peeling the space from culminious cloud and boiling them in the teaming rains of Calcutta. Canada was next. The bears of Nebraska ate looms and sundials for the fame of tea. Grass plains were subverted into algebraic-connotating
-tourist-haven-retirement-parks offering golf and the moment before twelve as a late night movie. The screen was at the same place the table of cornucopias for mouths of fur lined boots at summer camp, in winter ate and ate.

The woman was at first complicated…as one was two-framed compassion. Owing to the small opening her approach was fastened to shape but with intricacies of demeanour the spied line became ousted and the mink was soon on the right track of complete. She began by becoming ever the hero and tights were anointed then annotated. Big muscles rippled. Her bright melancholy was gestulated by her jumping up and down up and down. Up and down was annoyed by the turn-pike complacency of instinct that froze the wipers on the blade…small threads were eyed as cameleers. Never the less she reached the page of Normanby and held the door as wide as Candid, held and lapped-dogged the fold of reams of spun cotton and bodices of nipples. This was quite the reprieve she had wanted now the coursing of the insincere could disclose the merry. The frame held too for a shortened mile and spannered the hope of nincompancy at the belly lie. The tooth lay low and juice flowed down into the crotch seam of curtain at the cloud of the bears eating sunbeams at the table of lights. Sure you could be thought and one had only to say but to see the umbilicus of the date was admission enough. She had arrived at the first frame of flimsy, and she ate and ate and ate.

She who was it became them that was her, the bears were quite popular. Still. In frame was
she who ate custard, was she who ate the dryness in apricots, was she who held protons? was she who laughed smoke. Her past was becoming as the stream of words hemming her footprints. Cups were unlaying. Lift lids spoke…the flimsy was in tarantella a quivering in delight.

She…
the…
up-ending the…
and withdrawing only after the fight. Past portholes of fissure and globules of delight pressing inward, piano stile and an-eye-at-a-time…the serenata as sulphured yellow shine. Each dirge then was transfigured as wine purple. See. A loom is still sorting threading sties of reprieve. Frame. flimsy. Row home a line at a time.

Blu'

a perambulation of …Blu’
Levina’s ethical relation to alterity
a dialogue (in the making) between self and mine other

say
blue /blu:/ adj., 1 having a colour like that of a clear blue sky. 2 sad, depressed; (of a state of affairs) gloomy, dismal (feel blue: blue times) 3 indecent, pornographic (a blue film) (blue business) 4 with bluish skin through cold, fear, anger etc. 5 having blue as a distinguishing colour (blue jay) (blue day) -n. 1) a blue colour of pigment ie, blue colour 2) blue cloths or material (dressed in blue) 6 any of the various small blue-coloured butterflies of the family Lycaenidae 7 blue powder used as a laundry powder to whiten laundry…in a dress...in a shirt…blue cuffs, collar blue folds blue sky blue quilt, blue noses blue stockings, 7 blue thumbs, deep holes in the ocean, frames of cyanosis…blue moons blue tunes…, 8 the underneath is blue… …beyond blue…everything empty…blue prose…slang slung…blue thoughts postures gestures blue words pictures…tattoos…love. inside a grove. a groove…faded violet…milk on a lip…a cord, freezing cheeks in …sea-berries, I iris’s, pale moons on nails…of the vein that runs up inside blood now…blue…to the body
9 veils to
heaven is too
blue, blue collection blue love…in relation


itself…palest blue baby blue, light blue, blue, pearl blue, grey, powder blue, azure, bluebell… cerulean, cerulean, cornflower, forget –me-not, lapiz-lazuli, sure. Sapphire blue, skyblue, cobalt copenhagen blue true, ultramarine, deep blue, gentian blue, indigo, perse, royal blue, navy blue-black, navy blue, slate, steel blue, nile blue, saxe blue …prussian…, cyanin, indican, indophenol, induline, smalt, thenard’s blue, true blue cold, cyanine, ice-blue pavonine, sapphirine, woaded, azure, azury, bluish cyanotic…black blue… livid, slaty blueness, bluishness bice...bite it off

take-make love
intimacricies, sliced held down up close to an eye cut cut cutting… cutting into fine
intensives with a cut to pull out the gap from 2D. to three then into the gap the round literally foreshortened…paraphrased as accord to lantern up to pull down and from
inside inside the outerside-slyde…

with presence given and taken away in one…like her you her…you have him not
with presence…error, fight…bruised seen, obscene, out of tune underdone undone…hole in the heart
blue eyed blue eyed blue print

dis-place
impossible underneath, in the crack up under the arm close up folds the opened back to flat a little forward…blackblank lanterns folded into refraction’s carapace…eidola…consola
a…bility to strive fortoward as a space in the body’s in-ability to in-habit in them…
co-habitation enunciation

There is no one blue of substance no gesture enough to fondle love…so it is. Sooooooooooooooooo
Mr Rilke wrote…love requires a progressive foreshortening of the senses: I can see you for miles, I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you maybe, for a few feet but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend, sight the sovereign sense and concepts chief content…blurs. The lover …is in such splendid danger just because she must depend upon the co-ordination of her senses for she knows that they (all) must meet in the unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extinction, they come together and have no permanence.

Displacement… blue the word the colour the condition the act continue to contain one another
The hand would touch lovers skin shapes allstead a blue cut through with blue.

attending

...attending of conferences variously named torrets, shit…fuck, on a yearly or even on a once in a life time bases. fervour. could be considered a glut, a celebration of linguistic management gone to the dogs sort of extravagan-za. an experience of the sequested. attending as a margin of plots. first the signing up…if you are known as a ticker…the goodnatured nick…fuck name shit piss that is given to you by your colleges in arms on initiation into the family as it were…there is no hidden problem with getting in to these things…like a nudist colony you only have to be nude to walk around in one…and there …is no exception... (extract)

speakerliness

exploring correlations between sounded oralities or speakerliness, and obscenities as a possible point of departure for Language frames that 'allow' extra.