Exoskeleton

Star Fuckers: Warhol, Björling, Parland

2011-12-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

Over on Montevidayo, I've written a post about Andy Warhol and the Factory, and the strange "factory" of Gunnar Björling and Henry Parland, Finland Swedish modernist poets.

New Book by Kim Hyesoon

2011-11-14T07:15:00.001-08:00

Action Books is psyched to announce that we've got a new book from amazing Korean phenom Kim Hyesoon now for sale. Buy it for 12 bucks at www.actionbooks.org (or 20 bucks for the new one plus the previous one, Mommy Must Be A Fountain of Feathers) or for 16 bucks at SPD Books or Amazon.com.

Now available on www.actionbooks.org and SPD Books: All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon (translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi). The celebrated Korean poet Kim Hyesoon writes from a radiant black zone where matter becomes dark matter, human becomes trinket, garbage becomes god, a zero-point for our present moment's grotesque and spectacular inversions. This volume includes a selection of recent work, the landmark poem "Manhole Humanity," and the essay "In the Oxymoronic World." With fiercely incisive translations and a preface by Don Mee Choi.

"As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real!"—Aase Berg

"The final poem “Manhole Humanity” deserves its place alongside Césarire’s “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” or Ginsberg’s “Howl” or Inger Christensen’s It. Kim Hyesoon’s new book is armament and salve, shield and medicinal chant. It’s here to protect us." - Christian Hawkey

ALL THE GARBAGE OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
On the seat you left, two beer bottles, a cigarette butt, two pieces of scratch paper.
Why are you screening my calls, my messages? Don’t you have anything else to do?
You are the bourgeoisie of communication. Why am I always afraid of the phone?
When you look at me, I always feel as if I should change into something else.
How about changing myself into a bundle of clothes dumped on the sofa
or a pale pink wad of bubble gum dangling from someone’s lips
like the poor tummies of all the animals that flail about when they are turned over?
Do you know?
Eyesnavel god. Forearmsearflap god.
Sweetpotatokneesappleseed god. Pigstoenailschick god.
Dreamingdivingbeetlesashtree god. Lovelygirlsheelstoenail god.
Antsghostscatseyeball god. Ratholescatsrottingwater god.
Mrsdustingarmselephant god. Salivadropexplodeslikefreongas.
Salivafountainevenmoremortifyingnauseatingthanthesmelloflionsrottenbreath god.
Do you know all the dearest gods that are hanging onto our limbs?
On the seat you left, a wet towel, a wad of gum, a crushed tomato.
Dear blackgarbagebags who thankfully lent each one of their bodies.
Dear foldedarms of the window and concrete and steel under my feet.
How high the armsofthemachinehammers that beat down steadily upon
those foldedarms.
All the pigs of the world unite god. All the cats of the world let’s become a butter god.
Dear wrists escape from the arms god. Heap of curses, mackerel corpses spit out from a soccer player’s mouth god. There are 3 million gods in India. How many people live there?
Dearest multiple gods that have swarmed in from the sky, land, sea.
On the seat you left, I sit like a garbage god, and do you or don’t you know
that I wait for the green truck heading to the landfill like the dearest dirtiest loftiest god
who has long endured till now because of its hunger for humans?
Do you or don’t you know that every day our hair falls and mixes with the melting water of an iceberg in the faraway sea?
Yournostrilssingledropofapricklynosehairearth god!

Nathalie Djurberg

2011-11-13T06:20:00.001-08:00

I wrote a piece on the necropastoral and Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg's exhibit at the Walker, The Parade.

Tranströmer wins Nobel Prize

2011-10-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

I wrote a little post about Tranströmer in honor of his winning the Nobel Prize.

New Issue of Action, Yes

2011-08-30T12:59:00.001-07:00

New special Swedish issue of Action, Yes, guest edited by Anna Thörn and Sara Tuss Efrik, featuring art, texts, performances by Stina Kajaso, Cia Rinne, Ida Börjel, Leif Holmstrand and a whole slew of others: http://www.actionyes.org/index.htm

And here's a notice from Svenska Dagbladet.

Rats in the Fence: “Influence” and Bataille Boully, Feng Sun Chen, Aase Berg and HP Lovecraft

2011-08-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post about unhealthy influence, HP Lovecraft, Aase Berg, Bataille, the HBO show True Blood and a few other things.

Imperiet/Thåström/the 1980s

2011-08-24T06:39:00.000-07:00

I wrote yet another post about the "plague stage" and the Swedish 80s band Imperiet.

Corpse Language: Geechie Wiley, Ezra Pound, HP Lovecraft

2011-08-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

Hi
I posted a post about the "corpse language" of blues great Geechie Wiley, Ezra, and HP Lovecraft over on Montevidayo. It's a sequel of sorts to the PJ Harvey post from a few days ago. It also deals with "accessbility" and "obscurity" and "the Image".

Gothic Plague Stages: PJ Harvey, Herzog, Aase Berg

2011-08-09T08:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wrote a post at Montevidayo about Herzog's Nosferatu remake:

PJ Harvey:

And Aase Berg's Mörk materia (Dark Matter):

"Mouth-arms long, folded. The visible stylus and the seed capsule. A nauseating number of butterflies hovered in the odor from our open, sugar-soft wounds. And lanterns rose and fell from the city’s tallest Ferris Wheel. We followed Saskia along an alley of thujas and cypresses, rhodedendrons, purpurea, orchids, opium. The night sky wailed and exploded in fireworks and bursting particle heaps.

And shadows of mongoloids, pinheads, fatdogs and androids moved toward the wood, rubbed against the fossils and the veinage in the cell walls. There the body was harrowed by beasts, thrown back and forth in a deadsilent battle fight between muscle mechanisms and distortions between large milk-white moray eels inside the vein-burst petal skin.

She bites froth into the air. She crawls dog across the cracked floors. She pukes a sound into the mirror glass. The jellyfish burns in her, the planet burns in her. The floors are completely covered with straw, scales, spores, white petal wings..."

Herzog's Sublime

2011-07-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

Joyelle has an interesting post up about Werner Herzog (The Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner, Cave of Forgotten Dreams) on Montevidayo.

Counterfeit lineages

2011-06-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post about the aesthetics of homelessness, the avant-garde and the pesky immigrants.

here's how the post begins:

"1.
As I always say: the most famous definition of poetry in US culture is Robert Frost’s quip that poetry is what is lost in translation. (It’s so famous it’s even the title of a blockbuster movie, “Lost in Translation” – which notably is about “poetic effect,” not poetry proper, see my post about McQueen.) And almost as famous is his quip that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. The two are of course related: at the core is the idea of poetry as something disciplined and authentic, and that it must be protected against the fake, the lazy, the chaotic, the cheaters, the foreign.

2.
Despite various changes, it seems translation still is kept at the margins of American poetry. Translation is inherently a challenge to the dominant idea of “lineage” (perhaps lineage is inherently “dominant”) in US poetry: poetry is authentic, to write real poetry you have to know the true version of US literary history. Poetry has to be defended against the fake, against kitsch (“hipster poetry” or “soft surrealism” or whatever). You have to have a “good ear” to write poetry – it must come to you naturally..."

"Excessive Beauty": McQueen, Minnis, Kitsch etc

2011-06-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Wrote another post about kitsch, beauty, Chelsea Minnis, Alexander McQueen etc.

On Perloff, Decadence, Taste

2011-06-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

Wrote a new post today about Marjorie Perloff (Pound vs Eliot), anti-decadence rhetoric etc.

Sci-Fi Decadence: China Miéville, Aase Berg and Alexander McQueen

2011-06-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

Wrote a piece about the sci-fi decadence of China Miéville, Aase Berg and Alexander McQueen.

Interview on HTML Giant

2011-06-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Blake Butler interviewed me in HTML Giant here.

Excerpt:

"BB: What are you working on now?

JG: A murder mystery novel/poem/notebook about Images and infection, atrocity kitsch and The Law. A Starlet has been murdered, terrorist attacks happen, children are born and get pregnant in mysterious fashion (constantly multiplying), the son is locked in a tower with his favorite horse toy, the penis is a death prong through which – on the ouiji board – the murdered children of the Vietnam War finally gets to “speak,” they talk about the mall and the law, there are twitter feeds about motorcyclists who come from the castle outside of town, terror suspects who are given rubber gloves and led through the mirror, “Kingdom of Rats” it says above the mirror, it’s all about photography, hares, the body in snow, the body covered by a plastic bag, Art as Death. Etc. It’s always a staging, a pageantry, a b-movie. I hope that gives you some idea. I’m calling it The Sugar Book.

I’m also working on a staging of The Duchess of Malfi. Back in the day a girlfriend and I made a video version of The Duchess of Malfi which we shot at a shooting range (she was into guns and knew the manager). “The Ouch-Ouch” we called it. I want to go back into that space – the shooting range, the wax sculptures – but I want to pay even more attention to the clothes, the seams. I want the movements to be more exact this time."

[I'm just now taking a break from this writing.]

Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol

2011-06-01T07:26:00.001-07:00

I wrote a post about Dylan and Warhol (and Edie Sedgwick) on Montevidayo.

Swedes don't exist

2011-05-10T15:16:00.000-07:00

I wrote a blog post about how Swedes don't exist and immigrant kitsch, being "naturalized," etc.

Poetry Magazine

2011-05-04T10:56:00.001-07:00

I wrote a post about the rhetoric of Poetry Magazine (on Montevidayo).

"Accessibility" and Billy Collins

2011-04-21T10:27:00.001-07:00

I wrote a post about "accessibility," "atrocity kitsch," "Violence" and "Billy Collins."

"Kitsch"

2011-04-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post about kitsch and museums and Ron Silliman and Carolyn Forché and softness and mushiness and postcolonialism and Aase Berg and some other stuff.

Jessica Lawson on Kim Hyesoon

2011-04-10T10:03:00.001-07:00

Jessica Lawson has written a great, insightful review of Kim Hyesoon's poetry over at the new Jacket online journal, "Contagious Poetry":

"The patient’s disease threatens to reach out beyond the body and invade others, moving with the force of a river that cannot be dammed even when the word river is carefully broken up. Meaning manages to leak out even in the face of verbal mutilation and constant interruption, so that the poem operates by a contagion that spreads among words and makes collective sense of them. Poetry is a virus, its semiotic contagion infusing bodies and connecting us to one another and to the language with which we are infected. Viewed in this way, poetry is both an intimately corporeal act and a guerilla-style revolution in the politics of expression."

Lawson's emphasis on the body as a two way street of violence and politics suggests a connection to what Joyelle and I called "soft surrealism" a while back (yes, we intentionally misread Ron Silliman's phrase to critique his politics; yes we were totally talking about poets like Kim Hyesoon, not actually the poets Ron was talking about), as well as Mark Seltzer's idea of "wound culture," where collectivity is gathered around wounds.

Not to mention Joyelle's recent entry where she compares the way Kim Hyesoon and Camille Rose Garcia's bodies deal with pollution and contamination.

Anyway, I think this was a really thoughtful essay, an important essay for putting the body - not as a simple "realness" but as something more complicated and interesting - in to the discussion of poetry.

Camille Rose Garcia and Wallpaper

2011-04-07T17:38:00.001-07:00

I've been writing a few blog posts about Camille Rose Garcia and wallpaper.

Kyle Minor reviews the Entrance Pageant

2011-03-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

Kyle Minor has written an excellent review of my new book, Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, on The Faster Times.

Here's an excerpt:

"Göransson clearly does not subscribe to the now-fashionable notion that literature ought not traffic explicitly in symbolism. Characters wear masks, their names are often simply descriptions of the type they describe, their actions are often transparently stand-ins for abstract things outside the story. But, as promised by the verb intricate, these starting places are quickly undermined by way of special language, special syntax, special turns of character. Miss World, for example, is a five year-old boy in a basketball jersey. The characters of the Father and the Daughter seem to actually shift personas while remaining a constant if disrupted continuum of the two characters Father and Daughter. The second time we see the Daughter, she is “television horny.” The Natives are often given the task of asking people intrusive questions in the mall they are using as their staging area. Hollywood is played by a heap of dead horses. The character named Stagehand, who is literally a stagehand, is made to fall into obsessive love with an audience member before castrating himself, and this progression happens very quickly. He has castrated himself harmless to the audience member by page nine..."

I'm very pleased to know that someone really engaged with the book.

Fat/Modernism

2011-03-24T11:43:00.001-07:00

I wrote a thing about fat, excess and ornamentation on montevidayo.com.

Elizabeth Taylor: Citizen of the Necropastoral, Queen of the Underground

2011-03-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

Read Joyelle's obituary for the late great Elizabeth Taylor here.

New Issue of Action, Yes

2011-03-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

We've been a bit slow but we now have a new issue of Action, Yes, featuring work by Aime Cesaire, Clayton Eshleman, Laura Mullen, Alejandra Pizarnik, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Hirata Toshiko, Jackie Wang and a whole bunch of others. It also includes Montevidayo contributors Sarah Fox and Lucas de Lima!

Please stop by:http://www.actionyes.org/

"Silk-Upholstered Chair: Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Andy Warhol

2011-03-21T10:30:00.001-07:00

I wrote a post about classic rock on Montevidayo.

Snuff Films: The Ring and Chris Burden

2011-03-09T07:34:00.001-08:00

I have a post up about a current pet project of mine: art that evokes snuff films.

New York Times/Poetry/Paris Review

2011-03-04T13:21:00.001-08:00

I wrote a new post on Montevidayo about New York times and its gender trouble.

The Art of Goo

2011-03-03T09:07:00.001-08:00

I wrote a piece about goo and theatricality and media and Aase Berg and teenage girls (as insects) etc over at Montevidayo.

Review of Entrance Pageant

2011-02-28T18:02:00.000-08:00

Ryan Downey reviews my new book, Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, over at HTML Giant:

Radiohead, King of Limbs

2011-02-22T12:35:00.000-08:00

Ian Newman is blogging on Montevidayo about all the songs on the new Radiohead album, King of Limbs. First installment is now up.

New from Action Books: Daniel Tiffany, Peter Richards

2011-02-13T06:07:00.001-08:00

We've got two new books out from Action Books, Helsinki by Peter Richards and Privado by Daniel Tiffany. We'll write some more about them in the coming days. You can get them for a sales price of 12 bucks (instead of 16) if you buy them from our Action Books site.

Zurita, pageantry, "poetry of witness", contemporary american poetry

2011-02-11T08:03:00.001-08:00

I wrote an article about these topics on Montevidayo.

The Grand Piano

2011-02-10T17:53:00.001-08:00

I wrote a piece called The Grand Piano on Montevidayo.com.

Greil Marcus

2011-02-08T10:02:00.001-08:00

I wrote a post about Greil Marcus and Fetishes and Bob Dylan and some other stuff: http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=899

Review of Entrance Pageant

2011-02-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

Drew Krewer has an insightful review of my book Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate up here.

... This fear and persecution of “strangeness” is combated through the intrication/blurring of subjecthood. For instance, the character Miss World:

"MISS WORLD

(walks on his tip-toes into the middle of the stage. He is wearing only a basketball jersey. He is 5 years old. He is covered in fine dust. The audience is covered in fine dust. He turns to look at us and the loudspeakers emit the following like semen)"

In this excerpt, masculine and feminine blur—the pairing of “Miss” with the pronoun “he” and also the basketball jersey, which becomes a dress of sorts. Character and audience are also blurred. The parallel phrasing of “He is covered in fine dust” and “The audience is covered in fine dust” make he/audience interchangeable. This intrication continues to build and magnify throughout the book—“I,” “We,” and “You” are blurred, the titles and stage directions evolve into characters themselves, and the distinction between author/reader/performer dissolve.

Göransson’s prose is obsessive, feverish; it feels as if there is simultaneously an overwhelming joy and a keen aversion that animates his descent into the language inhabited by the characters."

Media Bleeds Through Apertures: Necropastoral, Pornography and Insectoid Psychosis

2011-01-25T08:56:00.000-08:00

Wrote a piece over at Montevidayo about "Media Bleeds Through Apertures: Necropastoral, Pornography and Insectoid Psychosis."

Wounding the Viewer: Plath and Arbus

2011-01-21T07:43:00.001-08:00

I wrote a post about this subject matter on Montevidayo.

Wounding American Literature

2011-01-17T09:15:00.001-08:00

I wrote a post about "Wounding American Poetry," which expands some ideas I brought up in my recent post about Silliman's views of translation.

Joyelle McSweeney on the "necropastoral" of Sylvia Plath

2011-01-14T09:48:00.000-08:00

Today on Montevidayo.

Excerpt:

"I’ve started reading through Ariel again, and it’s striking to me the degree to which this text works as necropastoral. The imagery of Ariel continually construes a kind of abeyance, a sojourn or removal to a blank world continually pierced by images of the would-be natural which reveal themselves as artifice and convey Art and Death to the Artist, whose vulnerability to Art’s impulses is pre-registered by her illness, her body as wound."

The Invisibility of the translator: Henry Parland, Ron Silliman and Me

2011-01-07T09:28:00.001-08:00

I wrote a post about the invisibility of the translator, Ron Silliman, Henry Parland and my own experiences as a translator on Montevidayo.

Lars Norén

2011-01-06T08:28:00.001-08:00

I wrote a post about the early poetry of Swedish playwright Lars Norén.

Sara Stridsberg and the Immorality of Absorption

2011-01-04T09:05:00.001-08:00

I have a new post up on the Swedish novelist Sara Stridsberg, Steven Shaviro's critiques of "the gaze" and some other observations about contemporary American poetry.

Laura Mullen on The Black Swan

2010-12-30T10:42:00.000-08:00

Laura Mullen wrote a piece about The Black Swan and i posted it on Montevidayo.

Claire Denis's gothic surfaces

2010-12-30T09:11:00.000-08:00

I posted about the French film director Claire Denis on Montevidayo.

Erotic Car-Crashes: Ballard and Cronenberg

2010-12-29T10:10:00.001-08:00

I wrote a post about car crashes and JG Ballard and David Cronenberg on Montevidayo.

Intense Allegories: The Black Swan and Ann Jäderlund

2010-12-28T17:54:00.001-08:00

I wrote a post about the movie The Black Swan and Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund and "intense allegories" on Montevidayo.

The Black Swan and Art

2010-12-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

I wrote a post about the movie The Black Swan over at Montevidayo.

Excerpt:

"But Nina succeeds in the end precisely not by being fucked. She’s a big success, literally transforming herself into a black swan on stage. The way to this success is not by sex, but through a couple of other means: Fantasizing about *homosexual sex* (with Lily) and, much more importantly, fantasizing about killing Lily (Art is Crime, as Joyelle likes to say). Art is fantasizing. She doesn’t actually have sex, but she imagines (homosexual) sex. She performs, but she performs so well she herself can’t tell the real from the fantasy. Art is quite convincing!"

Books of the year

2010-12-25T10:41:00.001-08:00

I wrote a list of some of my favorite books I read over the past year on Montevidayo.

The MFA Student: another post about this abject figure

2010-12-24T11:30:00.000-08:00

I've written a post about the figure of the MFA student and the model of insiders-vs-outsiders in contemporary American poetry. It's up on Montevidayo. Here.

Kyle Minor wrote a kind response on HTML Giant.

"Brad Pitt ejaculating and on fire..."

2010-12-22T14:27:00.000-08:00

I wrote a post about the figure of Brad Pitt in Ronaldo Wilson's and Christian Peet's poems.

Henry Parland, Yasusada, Forché and "atrocity kitsch"

2010-12-20T10:01:00.001-08:00

I wrote a piece about these matters on Montevidayo.

The Cure and Anachronism and Stunted Sexuality

2010-12-14T08:08:00.001-08:00

I posted a piece about Goth, The Cure, gurlesque, Anachronism, Let the Right One In and some other issues on Montevidayo.

Interview with Johan Jönson

2010-12-13T09:43:00.001-08:00

I have an interview with Swedish poet up on Montevidayo.com.

Here's an excerpt:

Q: In Collobert Orbital, what is the relationship between your book and Danielle Collobert’s work?
A: My intention was to expand on (parts of) her work; to re-vectorize it into a new technological and political (discursive) orbital.
Q: Why were you drawn to Collobert’s work?
A: Because of its stuttering, gasping struggle for survival.
Q: Her life?
A: Because she was very nomadic, but, in difference to the philosophy of pious hopes, it did not make her free in the least. On the contrary, it killed her. Or, more specificially: for me she was a clear and productive example of radical immanence.
Q: In Collobert Orbital as well as a lot of your other books, you refer to your work as a care-giver. I’ve read discussions about your relationship to traditional “working class literature.” What do you see as your relationship to this tradition?
A: I use its advances, write partially in critical dialogue with it. I share the class aspects, the feelings of inferiority and the consciousness of the importance of wage work for bodies, individuals, societies – yes, the whole damned planet. However, “my” aesthetic is very different from the classic Swedish working class literature. And we have different relationships toward modernity. Then: a linear, progressive, “from darkness we move toward the light.” Now: an imperialistic dynamic without outsides, without another horizon.

Vaginas, Malestrom Wounds and Evil Eyes: Aase Berg and JG Ballard

2010-11-30T08:42:00.000-08:00

On Montevidayo today.

More about Basquiat, poetry and the mess of kitsch

2010-11-18T08:04:00.000-08:00

Can be read on Montevidayo today.

Basquiat, "Radiant Child"

2010-11-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

I wrote a review of the new Basquiat Documentary over at Montevidayo.

"Blackie," Basquiat and Mr Rogers

2010-11-15T09:39:00.001-08:00

Are some of the figures I talk about in my new post on Montevidayo: The Messy Fascination of Repulsion.
And of course I talk about: The immigrant is kitsch (as pertaining to Basquiat).

Twin Peaks and Wounds/Media

2010-11-08T13:56:00.000-08:00

I wrote something about Twin Peaks and wounds and corridors for Montevidayo.

Translation Wounds: Christian Hawkey, Aase Berg etc

2010-11-02T07:23:00.001-07:00

I wrote a post about "translation wounds" in Christian Hawkey's new book Ventrakl, Aase Berg's book Forsla Fett and my own book Pilot:

“I would like to think of translation as wound through which media enters into a textual body. The wound of translation makes impossible connections between languages, unsettling stable ideas of language, productive ideas of literature. It is these wounds – wounds that foreground the media of language and image – that I am interested in thinking about today.”

Blake Butler, Steve Tomasula

2010-11-01T09:23:00.001-07:00

I wrote a post about design in Blake Butler and Steve Tomasula over at Montevidayo.

Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home

2010-10-30T11:42:00.001-07:00

Joyelle has a great little post about the cover and title of Bob Dylan's 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home" on Moneviday.com.

Christian Hawkey

2010-10-14T06:37:00.001-07:00

There's a review of Christian Hawkey's new book Ventrakl on montevidayo. The review's by Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle.

"Ambient Violence" in A New Quarantine Will Take My Place

2010-10-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

In Montevidayo, Joyelle has written a piece explaining her concept of "ambient violence," in part applying it to my book A New Quarantine Will Take My Place and in part applying it to Twin Peaks and Sara Pahlin:

As the first poem, “The Seminal Union of Carvers,” opens up, we can see a kind of convulsion in which violence saturates and moves towards and away from the speaker’s body. He begins, “I’ve saved the best conspiracy theories for my own private genocide,” attests, “I was born to break and break again,” but when violence’s mark becomes legible, “I’ve examined the bruise on your thigh and it looks nothing like your pet.” This instability keeps the poem out of the safe gesture of critique. The speaker is saturated with violence and becomes a medium for violence. He makes media, stories, sounds of violence. “In my great debacle, all stories are starting to sound like Vietnam.” “logging accidents pale in comparison to/the things that take place in my capital when everybody’s looking. “In my capital”, in my basement, in my torso, in my ribcage, in my girlfriend’s cunt, in the Hispanic children, the sites of violence are interchangeable like the quarantine that will take my place. “[The military] think the truth is buried somewhere in the backyard of my body. They think one shovel will do.”

New Review of With Deer

2010-10-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

There's a review of Aase Berg's With Deer in Word/for Word by Nicole Zdeb:

"Berg doesn’t want to spare the reader any discomfort. This isn’t a poetry of the intermediary, the mystic, or suburbia. It has teeth. The teeth have been filed sharp. In some poems, each line is a sweep of a blade. The line has movement and bright music, but it isn’t singing to you. It is eviscerating."

Here's a link to the full thing.

All I do is leak from orifices! (MFA Programs #2)

2010-10-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

I've written a sequel to my post about MFA programs and the ideal of the author alone in the woods and John Latta's attack on Montevidayo as "the leaking orifice squad."

The Ambient Violence, Erotics and Race of Ronaldo Wilson

2010-10-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote a response to Ronald Wilson's two great books over on Montevidayo:

The two books are full of assaulted bodies, maybe even “lynched” bodies. They are also akin to the body of Fredrick Douglas’s aunt screaming as she’s getting punished in what Moten terms the “primal scene” of Blackness, the reminder of the constant threat of violence against the black body. But the important part about Wilson’s poetry is that it constantly displaces, deforms this violence as by some kind of Freudian dream logic.

MFA Programs

2010-10-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

I've posted a piece in which I think about some recent essays and such about MFA Programs, that suddenly controversial topic. It's up at Montevidayo. As is Joyelle's piece about hearing loss and Matthew Barney.

Thåström, Decadence and the 80s

2010-10-04T09:52:00.001-07:00

I"ve got a new post up on Montevidayo about the Swedish pop star Joakim Thåström and his dismissal of his 80s songs with Imperiet.

Basquiat's Body Possessed by Media

2010-09-20T08:48:00.001-07:00

I wrote a post about one of my favorite artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat, up at Montevidayo.com.

Actually a funny thing: The first time I saw one of his paintings it was in an interior decorating journal my girlfriend at the time had bought. She said: "Look at this picture, it looks like what one of your poems would look like as a painting." I was totally blown away even by the picture in a photograph of some modernist home in a magazine and I immediately looked up his name and found that there was a show at the Tony Shafrazi gallery in Soho (this was around 1997 or so). I went to the gallery and stayed for hours just staring at the pictures. Anyway, the post isn't about that, it's about spasms and grotesque anatomies.

On David Lynch, Spasms, Body Possessed by Media

2010-09-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

Nathan Lee has written a great article about David Lynch in the new Book Forum. I've blogged about it on Montevidayo.com.

On Gaga, Gurlesque, Betraying Modernism

2010-09-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post about the immorality and decadence of Lady Gaga.

And the virtues of betraying modernism.

On Montevidayo.com.

Lara Glenum on "cunt gushers"

2010-09-14T10:11:00.001-07:00

Lara is writing abut "cunt-gushing" on Montevidayo.

Sarah Fox is writing about dead animal detrius and Baudelaire.

SKAM, Paglia, Gaga, The Canon

2010-09-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

On Montevidayo, Aylin Bloch Boynukisa has written a follow-up to her Swedish Gurlesque post, this time about the feminist group SKAM. Also, there's some stuff about Camille Paglia and Lady Gaga and Joyelle McSweeney writes about the Canon.

Selander, Lady Gaga

2010-09-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

I have a post about Lady Gaga and Stieg Larsson's insufferable detective trilogy, more specifically the character of Lisbeth Selander, on www.montevidayo.com.

New Books from Action Books

2010-09-05T12:54:00.001-07:00

We have two new books out from Action Books on sale on our web site:

Songs For His Disappeared Love
by Raúl Zurita
$12

“Raúl Zurita is, with Nicanor Parra, Chile's preeminent living poet,and his "Canto a su amor desaparecido," here in Daniel Borzutzky's superb translation,is a shattering cyclotron of compact epic. Written in wake of the poet's experiences of imprisonment, torture, and underground resistance, Zurita offers, in the poem's opening half,stuttering, heart-wrenching testimonies of political and personal loss, followed by a tour de force sequence continental in scope-- a kind of Canto General "in negative," drained of any of the consoling teleologies. It is a brave work that conjoins the major and the minor, the vatic and the humblest--and most courageous--orders of the quotidian. Giving no quarter to abstract aesthetic, it's a poem whose traumas jolt us awake and demand we remember.”

-Kent Johnson

Hank
by Abraham Smith
$12

"In an era of overpolished workshop poems and vague, bloodless experiment, Abraham Smith's Hank risks a caterwauling quagmire both epic and lyric in scope, replete with 18 kinds of loneliness. A folk paen to Hank Williams, Sr., its excess is astonishing, its unpunctuated, puncturing burble is propulsive, funny, unforgiving , and raw. Hank is an "elegy for gravel" along the lost highway we've been hunting for. It belongs only to the future of American poetry."

-Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Also: If you buy these two plus Don Mee Choi's The Morning News Is Exciting! you get them for half price off ($24).

MFA Rankings

2010-08-30T08:56:00.001-07:00

I've written a response to Seth Abramson's widely read MFA rankings. It's in Montevidayo.

Finland Swedish Gurlesque: Evan Stina Byggmästar

2010-08-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

When I wrote about the Gurlesque here a few months ago a lot of people found it interesting, including people in Sweden who have been writing to me about it. Today on Montevidayo, Swedish writer Aylin Bloch Boynukisa applies (and expands) the idea by talking about contemporary Finland Swedish poet Eva Stina Byggmästar.

The Second Part of My Interview with Daniel Tiffany

2010-08-24T07:29:00.001-07:00

is up on Montevidayo.

My Interview with Daniel Tiffany on kitsch

2010-08-23T06:20:00.001-07:00

Is now up on Montevidayo.

Atrocity Kitsch

2010-08-18T05:54:00.001-07:00

I have a post up on atrocity kitsch at Montevidayo.com, dealing with Shutter Island, Spielberg's Shindler's List and Carolyn Forché's Against Forgetting.

Shutter Island #2: Sara Stridsberg and the Cinematic Body

2010-08-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

I have a post up on Montevidayo about Shutter ISland, the Swedish novelist Sara Stridsberg and what might loosely be called "the cinematic body."

Shutter Island/Montevidayo

2010-08-04T10:31:00.000-07:00

I have a new post up on Montevidayo about Martin Scorsese's movie Shutter Island, or as I like to call it Shudder Body.

Joyelle has a post about genreless writing and Lucas di Lima has a queer reading of Rimbaud.

Montevidayo

2010-08-03T19:35:00.000-07:00

Hi

I'm now going to blog over at the multi-author web site Montevidayo with some friends and acquaintances. I think I will keep this going as well for more personal announcements.

An Interview

2010-07-30T08:43:00.001-07:00

Here's an interview between me and Drew Krewer.

Review of Dear Ra

2010-07-28T12:03:00.001-07:00

[Just ran across this mini-review of my novel Dear Ra at the Black Ocean Blog:]

Dear Ra
Johannes Goransson
Starcherone, 2008
$16.00

The flinches of Dear Ra consist of confessions, cautions, and insincere apologies. "If the ship is sinking don't make love to the rats." Like Burroughs without the slamming boys, it's a constantly-changing party line. It's "a Haiku about Bang-Bang-Ugh." Too many poems these days are really surrealist novels in hiding; it's nice to see one that comes into the clear. [John Cotter]

SPD Books Sale

2010-07-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

Go here and buy some books from SPD.

Mike Kelley

2010-07-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

[Received this interesting announcement in my email:]

GIVING BACK TO THE COMMUNITY
or
HOME INVASION

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF MIKE KELLEY’S MOBILE HOMESTEAD

Major new public art commission launches in Detroit on September 25, 2010

An Artangel Commission
with LUMA Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD)

Where you grew up - that’s your inner world. Mike Kelley

Mobile Homestead is the first instalment of a major new work by Mike Kelley - both a public sculpture and a private, personal architecture - based on the artist’s childhood home on Palmer Road in Westland, a neighbourhood which primarily housed workers for the Big Three auto makers: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

On Saturday 25 September 2010, Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead makes its maiden voyage from its new home in Midtown Detroit (on the grounds of MOCAD) to return to the "mother ship", the original Kelley home in the suburbs.

On its way down Michigan Avenue, one of Detroit’s main arteries and passageway to the western suburbs, the mobile home passes through some of the city’s most historic neighborhoods such as the old Irish area of Cork Town; Dearborn, the home of the Ford motor company, the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village (Ford’s personal collection of homes and structures associated with great Americans such as Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and Rosa Parks); Inkster; Wayne (where Kelley attended Catholic school); and finally Westland where the former Kelley family home still stands.

In a largely disinvested city with many abandoned houses and dilapidated buildings, Mobile Homestead enacts a reversal of the ‘white flight’ that took place in Detroit following the inner city race riots of the 1960s. It does so at a time when the city is exploring new options of renewal by assessing its singular post industrial conditions in an attempt to articulate a new model for American cities.

The sculpture, which almost exactly replicates the vernacular architecture of working class neighbourhoods in the American Midwest, brings the suburbs back into the city, and as it travels - on specific missions - the mobile home performs various kinds of community services, establishing a permanent dialogue with the community that houses it.

Over the past few months, Mike Kelley has been shooting material for a video documentary that focuses on the people and communities who live and work along Michigan Avenue. A ‘trailer’ for the film will be shown at MOCAD as part of the opening events on 25 September 2010.

The project will be fully completed in 2011, when the mobile home will be attached to an altered reconstruction of the Kelley home, to function as a community space.

Mobile Homestead is artist Mike Kelley’s first public art project anywhere and the first major permanent installation of his work in his hometown. This project is also the first commission by Artangel in the United States and has been produced with support from the LUMA Foundation and in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The work is also the first contemporary artwork especially commissioned for the Midtown Neighborhood of Detroit.

Mike Kelley: "Mobile Homestead covertly makes a distinction between public art and private art, between the notions that art functions for the social good, and that art addresses personal desires and concerns. Mobile Homestead does both: it is simultaneously geared toward community service and anti-social private sub-cultural activities. It has a public side and a secret side..."

James Lingwood, Co-Director of Artangel: "Mobile Homestead exemplifies the long-term projects Artangel on occasion commits to making happen. It’s an ambitious project that needs a specific place, in this case the city of Detroit. As the project evolves, it’s our hope that the place will need the project too."

Luis Croquer, Director and Chief Curator, MOCAD: "We are thrilled to be collaborating with Mike Kelley, one of Detroit’s greatest artists and Artangel, on this ground breaking project for the city of Detroit. Mobile Homestead is a complex multi-layered work that questions notions of history, site, architecture and most of all expanded notions of sculpture."

For further information, interviews and images please contact Janette Scott on janette@artangel.org.uk or Sarah Davies on sarah@artangel.org.uk or call +44 (0)20 7713 1400.

Lee Edelman Dream

2010-07-25T08:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I had another nerdy dream; this one about Lee Edelman and teaching.

I was late to my poetry class because I suddenly had to give birth to a child. When I explained this to my class, they all groaned and someone said, "We won't be forced to read Lee Edelman's "No Future" again in this class." I couldn't remember what the reading list was for the class, but I said, "What's wrong with that book? I think that book is very intersting." The classmembers didn't agree.

After class I was walking across the mall with one of the students and she complained about the lack of community at this school (which was a kind of amalgamation of Notre Dame and IUSB). She suggested that her project "The Arc" would help bring the students together. We came upon it. It was an old wrecked ship without masts that had been parked in the middle of the school lawn.

I asked her what it was and she said: "Down in the hull, I keep Wittenberg."
"Who is Wittenburg?" I asked.
"He's a famous theoretician, but he was killed in the earthquake in Haiti."

So I walk down into the ship and once inside it's huge - I walk through all of these wooden corridors without windows (actually now that I think about it, evocative of "The Dinosaur Pirates," a book Sinead likes, where the kids open a door at the museum and end up in this ship full of pirate dinosaurs etc).

It seems endless. I walk and walk and I can't find Wittenberg. But I soon realize that the corridors are teeming with cops who are trying to keep the corridors clean. And then I realize that I am a ghost, floating effortlessly through the corridors.

The Entrance Pageant

2010-07-25T08:08:00.000-07:00

I forgot to add the forthcoming (Tarpaulin Sky Press, in early 2011 I believe) book The Entrance Pageant to the list of my books (in the post below).

You can find some excerpts in the last issue of jubilat. Also in recent issues of Columbia Poetry Journal, Saltgrass and Tammy.

Here's my note on the title of the book:

The title is meant to create an equivalence between the word “pageant” and the word “wound,” because not only is this a text about the wound, the performance is also shaped like an entrance wound (there is no exit). I used to call the piece Wound Piece or Entrance to a pageant in which we begin to intricate. As the word “intricate” indicates, it is a performance about going in, not going out. And when you enter a pageant like this one, language itself begins to intricate. Try pronouncing the word “intricate” as a verb, preferably in the dark, with taste of sugar on your lips.

Here's the note on the production:

The main scene should be full of ornaments and crime. The words attributed to the characters do not necessarily have to be spoken; they can be acted out, or played on an archaic tape-player.

The second stage is an abandoned factory in downtown South Bend, IN, where during the entire performance my daughter Sinead dances while changing in and out of various costumes: the Hare Mask, the Cartoon Face, the Red Robe of History, the Reversible Body. She is only once actually seen by the audience, on a video screen streaming live from her dance. Mostly she is hidden because she represents that which is hidden.

The third stage is a mall, where the Natives stand still, watching, interviewing and photographing the Customers. Sometimes I feel a certain tenderness towards the Natives. Other times I want to stab them in their plug-ugly faces.

Ezra Pound Dream

2010-07-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

[I had this weird dream last night. It seems I am officially a nerd since I dream about Ezra Pound. It's also clearly influenced by Daniel Tiffany's book on Pound, Radio Corpse. But I the whole My Little Pony element of this dream is incomprehensible to me. Anyway, when I woke up I wrote this down:]

Last night I dreamt I had to explain Ezra Pound to my dad.
“Who’s this Ezra Pound,” asked my dad, feigning interest in my studies.
I felt I should explain Pound but I also did not want to because I could tell my dad was not really that interested.
So I told him: “Ezra Pound was a poet. He started out as a dandy and then he became a fascist and then he stopped writing and began working for Mussolini and then he sat in a cage.”
Miraculously we seemed to be walking through a kind of technicolor virtual reality interpretation of The Cantos. The colors were like candy and the shapes were rounded like in cartoons for girls. It was beautiful and nauseating! There were pink horses running through meadows. We were walking along the creek that ran through the woods by the house where we would spend our summers when I was a child.
I gave some brief interpretation of the events unfolding, giving some context for The Cantos. For example, I explained, "this is usury" and pointed to a glowing, Arthurian depiction of usury.
Then I noticed a dead princess in the creek. She looked very placid so I did not mind. But then I saw another and another and soon the entire creek was full of dead princesses piled up and the water was flooding the ground where we walked. We were wading through candy-pink water. It was a good thing we wore rubber boots.
“I can see why he’d want to shut himself in a cage,” said my dad in a lame attempt at a joke.
“He didn’t shut himself in. The Americans did it. They locked him in a cage and made him a contemplative sage. That’s how it works. Lock a fascist in a cage and you get a sage.”
I thought I had said something very smart but it made my dad uncomfortable. Then he said something grotesque about cages and the backyard of the house where we lived in the suburbs when we moved to the US.
This made me uncomfortable.
“Back to Pound,” I said. “The Cantos is an endless poem that is partly autobiography and partly myth and partly history. For example, he would write a poem that’s partly about going on walks with his friends and partly about Italian knights.”
At this point we see a castle.
“Funny, in my memories of childhood I don’t remember that being there,” I said. “It must be new.”
“That’s where he lives,” said my dad.
“Who?”
“Ezra Pound.”
“Why are we going to see Ezra Pound?” I asked.
“I’m not going,” said my dad. “You’re going. But be careful, he’s killed all his wives.” And then he turns and runs away.
At this point I enter a desert scene. The sand is red and covered in bones. There was no castle, no Ezra Pound, just bright sunshine and a red sand like cartoon about the wild west, and the sand was covered with bones. It was the 1950s. The bones were the bones of teenage girls.

[I think my dad's last words suggest that I'm supposed to marry Ezra Pound. The castle also looked exactly like the castle in Breillat's Bluebeard, giving more credence to this interpretation. Now that I think about it, the killing of the wives is of course from that movie. Also, I do watch a lot of children's TV, which may be why everything was very childish. But Sinead doesn't watch My Little Pony type of stuff; she prefers Zabumafoo.]

Kissing Hitler (or Marilyn Monroe)

2010-07-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

Interview with Marilyn Monroe:

"For instance, you've read there was some actor that once said that kissing me was like kissing Hitler. Well, I think that's his problem. If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has these kinds of feelings toward me, then my fantasy can come into play. In other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there."

"....This industry should behave like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But instead of clasping the child to them, they start punishing the child."

Alissa Nutting

2010-07-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

[Here's a new book I hope to read in the near future:]

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls
Alissa Nutting
$18 | paper | 152 pp.
Starcherone Books
ISBN: 9780984213320

Fiction. Winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, chosen by Ben Marcus. In this darkly hilarious debut collection, misfit women and girls in every strata of society are investigated through various ill-fated jobs. One is the main course of dinner, another the porn star contracted to copulate in space for a reality TV show. They become futuristic ant farms, get knocked up by the star high school quarterback and have secret abortions, use parakeets to reverse amputations, make love to garden gnomes, go into air conditioning ducts to confront their mother's ghost, and do so in settings that range from Hell to the local white-supremacist bowling alley. "These fine stories, anthropologically thorough in their view of the contemporary person, illuminate how people hide behind their pursuits, concealing what matters most to them while striving, and usually failing, to be loved"—Ben Marcus

Things I've written:

2010-06-22T11:05:00.001-07:00

[Several people who have been reading this blog missed that I am a writer, so I thought I would post some links to various books and other pieces I've written. I thought this would be quick and easy but it's turning into something quite time-consuming, so I think I'll go back and fill in material as I go along.]

Dear Ra
(I wrote this novel in 2000-2001, while moving from Iowa City to Seattle to New York, in the process becoming totally financially broke and personally exhausted. There's also quite a bit of despair about the election of Bush as president. It was published in 2008 by Starcherone, after having been selected by Carol Maso as the runner-up in the now-famous Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason. I noticed somebody complaining about the title. For me it was meant to evoke "Dear Abbey" or some kind of corny teenage thing. But my biggest influence was these letters that an exgirlfriend had collected from working at a magazine published by Hearst, letters insane people would write to Hearst - often addressed to Randolph Hearst. That and the letters of Serial Killers, such as the Zodiac etc. I was really interested in serial killers back then.)

Excerpts:
Double Room
In Typo Magazine
In Octopus Magazine
In Posse

Reviews
Blake Butler
Katie Toussaint, Verse

*

A New Quarantine Will Take My Place:
(This book includes poems I wrote way back in my MFA days in the late 90s, but mostly it's stuff I wrote in the first few weeks of being in Athens, GA, where I went to get my PhD, or I went because I was working in an exhaustive job as a landscaper and needed to get back to reading and writing. That was in 2003.)

Excerpts:
"Pig Circus" in Apocryphal Text
"Retina, Ignite," Octopus

Reviews:
Sean Kilpatrick, Jacket
Nathan Thompson, Stride Magazine
Ross Brighton

*

Secessions:
(This was a pretty vast and un-finishable project I worked on for a couple of years, maybe 2004-2006. I decided it's not going to be published. It was inspired by research on Öyvind Fahlström, a Swedish conceptual artist from the 1960s. I love his idea of the "kalas" (party) as opposed to "collage.")
La Petite Zine
Coconut

*

Pilot:
(This book was published by Fairytale Review in 2008. It's a story told through translations and re-translations - of birthing manuals, Swedish pop music, Leslie Scalapino and Emily Dickinson poems, fairytales, David Cronenberg movies etc. It's very performance-based; it blends Swedish and English into a kind of awkward language that is supposed to interfere with free and easy performance. That is why paradoxically I don't read this very often at readings. It's tough on the mouth.)

Reviews
Tyler Flynn Dorholt, Octopus Magazine

*

Haute Surveillance
(I wrote this novel last year. It hasn't been published.)
Scantily Clad chapbook

*

Translations:
Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg (Action Books, 2005)

Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland (Ugly Duckling, 2008)

With Deer by Aase Berg (Black Ocean, 2009)

Gingerbread Monuments by Viktor Johansson and Klara Källström (2009)

Collobert Orbital by Johan Jönson (Displaced Press, 2009)

Dark Matter by Aase Berg (forthcoming, Black Ocean)

Transfer Fat by Aase Berg (forthcoming, Ugly Duckling Presse)

*

Interviews:

With Blake Butler, Htmlgiant

Exchanges

Vacation

2010-06-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to write any more blog entries here for a while, as I'm spending the summer finishing up a detective novel and doing work on Action Books and Action, Yes. However, starting in August, I'm going to start a new blog with a different set-up. More about that later.

Goransson, McSweeney this Saturday

2010-06-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson
Date: Saturday, June 12, 2010
Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: Kalamazoo Book Arts Center
Street: 326 W. Kalamazoo Avenue, Suite 103A, Park Trades Center
City/Town: Kalamazoo, MI

Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson present readings from their work on Saturday, June 12, 2010. Works by the poets will be available during the event for sale and signing. Broadsides from other "Poets in Print" events and other book arts creations are also available for sale.

This event is free and refreshments are served. Doors open at 6:30.

--

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the sci-fi novel Flet (Fence Books) and the noir Nylund, the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as two books of poetry from Fence. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and, with Johannes Goransson, is co-founder and co-editor of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-journal for international writing and hybrid forms.

Johannes Göransson is the author of books of prose and poetry - Dear Ra, A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Pilot ("Johann the Carousel Horse") - and the translator of a number of others - most recently Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonson and With Deer by Aase Berg. He co-edits Action Books and Action, Yes, and he teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

Harp & Altar

2010-06-03T06:09:00.001-07:00

There's an excellent issue of the journal Harp and Altar, including fine work by sometime Exoskeleton commentor Ana B and some other folks I already knew about and some folks I didn't (great little poems by someone named Matthew Klane). Anyway, that's what I'm reading this morning instead of working on my heroic pornography.

Seven Corners

2010-06-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

Steve Halle has been kind enough to have me as the Featured Poet on his blog Seven Corners. The poems are from Scarlet Street, a manuscript I finished this winter. The title is from the noir film starring Edward G. Robinson, and the manuscript as a whole deals with my obsession with various directors and movies--Godard, Guy Maddin, Carl Dreyer, Hitchcock, Wong Kar-Wai, Catherine Breillat, Jack Smith, Stanley Kubrick, and others.

The site is at: http://sevencornerspoetry.blogspot.com/

Exotic Consultant

2010-05-31T15:06:00.000-07:00

[I haven't had many blog ideas recently. But I'm part of a discussion about race and ethnicity and such for HTML Giant and today I was responding to a question about the danger of "exoticism" in translation. I kind of went on so I thought I'd post it here as a blog entry:]

A lot of people are worried about exoticizing, or incorrectly representing the foreign. They want their translations to be "faithful" to the original, or perhaps - in some more recent experimental translation practices - more than faithful (full of definitions and historical background)… I have a number of issues with this approach. The ultimate result is that fewer translations are published. Translation is simply too “problematic” to engage in it. Is it correct? Is it the right text to translate? Is it good in the original? Is it the best poem from this other language? How can I read it? People are scared because they don’t feel they’ve mastered the foreign language or literature. It’s secretive, elusive. Everybody feels too bad about it all in a lot of different ways. Easier to do without it… Well people have to be a little more daring. Nobody is the master of any literature! Nobody is ever faithful when they translate; translations are simply not faithful. The idea of translation as faithful is based on shall we say a monogamous concept of the artistic experience; a model that is very constrained, narrow. Nobody faithfully gets an artistic message anywhere, even if the poem is not in translation. Art is much more dispersed than that. Art is not monogamous. It’s very unfaithful. It is a slut. (Or, to quote an anthem played at the supermarket here in Mishawaka, Indiana, “You’re under the gun/So you get it on the run.”) It moves across language barriers, across economic borders, across ethnic groupings etc. Reading a poem is to be unfaithful to “the original.” There is no “original” in the sense that there is no true, one and only experience of the poem. Reading is a whorish activity… (“Heard it from a friend, who/heard it from a friend who/heard it from another you’ve been messin’ around.)But there is always this attempt to keep the lineages clean and direct, to keep art as this narrow cause-and-effect experience that we can get if we are properly trained. I’m not properly trained... I think all writing is about sex!... A foreigner is a counterfeit; I can’t give a faithful reading, even if I tried, even of Swedish poetry... Actually the Swedish “tradition” as a marginal literature is actually highly translation-informed. My favorite books when I first started reading include “Pa drift” av Jack Kerouac and “Acklet” av Jean Paul Sartre. I consider that a very Swedish start… I was a whore from the very beginning… To bring this back around to “exotics” – people who “exoticize my otherness” tend to be people who are interested in what I’m writing; people who conversely try to deny my otherness tend to be people who are opposed to what I’m doing, who fear that I’m taking secret privileges, that I’m cheating, that I’m using my immigrant status to access some secret jouissance... I think exotification is part of appreciating art. I don’t like mundane things, I like exotic things. I love hip hop because the puns etc are exotic to me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with white boys in the suburbs wearing hip hop influenced clothing etc. The ridiculing of such figures always betrays a conservative, sometimes even racist strain in the ridiculer… But also: I love Aase Berg’s poetry and translate if from Swedish because she exoticizes the Swedish language and makes it both seem super-Swedish and foreign; and, in translation, forces me, the translator, to exoticize the English language. It reminds me of when I first came to the US – the language was so strange and riddle-like… People like Ron Silliman call themselves "realists" and proclaim that they are interested in “rigor” and “precise” and “hard-chiseled” poetry. They believe in mastering traditions, creating lineages. Translation messes up their “New American” lineages… I’m an immigrant and an iconophile. I have no lineage and my traditions are terrifyingly unclean. I love the wax museum (even the ones in which real people have been covered with wax, or maybe especially those ones). I love secrets (and characters/texts that are “full” of them). I even love metaphors and similes. I love Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger. I love exotic costumes. Especially when those costumes are found in language. That’s my motto and that’s the sun’s.