Interview in The Conversant

I am very excited to be in the latest issue of The Conversant.  Thanks to Phil Metres for interviewing me and for Andy Fitch agreeing to publish it.

Check out the amazing poets included:

May's issue features interviews with Danielle Dutton, Lisa Jarnot, Toril Moi, Calvin Bedient, Lynn Xu, Dara Wier,Gillian Conoley, Mónica de la Torre, Tyrone Williams, Lily Brown, Jena Osman, Anis Shivani, Kate Durbin, Dan Chelotti, E.J. McAdams, Vanessa Place, Dan Beachy-Quick and Sibyl Kempson conducted by J’Lyn Chapman, Laynie Browne, Rusty Morisson, Andy Fitch, HL Hix, Virginia Konchan, Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Philip Metres and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. 

The Next Big Thing Questions

Poet and publisher Jill Magi "tagged" me to answer:

The Next Big Thing QUESTIONS:

What is the title of the book? 

TRANSECTs

Where did the idea come from for the book?

For almost a decade I have had the pleasure of talking to the choreographer Jennifer Monson about dancing outside.  Through this experience of her work and the work of other movement artists that have come up through the interdisciplinary Laboratory of Art Nature and Dance (iLAND) residency program I started to come up with my own practice of how to write outside – or with outside.

What genre does your book fall under?

Concrete. Somatic. Found. Procedural. Psychogeographic. Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Anyone from New York City Players.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

TRANSECTs attempts to create a collaboration with words in their urban habitat using procedures and the scientific technique of a transect as the method.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Years.  Miles.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Inspiration doesn’t always last long I have found without encouragement and curiosity by friends and peers. The book was buoyed by conversations and walks with: Phil Metres, Cecilia Vicuna, James O’Hearn, Jonathan Skinner, Marcella Durand, Tonya Foster, Doug Manson, Michael Leong, Amy Carroll, Clarinda Mac Low, Bob Sullivan, Katie Holten, Bill Fox, Elliott Maltby, Steve Clay, Sergio Bessa, Jamal Joseph, James Sherry, Robert Kocik, Petra Kuppers, Brenda Iijima, Thom Donovan and all the Somatics fellows in Michigan.

The texts that were important to this book include:

Tim Ingold’s Lines

John Cage’s Empty Words

Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak

Joan Rettalak’s The Poethical Wager & Procedural Elegies/Western Civ Cont’d/

Langston Hughes’ “Island”

Jill Magi’s SLOT

Ed Roberson’s City Eclogue

Cecilia Vicuna’s “Libro Desierto/Desert Book”

Steve Clay and Jerome Rothenberg’s A Book of the Book

Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference

Liz Kotz's Words to be looked at: Language in 1960's Art

David Joselit’s “Dada’s Diagrams”

The Unpainted Landscape edited by Simon Cutts

Gianfranco Barchello and Henry Martin’s How to Imagine

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The emergency orange cover.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The chapbook was published by Jill Magi and Sona Books. Thanks Jill!

My tagged readers for next week are:

Bob Hanson

Doug Manson

Julie Patton

Amy Carroll

Robert Grenier: "a potential occasion for another real experience"

Robert Grenier (RG) spoke at Columbia in March and I took some notes because I find his work and him to be completely fascinating.  Thought others might want to see some of this too.  [Note: my transcriptions of the poems are nothing like the poems and should be held very suspect.  They are the (bad) map, and not the territory.]

RG has 170 books of these hand-written poems. Lately he has been thinking about ghosts - "ghosts presence as absence" - because of the deaths of Creeley, Scalapino, Bromige.  He talked about his poem from Sentences: "gost." He says "One of my tasks is to bring the 'h' back into existence..."

Shows:
HERE
I AM
THERE
YOU

Which is an allusion to the Creely poem that goes "here I am, there you are." (Look up). The "are" is the ghost here.

RG talks folks through the "making" of the poem, acts as an intermediary. The handwritten poem in the books is THE poem and his ideal reader would be the one who reads thru these.

AN A                NO
PPLE                DAVID
ORCH               BROM
ARD (AND)      IGE

Works are made out of letters.

He reads some more:
(Fill in)

He talks about writing the fact as it's happening in the letters themselves!!!

He says the poet only reaches the one who wants to read the poem.

(Hint to his "orthography": all the lines are underlined.)

This work is a form like a sonnet is a form.

"Naked duration"

“constructed artiface of the occasion” – letters in space

“lost in the enactment of the ‘line’” (meaning the line that makes up the letters)

An artist named John Bacchi (sic?) translates Grenier poems by drawing them out

“My deepest intention is that someone would read the 170 books…”

LATE DARK
RAIN ENING
IN         SKY
MAY TODAY

“I am the reader of the work as it is drawn.”

BEGINS BEAN
AT SQUASH
NIGHT
CORN

Sometimes people write to call it into being.

THE TODAY
MOST REAL
BLUE WHITE
SKY CLOUD

You can see the cloud and write it.

Some day I will be gone and I think someone will see that cloud.

“a potential occasion for another real experience”

Some Citations from Amanda Boetzkes' THE ETHICS OF EARTH ART

“[Lucy] Lippard argues that the move toward the virtual disregards the importance of the local environment. She thus posits the local as anti-institutional and anticorporate stance. Artists should, she argues, ‘innovate not just for innovation’s sake, not just for style’s sake, nor to enhance their reputation or ego, but to bring a new degree of coherence and beauty to the lure of the local.” (39)

Hans Haacke : “Make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is nonstable…Make something sensitive to light and temperature changes, that is subject to air currents and depends in its functioning on the forces of gravity…Make something that lives in time and makes the spectator experience time…Articulate something natural.”(44-45)

Luce Irigaray: “Porosity, and its fullest responsiveness, can occur only within difference. A porosity that moves from the inside to the outside of the body. The most profound intimacy becomes a protective veil. Turns itself into an aura that preserves the nocturnal quality of the encounter, without masks.” (62)

Poet Jonathan Skinner and Cellist Madeleine Shapiro for Earth Month Concert on Monday, March 28

Earth Day at the Cafe

Monday, March 28th

Two sets: 8:30 and 9:30 PM

29 Cornelia Street, NY, NY 10014

information/reservations: 212.989.9319

http://www.corneliastreetcafe.com.

a full dinner menu is available

April is Earth Month and cellist Madeleine Shapiro and poet Jonathan Skinner will kick off the celebrations by presenting the second annual Earth Day at the Cafe. The performance will take place on the Schizoid series curated by Frank Oteri.

Music in the first set will draw from Madeleine's ongoing Nature Project featuring wind, snow and birds in works by Judith Shatin, Matthew Burtner and Salvatore Sciarrino. The evening will also highlight the world premiere of Avalon Shorelinesby Gayle Young (www.gayleyoung.net), the well-known Canadian composer, sound artist and instrument builder. Avalon Shorelines, combines live cello with pre-recorded sounds of waves and rocks rolling in the receding water of stony beaches along the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. The works will be intertwined with readings of original poetry by award winning eco-poet Jonathan Skinner.

The second set, Travelogue, includes music by Zhou Long, Luciano Berio, and the hauntingly beautiful Cuaderno di Viaje by the Mexican composer Mario Lavista, again, intertwined with poems by Jonathan Skinner.

noema

What is noema? It is a word that comes from the Greek, meaning “thought,” but later became a more technical term in the phenomenology of philosopher Edmund Husserl. It is also the title for a new journal founded by 2008 iLAB resident, choreographer and experiential geographer Karl Cronin for his Somatic Natural History Archive project. He gives his own gloss on Husserl’s noema as “the perceived object as a perceived object,” seeing noemas as kinds of encounters.

This past Spring, I received the first volume of noema, wrapped in a beautiful cover of sparrow silhouettes cut from striking wallpaper patterns (by Ann Lopatin Cantrell), and was blown away by the contents, which present still photos from a growing collection of Cronin’s “embodied portraits that depict the life histories of10,000 plants and animals.”

What is attractive about the project is its unbelievable ambition, the wild execution of these attempts of “kinetic empathy” with other species, and the links to other media. As an example of the last point, in noema you can see a still of Karl’s response to Yucca glauca (Yucca) but then you must visit his website and link to the film of the response - the films capture the dynamism of these encounters, where the photos can only hint at them.

The journal and the overall project are wonderful, and if you are interested in the intersection of movement and natural history you should consider getting a subscription.* I am curious to see how the encounters will evolve over time, and more importantly if Karl will have the stamina to fulfill its five-figure ambition. I really hope so. I feel this work will be very generative for other artists. I know it has made me want to go meditate on a species and try to create some poetic empathy, although maybe just for 10 species.

*Annual subscriptions of noema are available for $20. To subscribe, contact Karl here.

The Noncomputable

One of my favorite blogs to read is at the Resilience Alliance.

Recently it directed my attention to the abstract for a paper in Ecology and Society called Resilience: Accounting for the Uncomputable:

Plans to solve complex environmental problems should always consider the role of surprise. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to emphasize known computable aspects of a problem while neglecting aspects that are unknown and failing to ask questions about them. The tendency to ignore the noncomputable can be countered by considering a wide range of perspectives, encouraging transparency with regard to conflicting viewpoints, stimulating a diversity of models, and managing for the emergence of new syntheses that reorganize fragmentary knowledge.

(Here’s a link to the paper.)

It made me think that poets and artists and dancers could provide that counter since surprise and the noncomputable are often comfortable places for them to reside as it is integral to their discipline.

Again and again I hear that artists are the ones who can benefit from a collaboration with scientists, but I believe scientists can benefit too. This would be one concrete way.

Sciart and the Benefits of Art/Science Collaboration

INSIGHT AND EXCHANGE: An evaluation of the Wellcome Trust’s Sciart programme was recently released.

It is an important and useful document because there are not many studies on the value of art/science collaboration. Usually there is an intuition that they are positive, often more positive for the artist than the scientist. (Although you can see some of the anecdotal evidence I have been collecting to show the value to scientists here.)

Sciart was launched to fund “visual arts projects which involved an artist and a scientist in collaboration to research, develop, and produce work which explored contemporary biological and medical science.”

Some of the overall benefits of Sciart recognized in the report of the first decade are:

• Attracting media coverage

• Considerable educational benefit for the public

• The emergence of new processes of working

• Removing barriers to cross-disciplinary collaboration

Specific benefits artists provided scientists, included:

• Preparing some scientists to take more risks

• Improving scientist’s own communication

• Generating more reflexive awareness of the wider context of the scientist’s work

• Assisting scientists in rediscovering their personal creativity

There are other recommendations for organizations that would want to get involved in funding these kinds of collaboration. iLAND has already implemented many of these recommendations unintentionally and we could look at some of the others, especially on reporting. There is still time to apply for an iLAB residency from iLAND. If you are a dancer, movement artist, or scientist, please check out the iLAND website.

Poems Can Stop Bulldozers

The Australian poet John Kinsella has posted a blog at the Poetry Foundation site that is a very powerful statement about the efficacy of poetry, especially in thwarting environmental degradation. What is so striking to me is that in the absence of violence - Kinsella is a pacifist - language is one of the last things one has left to articulate resistance.

Vermin: A Notebook

Poems can stop bulldozers.

BY JOHN KINSELLA

Driving down to the city this morning, we saw five or six emus crossing the road in an area of national park where I hadn’t seen emus before—not once in a lifetime of driving that way. It was a remarkable and invigorating sight as they plunged into the wandoo woodlands of Western Australia, negotiating their way through the spiky hakeas and parrot bush.

On a personal level, it came as a kind of foil for the weekend-that-was—a complex amalgamation of environmental affirmation and also witnessing of horrific environmental crime. The sort of experience that leaves you wondering if any form of environmental activism has any chance of succeeding, yet nonetheless also convinced that there is no choice about acts of resistance. Without them, the environment has no chance.

And writing a statement like this is part of a process of creating poems that hopefully resonate in different ways and in different contexts, and extend what is a particularly local debate into the wider dialogue of which, sadly, it is also part. The compulsion to witness in poetry, the desire to overcome a feeling of crushing failure, and the need to create a cautionary tale that is more than propaganda—all this goes hand-in-hand with a volatility and (maybe overly) emotional reaction to the situations as they happen.

I can see the poem forming in my head as I am raging against an act of destruction, not as a fetishized aesthetic “response,” but in the struggle to formulate a language of reply that is not aggressive and thus self-defeating and hypocritical. I am being somewhat obtuse here. To begin at one possible beginning . . .

Click here for the rest of the essay.

Antennnae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

The artist Brandon Ballengee sent a link to the new issue of Antennae, which features one of his scans of cleared and stained amphibians on the cover. The journal is new to me, and I read the whole thing this weekend very avidly. In addition to being a great overview of the academic issues facing the study of nature and visual culture, it had excellent insights into art/science collaborations which is something that I have always been interested in and have the chance to see first-hand with my work on the board of iLAND.

Here is Brandon in an interview:

I strongly do not think blurring in the context of genuine art and science cooperation means dumbing-down. Collaboration implements increased complexity. For in collaborative multi-disciplinary projects, participants come from different skilled backgrounds and work through different models of approach. During the working process natural blurring or overlaps occur between disciplines – which is essential for a cross-pollination of knowledge and skills. Innovation happens precisely because participants approach problems differently. The process is not exclusively art or science but transdisciplinary research.

What is most intriguing to me is that the collaboration is not science or art, but this hybrid that Brandon calls "transdisciplinary research."

Here are two other artists Dan Harvey and Heather Ackroyd:

Pr. Howard Thomas has mentioned that our collaboration has had a direct influence on the culture of IGER (Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research) and stated that some of the new directions for IGER research would never have been undertaken without our artistic presence. There has been quite a strong media profile for art and science initiatives in the UK in the last few years, and the work of IGER has received more press through our working together than it thought possible, or would have done without our interaction, and when funding for research institutes is hard won, “profile” means something. It has been argued at times that artists gain more from crossing the cultural divide between art and science than scientists do, but we buck that trend.

I pulled this quote because I thought it did a tremendous job of "measuring" the value of the arts to science. Collaborations with artists allow scientists to pursue "new directions," to increase the media profile of science institutions, and improve the chances for "scientific" funding. Although only anecdotal it is very persuasivie. If anyone knows of any other studies that are more quantitative about the effects of artist's collaborations on scientific funding I would love to see them.

The Considered Landscape

The poet Andrew Schelling sent me a wonderful little book that I had never heard of before, THE CONSIDERED LANDSCAPE by the botanist Edgar Anderson (White Pine Press, 1985).  It is a collection of essays that Anderson had originally written for the journal Landscape.  Although he was not a poet and his book was not necessarily geared toward poets, he opens his first essay with a very provocative couple of sentences against the "average" American poet:

Sometimes the American poet lets us down.   He lives and writes in America but in his mind's eye he looks upon an English rather than an American landscape.  Look about you just as spring is passing into summer: look with a clear eye and a critical mind and see if you find the kind of a June the average American poet has been singing of.

Here he describes the power that reading has over the poet, mediating one's experience of the world before one's eyes.  It is the kind of statement that only someone who has spent a long time in the field can make, and it really encourages me to keep getting out and actually seeing what is there.

Many of the pieces in the book consider urban landscapes.  In these essays he is ahead of his time, noting how natural cities are and how wonderful they are for "studies" of human nature, weather, plants, and birds.  He critiques the American tendency to see "nature" outside of cities, and believes that is why cities can be so poorly designed.  

I have always thought that one of the ways to be happy in the City is to pay attention the natural world: the phases of the moon, the migrations, life cycle of trees and weeds, and it was very heartening to find Anderson describing this too:

One can forget one's troubles, and find peace and quiet, and food for thought in the intelligent observation of nature.  It is quite as easy in the city as the country; all one has to do is accept (we are) a part of Nature.

TREE MUSEUM

Artist Katie Holten has an amazing project on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx called TREE MUSEUM.  100 hundred trees along the 4.5 miles stretch of the Concourse now have signs with instructions on how to access an audio guide via your cell phone.  The audio guide features the voices of community members, super stars like DJ Jazzy Jay, the Bronx historian Lloyd Ultan, scientists like Eric Sanderson and Uli Lorimer, architects like Daniel Liebskind, among others.

It also features my haiku poetry.  Almost a year ago, when Katie told me about her project, I asked her if I could write poems around it and it started me on a six-month-plus project to write haiku about the trees on the Concourse.  The Challenge I gave myself was to only write while I was walking the Concourse.  So I logged about 20 miles on the Concourse, wrote over a hundred haiku, and hope to have a small collection of 40 poems as soon as I lay them out and self-publish them, which I don't know how to do but will figure out.  If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

All artists make something out of nothing.  But one of the things that is so beguiling about Katie's work is that it transforms nothing into goodwill.  That may sound like an exaggeration, but the TREE MUSEUM is bringing together a very diverse group of people to share their work and stories, bringing artists into the Grand Concourse to lead projects in the community for the community, and bringing participants together to collaborate.  Her work feels like more than the sum of its parts, and you will have to check it out for yourself online at 

http://www.treemuseum.org/

Join the TREE MUSEUM community:

http://treemuseum.ning.com/

Come out for the opening on Sunday, June 21, Father's Day, at 5pm:

http://www.treemuseum.org/when.html