Announcing 4 new titles from LRL e-editions:

To be a young poet is, among other things, to ask the question, what can poetry do? From Auden we learn that “poetry makes nothing happen.” And even in the most public venues, as at the presidential inauguration, the crowd and arbiters of cultural value alike turn their backs on poetry. But the poet also tells us, though these lines are oft neglected, that poetry “survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” So early in my career, I have clung to Auden’s completed thought, even as poetry continues to cede privilege of place not only to novels and plays, but also to newer genres and media. “Nobody reads poetry anymore,” my students tell me, because it’s outdated and accomplishes nothing. Even in my own schooling, poems were exhibited as pedagogical oddities, at best, or at worst, inflicted as punishment for indolence or inattention. Despite such inauspicious beginnings, I carried on with poetry, bolstered by my budding friendships with others who shared my fervent belief in its potential.

Later, finding myself with students of my own, I looked for poems that I thought did something, or that made me do something. My students needed a poetry “at least as interesting as, and a whole lot more unexpected than, television,” as Charles Bernstein has written. Where was that poetry? I realized, I didn’t know. Though I had begun to style myself as a specialist in American poetry and poetics, I found myself back at the beginning, and back in the library. After much casting about, I turned to the works of various historical avant-gardes and their contemporary survivals. I turned to poets like Cecilia Vicuna.

The first meeting of our course, Technologies of Poetic Imagination, was called to order in the drab surroundings of a humanities computer lab. We would question (or so I dreamt, wildly) concerning the relations between textual, visual, and digital forms-and not just in theory, but in practice! We would poem something into happening! Having worked in the fine and graphic, as well as the literary arts, both as practitioner and instructor, I had always dreamt of such a course. So why was I now, at our first class meeting, so nervous? There was the technical stuff-the students needed to learn to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, how to think visually, and how to talk about their compositions. They needed to learn that poetry need not rhyme, nor dote on flowers and sunshine, that some poetry strikes out toward uncharted-and often unpaginated-territory.

And so we began with a beginning-with Cecilia Vicuna’s Instan, and this gramma kellcani:

Gathered together in the words and the form of this “palabra estrella” were some of the most crucial questions for our course: What is this “com,” this togetherness? What do we mean when we say “we”? Why are we here, and where are we going? How do we come together in language, and through language, make things happen? The star-form, at once a movement inward toward an origin, and a spiraling out toward a destiny, marks the path we take in common. The star draws together many discourses, and suggests their interdependence: the language of economics (“commerce”), the language of writing (“compose”), and the language of affect (“compassion”) all share the prefix “com.” We are reminded that our social, aesthetic, and economic realities, as well as our destinies, are what we make in common.

Where change becomes necessary, our ability to act in community, in local and present ways, is crucial for remaking our worlds otherwise. For Vicuna, “com,” togetherness, and community begin in as little as the exchange of a single word between two people. She theorizes in “fabulas del comienzo, y restos del origen”:

A word is a non-place for the encounter to take “place.”

A continuous displacement, a field of “con,” togetherness.

A word disappears, the connection remains.

Here Vicuna hints how we make things happen in and through language. The non-place is nothing other than that unlikeliest, reciprocal translation between people-what we call communication. Each cycle of translation is a displacement, a confrontation with intersubjective difference. The differences spread to become a field we call language.  And when the sound or sight of a word falls away, it remains with us, in what Susan Stewart has called the “paralife” of the artwork:

Like language, artworks can make nonbeing present and so open up the sphere of being to what is not   [...] But they are materially finite; their aesthetical ideas are manifested within their finality of form [...] They literally bear meaning, and once they are materially gone, they exist only if they are carried on in the paralife of reproduction and other forms of description.

Stewart doesn’t specify what kinds of reproduction and description she imagines, but her commentary returns me to Auden. Poetry survives, a way of happening, a mouth. Poetry survives in the mouth of its audience. We carry the poem in our memories and our bodies. Ever afterward, even in the most infinitesimal degree, the poem echoes forth in the speech our mouths form, and reverberates in the actions our bodies perform. Such effects are incremental and precarious, but here at last is some inkling of how to do something with words. The world imagined otherwise-that “non-being” that art makes present-manifests in us, in “com.”

By the end of the course, convinced I had adequately enlightened, tortured, and thrilled my students, I set them their final assignment: Installed Poetry. I asked my students to choose an artist-Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy, Adrian Piper, and Vicuna were among the options-and create a visual or performative text in response, to be installed in a public location in the city of Ithaca. Certainly, some students groaned, while others seemed to welcome the challenge.

I felt the assignment a risky proposition-did I dare loose a hoard of poet-doers on our fair city? The assignment description included a list of exhaustive restrictions. From conception to installation, each project underwent multiple revisions and critiques, most with public safety foremost in mind. Freshmen students, you see, are quite eager to set things aflame. And yet the risks were more than just of the flammable variety: what if these installed poems didn’t do anything? Or perhaps worse still, what if they did?

By chance or destiny, we had begun our course with Vicuna, and now we closed with her earlier work, cloud-net. As I introduced the text with mp3 recordings of Vicuna’s poems and singing, some students shifted in their seats, embarrassed, and still others tittered nervously. I paused. I asked them to think about their discomfort, and to consider what it was about the light, piercing tones of the poet’s voice that had so unnerved them.

They had been touched by sound, and their bodies had reverberated with it, responded in kind.

I asked them to remember this unease as they embarked on their final assignment-to consider what it is for words to venture forth from the page, touching and gathering reader and audience alike in a playful embrace. I asked them to feel what it is to take part in “com,” to experience that continuous displacement, and to make pregnant in others that paralife of the word.

Here are some of their results-

Megan

Megan’s Branches Stacked Over Two Hours was constructed as a play on Andy Goldsworthy’s Branches Stacked Over Two Weeks. Over the course of two weeks in 1983, Goldsworthy stacked five conspicuous piles of branches in a row atop a hill in Cumbria. The overall effect of the arrangement, Megan noted, evoked “visions of wraith-like creatures,” reminding the casual observer that a life-force dwells even in branches that have been cast aside, lifeless. Goldsworthy is well known for his stacked stone “guardians” that protect the entrances to cities, forest clearings, and gardens. Megan read Goldsworthy’s stacked branch figures as wraiths rather than guardians, however, because their jagged and twisted lines expressed an agitation quite different from the serene solidity of the guardians.

In Megan’s own installation, branches were stacked not in the form of a wraith or figure, but in the form of a tree. The artist wanted to “expand on Goldsworthy’s concept of time,” and so chose a form that would more directly express the lifecycle of the branches. Once installed on the Arts Quad on Cornell’s campus, and to Megan’s surprise, the structure was largely ignored by passersby: “My audience barely glanced at the structure. While building it I got so little reaction that I tried to elicit a better response by putting up a sign that said ‘Art’ and having it point at the figure. This explicit sign did not seem to change the response. Most of the people I watched were on the phone [...] ” Despite the artist’s valiant efforts, the stacked branches failed to attract the attentions of its intended audience. Yet the indifference of the passersby, intent on their conversations and cell phones, did provide a provocative contrast between the unassuming, not-quite-natural form of tree and the almost prosthetic extension that cellphone technology has become.

Ife

Yinka Shonibare’s 1999 statue group, Dysfunctional Family, features an arrangement of four cartoonish, alien figures. Their surfaces are covered with batik patterns of golds, reds, and blues. Shonibare, a Nigerian-born British national, draws on batik in particular to express the constructed nature of foreign, alien, and exotic signifiers of identity; although often used to evoke notions of African authenticity, batik is in fact a colonial import to the continent.

Ife, also originally from Nigeria, decided to mount a social experiment and performance piece in order to challenge “foreign” as well as “authentic” representations of Africa. The artist constructed an information booth in the entrance of a local campus building, and purported to represent the imaginary African nation of Zurburti. In preparation for the performance, Ife dressed herself in a mélange of cultural signifiers, including a pick boubou, a black shawl, and a head-tie. “The black spot on my head was an Indian symbol,” Ife notes, “I put it on for fun, to incorporate some of Shonibare’s jouissance.” Ife found that for the most part, her foreignness and authenticity went largely unquestioned because of her “African” dress and official-looking information booth. Of the forty people Ife encountered, only one young man sensed anything amiss with her presentation. Her documentary photographs show first his confusion, and then his relief at detecting her subterfuge. Others students were interested to hear more about the country, while some were in a rush, and one young man even claimed to know all about the country already, “because one of his friends is from there.” By directly engaging her audience, Ife elicited a range of responses from her fellow students, and extended the playfulness, but also the implicit cultural critique, of Shonibare’s statue group.

Stasiya

Protect Me from What I Want, one of Jenny Holzer’s truisms from her Survival Series of the early 1980s, offered subtle, but conflicted critique of the consumer impulses driving Americans in an era of Capitalist decadence. The phrase itself, “protect me from what I want” indicates a consumer’s vulnerability, and yet the request, writ large in the visual format of advertising, makes that vulnerability over as a commodity, and places the consumer firmly within the matrix of someone else’s consumer desires.

In response to Holzer’s work, Stasiya came up with a series of discretely placed doves, each of which were imprinted with the repeated message “Fi Liber Fi Felix.” Rather than asserting itself in the visual form of advertisement, Stasiya’s installation blended inconspicuously with the wintry site of Ithaca’s Commons. The artist notes that her message, “Be Happy Be Free,” differed from Holzer’s in that it was a message of direct empowerment, rather than critique. And yet, the slogan-like quality of “Be Happy Be Free” suggests the question of whether any source external to ourselves, and especially a slogan, can give us happiness, freedom, or agency. Once told to be happy and free, we find ourselves enmeshed in a paradox, anything but free from the slogan’s demands.

Tamara

In their performance work The Singing Sculpture (1969), Gilbert and George painted their bodies and clothing bronze, as though they were cast metal statues, and stood before an audience, lip-synching and dancing jerkily to a recording of “Underneath the Arches.” Their performance was an uncanny melding of artist and artwork, nature and artifice. The stuttered movements of the artists’ bodies belied their bronzed surfaces, calling attention not only to the flesh of their very real human bodies, but also to the vulnerability of any statue, condemned to silence, a mere “still unravished bride of quietness.”

For her installation, Tamara removed herself from the actual performance, instead wrapping two volunteers in aluminum foil. The volunteers were instructed to lie on a hillside while remaining utterly still and silent; if approached or questioned by passersby, they were not to respond. Meanwhile, the artist stood at a remove and observed the reactions of the public. To her surprise, Tamara noted that while some worried for the comfort or safety of the volunteers (e.g. “You look like a fine arts casualty. Are you allowed to talk?” or “Aren’t they cold? What if it starts raining? Do they have to stay there?”), others taunted and accosted the lifeless forms (e.g. two young men poured lemonade in one of the volunteer’s mouths and then walked away, laughing). Many expressed fear and trepidation initially, though given time, ventured so far as to touch or even pose for photographs with the sculptures. The anonymity of their surfaces and the silence of their repose may have been what ultimately emboldened those observers who treated the volunteers as other or less than human. Beyond the rising of their breathing chests, the volunteers gave the audience none of the usual indications of agency or subjectivity. Instead they lay as art objects-indeed, art casualties-in a striking performance of three-dimensional still life.

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For me as a teacher, and as a young poet, the experience of watching my students make their first forays into the world beyond the classroom, performing their words and their art without a safety net, has been deeply gratifying. I thank each of my students, and particularly the students included in these brief remarks, for their courage and forbearance.

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Julie Phillips Brown is currently a joint-degree candidate for the MFA/PhD at Cornell University and works on contemporary poetry and poetics. Her poems have appeared lately in issues of Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and Webconjunctions. For more, visit her blog at www.coupdedes.blogspot.com/.