Influency West is all geared up:
Click the link for more info, including readers, cost, and how you register: http://influencywest.wordpress.com/
September 9, 2009
Upcoming Poetry Events, Vancouver and Toronto
The KSW is bustling with new series including one centred on Lacanian poetics, called “Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics” organised by Nancy Gillespie and Nikki Reimer [more info on it below], and another one based on Margaret Christakos’ Influency series in Toronto. Influency West is organised by Jordan Scott and Jason Christie. More to come on that.
In the meantime, here is the agenda for Influency Toronto:
INFLUENCY 7
______________
Influency 7: A Toronto Poetry Salon SCS 1777
Featuring eight guest poets:
Ronna BLOOM • Stephen CAIN • Christopher DODA • Kate EICHHORN •
Nathaniel G MOORE • Lisa ROBERTSON • Trish SALAH • Jacqueline TURNER
Eleven weeks, Wednesday evenings: Sept 30 to Dec 9, 2009, 7pm to 9:30pm (conversation may go to 10 pm)
University of Toronto St. George Campus, location TBA (downtown, central)
Instructor: Margaret Christakos, mchristakos@hotmail.com
Fee: $235, plus $120 book package
University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Creative Writing Program
www.learn.utoronto.ca or tel: 416-978-2400, Press 2.
Eight accomplished poets working in distinctive styles will appear as both guest readers and peer critics in this unique lecture-reading series hosted by Margaret Christakos. Each poet’s critique of a colleague’s work will be followed with a reading by the poet under discussion. A group discussion led by Christakos will follow. Students will accumulate critical vocabulary to discuss more fluently the divergences of approach, motive, process and product typical of Toronto’s multitraditional literary culture.
Sept 30: Introductory Talk by Margaret Christakos; book distribution; small group formation and activities
Oct 7: Trish SALAH on Ronna BLOOM’s Permiso (Pedlar)
Oct 14: Kate EICHHORN on Stephen CAIN’s American Standard/Canada Dry
(Coach House)
Oct 21: Margaret CHRISTAKOS on Christopher DODA’s Aesthetics Lesson (Mansfield)
Oct 28: Christopher DODA on Nathaniel G MOORE’s Let’s Pretend We Never
Met (Pedlar)
Nov 4: Nathaniel G MOORE on Lisa ROBERTSON’s The Men (Bookthug)
Nov 11: Stephen CAIN on Lisa ROBERTSON’s Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul
Whip (Coach House)
Nov 18: Lisa ROBERTSON on Trish SALAH’s Wanting in Arabic (Tsar)
Nov 25: Jacqueline TURNER on Kate EICHHORN’s Fond (Bookthug)
Dec 2: Ronna BLOOM on Jacqueline TURNER’s Seven into Even (ECW)
Dec 9: Registrants’ Intertext Presentations and Salon Closing Party
Influency 7: A Toronto Poetry Salon follows on the six successful previous salons inaugurated in Fall 2006, housed in the Creative Writing program at the U of T School of Continuing Studies. This unique lecture-reading course features a flow-chart series of lectures and readings by eight contemporary Toronto guest poets in person. This Fall 2009 session runs eleven weeks, with Weeks 2 through 10 feature an intro by facilitator Margaret Christakos, an original 40-minute lecture by one of the participating poets on the work of one of their colleague poets, and a half-hour live reading by the poet under discussion. A 40-min (plus) facilitated exchange of responses and ideas then takes place among the “critic,” poet and course registrants.
Students buy a book package of 9 titles at the first class. The class reads an assigned book of poetry each week in preparation for the evening’s guest poet. There will be nine books studied this session. In the week after a given lecture/reading, registrants compose written responses to the poetics and ideas encountered during the class and during their own consideration of the poetry being studied. Registrants may email their weekly responses to the whole class thereby increasing the level and complexity of conversation. The last class is devoted to the delivery by registrants of their own prepared observations on the interesting interrelationships they find among some of the poets’ works studied.
Who takes Influency? Some registrants are contemporary writers engaged in the forward edge of their own innovative writing, others are former poetry fans returning to the study of contemporary poetry after years of being separated from it, still others are wondering if poetry could be a pleasurable way to jumpstart their thinking. The salon generally includes a mix of registrants of all ages, producing a stimulating field of audience and opinion. The form of learning in the class is respectful of students at all levels; those beginning will find a learning curve steep and yet full of excitement. There is no prerequisite for this course and registrants may return for multiple salons as the roster of poets changes each term— generally about one third to one half of the class are return registrants, making the class socially fun and warm. The class atmosphere tends to be lively, supportive, inquiring and hospitable. Small group structure in the class pairs up newcomers and experienced poetry readers, capitalizing on diversity.
Over this eleven-week course, there is an opportunity for registrants
at all levels to broaden the field for the critical reception of
contemporary poetry, and to build readerly and writerly community.
The complete course outline for SCS 17777 Influency 7: A Toronto
Poetry Salon may be obtained by emailing mchristakos@hotmail.com.
Registration is open NOW.
***** ***** ***** *****
Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics
The theme of this series returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Four Discourses in order to discuss the social bond of poetics. Lacan develops this theoretical frame in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, and some of the selected fragments from Television. He proposes that there are four fundamental discourses, or structures of discourse, that produce different social bonds for the subject. These discourses consist of the master’s discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, the university discourse, and the analyst’s discourse. While Lacan is concerned with the limitation of the master’s discourse and the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in the analyst’s discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to make an hysterization of discourse in the process of analysis—because this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse—he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the analyst’s discourse for Real change to occur. Seminar XVII, which took place in 1969, follows the student and social revolt of May 68, a historical moment in which Lacan was immersed. He is critical of revolutions that appear to simply question the master and the university, and as a consequence only reproduce a new master, without shifting social bonds, as he cynically suggests that the Parisian students of 68 were in danger of doing. However, we do find moments in Lacan’s seminars in which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other discourses to enact some social change. Therefore, I am using this frame to ask questions, develop a dialogue, about poetics and social change. Can poetics operate like the analyst’s discourse to create a different social bond through language? Do poets intervene in these other discourses or intersect with them in subversive ways that shift discourse and social bonds? Is Lacan’s concept of the structure of the four discourses useful for us today, particularly as we head into financial cuts in the arts and academia that may limit interventions in hegemonic discourses? Or do we need to rethink what poetics and discourse are and reconsider how we engage with and disseminate them?
- Nancy Gillespie
(A further description of Lacan’s four discourses will be available to workshop registrants. )
September 6, 2009
notes
Freud took pains to separate the uncanniness provoked by aesthetic experience from that which is sustained in reality; he most particularly stressed those works in which the uncanny effect is abolished because of the very fact that the entire world of the narrative is fictitious. Such are fairy tales, in which the generalised artifice spares us any possible comparison between sign, imagination, and material reality. As a consequence, artifice neutralises uncanniness and makes all returns of the repressed plausible, acceptable, pleasurable. — Kristeva
August 19, 2009
Review: Lai and Wong’s Sybil Unrest
The latest issue of Memewar is up online available for download. In it you can find a review I recently wrote for Sybil Unrest a collaboration between Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, published for the first time as a bound edition through LINEbooks.
July 12, 2009
Scream Live Stream
If you’re missing out on the Scream this year, you can watch an archived live-stream of the panel discussion:
[after some failed attempts to embed it in this blog, click below instead]
Five New Manifestos on the Book & Open Letter Launch – The Scream Literary Festival – July 7, 2009
June 1, 2009
language poetry and poetics at its best
Baggs understands the workings of language beyond anything most pomo-lang-po’s ever dream. We try to find this—to go here—through sound poetry, but the medium of lexical language always comes between raw communication and the object desired. Of course, I say this without seeking to condemn language via a lexicon — but it’s good to monitor our limitations.
May 23, 2009
The Art of Letting Go
It’s often anti-climactic. Like most things in life. I prefer the drama right off the bat, get my fill of it all, feel a rush, and then sit down as I watch it dwindle away in a pathetic attempt to remain important. Most things go this way for me. Places, people. Have been looking for something with lasting power, but alas, the only thing that sticks to me, like a fly sticks to that sticky poison tape, is the Academy. It gets harder mind you, and apparently (as I’ve just discovered twice in one week) I don’t always win the battles. All it wants is for me to conform. All of us should conform. It would make life easier for everyone involved: look, the institution has been here for a long f-ing time, and the people who fill its guts right now, at least in BC, aren’t really interested in caring about it in the way I hoped. Late-capitalist neoliberalism transcends the signification it supposes as it falls from the lips of professors and grad-students, and becomes them.
Gordon Campbell won the last election, in fact, the Liberals gained more seats. No one outside of Vancouver even knew what STV (http://www.stv.ca/) was about, and the Liberals’ smear campaign did an adequate job in convincing a substantial number of mindless people that we, in fact, do not want proportional representation and thus a real democracy. So the people of BC have spoken. They want a government that gives their tax dollars to corporations, that promotes a classist society, that makes education unaffordable and impossible for lower and middle class people, a government whose policies are inherently racist and even sexist, and who is slowly creating a new oligarchic state, ruled by aristocrats in the guise of democracy.
After tapping myself dry trying to preserve SFU’s place/name as a better university, trying to advocate action and mobilize grad students to create an affect that would generate increased grad student funding, after trying to mobilize people and get the attention of SFU students and promote conscious raising at large, I have to admit, I’ve lost all interest. I put my degree on the line, I threw my heart into it hoping that people would wake up and recognize their agency, hoping that the media would step forward and tell people the truth (okay, I know that’s way too idealistic, but you have to try), hoping that alternative media would penetrate the mainstream—and what I got were more then a handful of SFU grad students and the like saying, “Oh, what’s that about?” and “Hey thanks for doing that” (walking by in the hall), and “Well, the Administration is between a rock and a hard place, so….”. I put my degree on the line and my marks showed it, and I feel that almost nothing came of it, and honestly, that sucks.
I’ve never been the type of person who just got good marks because the profs liked me. In fact, for the most part it has been the opposite… (interpret that as you will). As a result I’ve worked my ass off, driving myself insane researching in order to get the same grades as my friends—meanwhile, I look over their papers and make corrections, restructure them and change their arguments slightly because I wanted them to come along this road with me. I also take too many risks with my work and it backfires a fair bit. I keep doing it because it’s the only thing that makes this interesting. … What I like about the institution is that it wants us to take risks. It thrives on risks. But then it slaps our hands for doing so, and makes it harder for those who want to. … What I like about the institution is that its right hand doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. And in that space is where one lives and works.
But in terms of saving SFU: I’m really glad to have helped start something good, that other people have jumped on that train, and are looking at it in a proactive light. As for myself, however, the election results are too disheartening. If that’s the kind of government that people want to vote for, they can have it. I’m not sure why I should I care anymore. This is a democracy after all, right, and the majority has spoken. People are uninterested in ‘revolution,’ they just want things to be the same, in fact, it seems, worse—they want more debt, they want to be screwed by corporations. What can you do? I wasn’t fighting for me anyway. It was for the public good, and was screwing myself in the process. (This is probably the most personal blog entry I’ll ever write). If the public doesn’t want it, then I don’t want to fight for it. So letting go, walking away, yet again. It’s time to focus on my own work, no one else will. The art of losing isn’t hard to master…. For different reasons, and to different people, I am sorry.
This entry marks a change in the ‘theme’ of this blog. I don’t anticipate it becoming apolitical, but I think it will deal with literature and events and reviews, etc., potentially addressing public issues through that media.
Source: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/ars_electronica_2007/
