DIU 2 14 July 94 course description "american poetry" required texts: walt whitman drum-taps marianne moore selected poems, 1935 frederico garcia lorca poeta en nueva york john wieners behind the state capital or cincinnati pike joanne kyger the wonderful focus of you what does it mean to be an american? & once we think we discover this meaning, what to do with it? for if poetry arises in the gap, not between sense and nonsense, but sense and PURPOSELESSNESS (this will be our first thesis), then the TASK of poetry will be a confrontation with nonsense, in the hope that purpose lies that side of the continuum (this will be our second thesis). what to do with what we know (not to mention, how to act given what we DON'T know) is poetry's preeminent question. we begin with war; pause to consider the pleasures and discoveries of the imperial eye, the grace our language attained when it gave in--without blinking--to the intellectual grandeur of the I, a sure center sure of its own morality; we'll then study--without blinking--the aftereffects of this assumption of power, the poverity and madness which the center always deposits at its margins; and we'll conclude by considering america's prospects in the coming ante-time a digest: "Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, / pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple..." whitman "Slow / To remark the steep, too strict proportion / Of your throne, you'll see the wrenched distortion / Of suicidal dreams / Go / Staggering toward itself and with its bill / Attack its own identity, until / Foe seems friend and friend seems / Foe" moore "Porque ya no hay quien reparta el pan ni el vino / ni quien cultive hierbas en la boca del muerto" ("For see: there is none to apportion the bread and the wine / or cultivate grass in the mouths of the dead") lorca "If I tread the straight and narrow / I should no trouble, do what's / expected of me, realize my friends / are not my enemies, and get rid of // them both..." wieners "The seemingly inexhaustible / sophistication of awareness becomes relentless and horrible, / trapped. How am I ever going to learn enough to get out" kyger --black hole sun The utopian schemes that have informed us of our possibilities-- Brook Farm, the Marxist stateless state and even the endlessly progressing capitalist economy, guided by an invisible hand or by liberal bureacracies-- were equally predicated not upon the order of foundational knowledge but upon an order of minds in the thrall of the sublime. The profound moment of insight, enlightenment, revolution is not vision but the catastrophe of the imagination. It is the shattering of the image, of the old style, of the conventional view, of _ancien regime_, and so forth that leaves one unsettled but grasping a profound point of a knowledge. The site of the revelation is not directly open to inspection, and especially not available for a second look, but, as it--whatever it is--recedes from view, it confirms the the confidence in the utopian possibility, and it can be brought back to the edge of view by the next careful negotiation of imagination into spectacular collapse. For nearly two hundred years, art had been a matter of tearing through the surface of rationality, convention, and social stultification in order to maintain access to the surprise of life as such. For the generation of artists born of the World War II and after, however, everything they'd learned was wrong. The techniques of the artists who had interested them in art in the first place, whom they had admired and thought to imitate, turned out to be inappropriate to this new condition. Dadaism lives: it is taught at in the Harvard M.B.A. program. Surrealism lives: it is taught to computer programmers at M.I.T. (some might say, mathematics has proven so strange, that it is taught even in the math department). Our architects, our lawyers are modernist purveyors of chaos (to say nothing, of course, of the faceless committees which generate what we call the media). There is no point, in the face of unbridled growth economies, to recall wild nature in tranquility, to practice nihilistic techniques of art and thought, to do automatic writing, or to create chance generated art. Chaos no longer needs the help of art. The techniques that delivered fresh air in 1810 or 1910 contributed (though contributed insignificantly) by 1970 to a proliferation of incomprehensible energy. The Dadaists never managed to exhibit the degree of chaos that Robert Smithson records in his photographs of Passaic, New Jersey. If the task of the artists is to right the balance between consciousness and unconsciousness, they must now cast their lot with consciousness. It is the unconscious itself which is manifesting as uncontrolled production. If the task of the artists is to right the balance between order and chaos, they must now cast their lot with order-- with construction, not deconstruction. This involves large scale reordering of the practice of art, in order to serve the same function. --Thus, Albert or Hubert air.txt radiostation wrpi 91.5 fm troy, ny 7 july 94 0811-1200 George Quasha/Charles Stein--"life on the flying carpet"/anthology '85 (cassette) Eric Dolphy--"Burning Spear"/Iron Man - Bob Marley & the Wailers--"Positive Vibration|Wake Up and Live|I Shot the Sheriff|Dem Belly Full|Concrete Jungle|Ambush in the Night| You Can't Run Away From Yourself|Heathen Writing|Natty Dread Rides Again|War"/live Santa Cruz 12/79 (cassette) Public Enemy--"Harry Allen's Interactive Super Highway Phone Call to Chuck D"/Give It Up - Chico Freeman--"title song|Freedom Swing Song|Lookup|Nia's Song Dance|Morning Prayer"/Peaceful Heart, Gentle Spirit Mutabaruka--"People's Court Pt. II"/Melanin' Man - Lou Harrison--"Threnody"/Just West Coast - Cecil Taylor w/Workshop Ensemble--"Legba Crossing"/Legba Crossing Diedre Murray/Fred Hopkins--"Systems"/Stringology - Mission of Burma--"Trem Two"/vs. Mission of Burma--"That's When I Reach for my Revolver|Outlaw| Fame & Fortune"/Signals, Calls, Marches Mission of Burma--"Forget|Peking Spring"/ep Mission of Burma--"Academy Fight Song"/45 rpm - Lisa Germano--"the earth"/happiness John's Black Dirt--"Movements"/Perpetual Optimism is a Force Multiplier Lisa Germano--"Miamo-tutti"/happiness - Bheki Mselku--"Ntuli Street"/Timelessness Michael Lally--"Healing Poem"/cd b/w Henry Threadgill Very Very Circus--"Some Place"/live at Koncepts DIU is a weekly newsletter directed towards Descriptions of an Imaginary University (c)irculated by the Logic of Snowflakes hypersidiary of We Press, USA to contribute or receive previous presentations "write" to cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet