D I U 3 4 4/9/96 I believe that the acknowledgement of ourselves as citizens of the earth is a concept in direct conflict with the 20th century western "philosophy" of egotistical self-importance, which to a large degree precludes compassion for others. I think this same premise inhibits our ability to look beyond the familiar boundaries of reality to which we cling so desparately. By even considering the reported accounts of human-alien interaction as possible, I find they eerily mirror man's own treatment of other members of the world's community, as well as the planet itself. I believe the alien phenomena to be yet another wake up call to our own humanity. ". . . To me that's why puzzles like UFO's are interesting. I don't have a personal theory to "explain" them, but I see them as an opportunity to pose new questions. If it's true that information resides in the questions we ask, coming up with novel problems may be more important than having answers, at this stage of our very limited understanding of the universe." Jacques Vallee (computer scientist, author, and UFO researcher) We ask you to consider posting the following announcement (with or without the preceding paragraphs) in your zine, DIU. Although this information may not seem to apply directly to the subject matter of your zine, we believe that it does, as the alien phenomena personifies the exponentially increasing struggle of technology vs humanism, which impacts us all. Please allow us to supply your readers with free stickers and info. If you would like to see the stickers and info please e-mail me your snail mail address and I would be happy to send them to you. (If you're interested, I can also e-mail you the sticker image.) Thanks for your consideration, K2. ADVOCATE DISCERNMENT REPRESENT TRUTH Say NO to deceptive alien entities. For FREE stickers and info send self-addressed stamped envelope to: V2, Box 911, Stanwood, WA 98292 USA (for international addressees please send postal reply coupons for 2oz. letter) Fear Not. Spread the Word. * Keynote Address, NYC Talks EPSA President Experimental Poetry Society of America New York City Friday, March 29, 1996 Let me add my words of welcome to new work, and to this unconventional gathering. As the saying goes--a funny thing happened on the way to language. Or, more accurately, a wonderful thing happened on the way to beating one's brains apart about what next to write. We have so stirred the interests of young experimentalists that we have the largest unconvention in this generation's history. That will cause some inconveniences and some crowding, but we will do everything possible to make this generation the vital and historic event it will be--marking a rebirth of the avant-garde movement in America. It is good to be back reading new work--which is my resting place--and which in fact and in spirit, in many of the most important ways, is also the homeland of the American experimental movement. Here my life as an EPSA member and cheerleader began. And I come here today determined that this movement will grow stronger and regain its rightful place as the people's tribune in the places of government power-- and in the face of corporate power. Brothers and sisters, we have come to New York City for one fundamental purpose, and that is to set the course for the future of the federation, for the revival of America's working experimentalists, and for the restoration of America as the leading avant-garde power in the world. We are here on behalf of 130 working poets who believe in something as general as an oppositional poetics, in its power to transform the American poem, and in its role as a proud, powerful and humanizing force for a better aesthetic standard. We believe in what this great movement has accomplished in the past century and in what it can accomplish as we approach the next one. 130 strong. Poets of at least several colors and creeds. Women and men who make common cause because they know what it is to labor in obscurity for the good of the language, because they know what it means to fight hard among themselves and because, in today's savage economy, they know that's the only way you get a job, or keep a job, or secure _le me'tal riche_ of literary prestige. This week on behalf of the scores of American poets who want and need jobs . . . Let us, together, resolve to grow in number. Let us, together, resolve to save experimental poetry's agenda from the cold iron fist of the conservative mainstream. Let us, together, resolve to have this federation seen and understood as it is--as the champion of the most important writing in America--the men and women whose hard work makes American readers work hard every day. And let us, together, resolve to open up our leadership so that the face of the avant-garde movement truly will be the face of America. Let no one question our determination. The fundamental fact is that poetic associations are absolutely essential to economic and social progress. Without them, the poets of this nation will never obtain their rightful measure of dignity and respect, and their fair share of the imaginative wealth they produce. America cannot prosper and cannot shine as a beacon of hope for the world without a strong multicultural experimental movement that brings us back to the defining truth of our national being--the ideal of formal freedom for all. The vast majority of Americans know that values like risk-taking and impenetrability do not flourish naturally in the climate of the literary economic jungle. They know that these values are not handed down from on high--that most publishers do not give a better deal to poets out of the goodness of their hearts. It is only when poets themselves band together and demand what is rightfully theirs that the wealth they produce gets converted into royalties and not remainders. So above all else, let solidarity be our pledge. It's true that we come here today divided on the issue of who will lead us into the next millenium. But let there be no question that when we leave this place to carry on our work, we must do so with our divisions healed or at least exacerbated, our strength enhanced, and our federation more united, by force or proxy, than ever before. No matter what your feelings about this gathering--no matter how you intend to vote on the leadership question--let us always remember that our adversaries are not here in this room. They are out there--in the smug, anti- intellectual editorial suites of publishers and department lounges of universities that are increasingly hiring idiot versifiers for good jobs that you and I will never get. Our enemies are the tastemakers who intimidate the weak thinkers among us--who force poet-teachers to adjunct hither and yon in search of a living wage. Our real enemies are the legions of journalists and mandarin reviewers whose stock in trade is showing readers how they need never bother with the task of reading poetry. Backing up all of them are the reactionaries who--for the time being and for the time being only--have taken control of the MFA workshops and are hell-bent on destroying all that our movement has fought and struggled for across the generations. The members of this "mean team" know exactly which side they are on. They are on the side that wants to keep working poets out of the limelight in order to push their own stock up. And they have an agenda to do just that-- by returning us to the dark days of so-called new-critical formalism, when conservative poetics ruled unchecked in this country and the literary royalists could do whatever they pleased. We will not let them have their selfish way. We will not tolerate their campaign of contempt for working experimentalists. We will not let them enact the ban on constructivist forms. We will not let them repeal the new sentence. We will not let them repeal the tenets of projective verse. We will not let them snuff out the Segue Foundation. We will not let them belittle prizes and awards such as the Sun and Moon Poetry Contest, which give a modest boost to younger poets. As our movement grows, we must also address another major challenge, and that is the question of how we can become an increasingly powerful engine of progressive change in our society. In an era when gossip tidbits have a way of becoming front-line issues-- when readers' anger toward self-aware writing is on the rise, and when race-, gender-, and class-based polarization among readers looms--this aesthetic movement must refocus our membership on the critical economic issues--on jobs and readings and book distribution and reviews. Let's not let them get lost in the present wilderness of hype, backlash and abstruse politics. I firmly believe that we can restore the faith of America's readers in the new American writing by showing them not what divides them, but what unites them--and what unites them is the fight for a better read. We simply have to reach our readers, educate them, help them discover the commonality of their linguistic inheritance, and help them focus on the coming publication season and on buying books that will buzz the synapses of the hard-working majority. Nineteen-ninety-six is a time when the decisions of our readership will set the course of our movement for a new century. But this is a time of decision for the oppositional poetics movement, as well. To be sure, on the critical poetic issues of the day, we know where we stand, we know which side we are on and we know who our friends are. On the goals and aims of this federation, on our vision for American poetry, there is no real dispute. But the time has come to decide where this movement is headed and how our federation will inspire and lead poetry's renewal in the 21st Century. How do we change this movement so that vigorous manifestoes once again are seen and heard as the authentic voice of poetics? How do we change so that the avant-garde is winning again? Winning the allegiance of America's poetry readers, so that we can grow and flourish and better shape them. Winning the support of the public at large, so that we can bring constructive change to our arts funding mechanisms. Winning teaching jobs and aesthetic battles in the press-- these are our purposes and priorities. On these great questions, we will not retreat, excuse, pause, or equivocate. But to restore this federation to its rightful place at the center of poetic vitality, we must make the right choice today. We must build a movement that is broadly reflective of the aesthetic spectrum of the contemporary avant-garde, and serves its interests always. The struggles of 10 and 20 years ago--the great talks series and the residencies, the publications and readings--are shining moments in poetic history. But I tell you we are living in a fool's paradise if we think for a moment that we can simply tear a page out of that book and use it to set the course for the remainder of the 1990s and beyond. The avant-garde rhetoric of old is comforting and stirring. For us and for critic-activists, it makes the pulse beat faster and raises our spirits. But for scores of writers who want progress and improvement in their lives without increasing the amount of struggle they already feel, it's too often a call to arms they cannot and will not answer. Raising the decibel level--without exercising the mind and without building the political muscle to show that we know what we mean and we mean what we say--is a prescription for disaster. We have to think and target before we organize events, magazines, contests, junkets. Otherwise, we will marginalize this movement and consign it to the fringes of literary production for generations to come. We must worry less about blocking bridges such as "narrative," "lyric," "absorbency" and so on, and worry more about building bridges to the rest of poetry's readers. We must enlist the support of members of the reading public, not inconvenience as many of them as possible. Our purpose, as I see it, is not to break down the literary system, but to make it work for working experimentalists. To prevail in this cause, we must do what is right, even when it is hard; but we must not decide to engage in a fight simply for the sake of having one. This federation can lead, innovate and inspire. This federation can win. This federation can summon the collective insight of its best and brightest-- and forge dynamic approaches to our greatest challenges. It can and it must find the means to support every writer locked in the struggle to stretch the mind, and it must ensure that no alternative poet is ever left unreviewed and that no fellow-traveler remains unenlisted. It can and must devote every resource to the fulfillment of its oldest bedrock principle--solidarity--without which we are nothing. But this movement cannot move forward as long as Language Poetry is viewed by some as the cause of every problem that afflicts writing today and, at the same time, as the theoretical wall beyond which no passage is possible. This, my brothers and sisters, is the path of least resistance, and we will pay a steep price if we choose to take it. To survive and succeed, we must spend less time talking and listening to heroic elders and more time talking and listening to ourselves. If this movement is to be rebuilt, it will be rebuilt from the ground up-- by creating the broadest possible support behind a program of progressive change, and not by allowing a few to don the mantle of "cutting-edge experimentalism," proclaim the way forward, and expect others to follow. The essential strength of this federation has always been with its journeymen and journey-women. There is no savior waiting in the wings. There is no plumed knight who will shatter the literary power structure with the force of words alone. There is only a great deal of work to do--tough, gritty work like providing theoretical umbrellas for seemingly irreconcilable poetic projects, writing manifestoes that aim high and swing low, and forging, as the much-vilified Pound taught us, an effective role for poetry in the political culture of our country--a role for poetry and of poetry, making our own considered judgments about which ideas may be worthy of our appropriation. I suggest we get down to it. Hundreds depend on us, whether they know it or not, to help build a better small-press community, with better venues, in a better, more decent and more truly human literary marketplace. If we don't do it, no one else will. We--you, me and 130 others--are the strongest moral force in this nation of writers, arguing every day for the rights of all to write with dignity and live in decency. If we don't do it, no one else will. We can and will, through our organizing efforts, lift up the conditions of work for the hundreds who join our ranks--and we will, thereby, as we have in the past, improve the lives and conditions of many hundreds more as they move to the higher standards we build. If we don't do it, no one else will. We can and will, through our political struggles and our unacknowledged legislative action, reform this nation of nothing but poetry and make it one in which the successful will join hands with the newly emerging, and the uncertain and the neglected and the past their prime will be cared about and cared for. If we don't do it, no one else will. Together--you, me and 130 others--let's lift up poetry and give it back its strength. Let's lift up this nation and give it back its soul. Thank you. --"Braveheart" * Subject: by way of (the shapers, or was that...?) _from_ The Figures These decimals are a kind of fixation, supernumerary entity of an impure mathematics, the whirl into which distinction this very being is elided, resides. Their colours coded, spelt through the leaves of a late autumn day or, funnily enough, lips shaded to a rainbow series of consumer demand and prefabricated need. The absolute mass of inertia doubled over in laughter at those lineaments of sublimated desire and the realization of the correlation. Here a flag flags, there an encrypted call is heard. The answer _dances_, is that it is processed as a bouncing chorus line of mimes. The swift numbers running from the sculpted air each configures. This confabulation guided by a sublimed expression of an argument I cannot remember. The wave forms (and) slip(s) away a way the human mind can remain. In the powers of light, exponential, the raised surface of that formulation, this book of changes. --The Alterran Poetry Assemblage * Subject: expanding matrices Dream 11 Feb 96 "..walls of its cell grow larger/as in an outrageous dream.." Sat down in large lecture hall to take Biology exam, for which I'd prepared meticulously. So much so it seemed I could see thru my own skin, identify the multitudes within. Knowledge= transluscence. I ran my finger along organs, nerves, tissues, cell walls. Fingers came out covered in glyphs, which were mesodermally-derived answers. The body itself a bioencyclopedia. Graze anatomy. I was practically weightless with the ejection or rejection of disproved hypotheses. Knowledge= serial thinning. Walked an infinite bloodpath to the palace, the Tower, yellow brick road pseudopodially navigated. I'd lost my eyes. Who needs 'em? Not the earthworm I'd become. A burrower is all the scholar need be. But when the exam was set in front of me, I knew something had gone horribly askew. It wasn't the multiple-choice footrace we'd been led to expect. In fact, there were only blank spaces to be filled with the answers to questions we'd be provided in a moment, via the ominous overhead/screen (what it meant, I realized now, to be "screened"). The good doctor explained that we'd be shown a series of slides, the organisms or animals upon which we'd be asked to identify by phyla, &c. Still the fear did not come: tho this would be a considerable challenge, close study had prepared me for a good stab at such identification. I could see thru skin. Let the games begin. He clicked on the machine & light shot thru the first image. It was a simple enough beast we saw, & began to log our answer. No sooner than we began, however, the still picture developed a perceivable pulse. Tho the room itself was still, one sensed the warning signs of a temblor. As I struggled to keep the image at rest in my mind, it commenced to undergo a startling series of biomorphisms. Pseudopodia became recognizable human arms became hooves became the lining of a gut wall, all the while the organism maintaining a smiling "face". At the front, the good doctor's voice a distant but shrill metronome. "Remember taxonomic hierarchy." Even the word remember became re : member, itself undergoing a sort of peristalsis, sick pulse, intermediate leprosy ending in nightmarish reformation. My finger was no more on the pulse, no more in the pie, no more on the trigger. It was itself severing. The images kept morphing, kept on truckin' like the invisible world was meant to do. What should it care for the student, for the taxa set in stone? He'd change the slide at reasonable intervals, leaving us to identify the last image of the organism left in our memory. The exam continued for hours but seemed to move backward & forward in time, as if we were witness to past & present simultaneously (or the simultanaeity of past/present), to the process by which the Pre-Cambrian points a bony finger at the Post-Atomic. Its smiling "face". Look out yer window to see the flukes swimming past. We visited black lakes, visited Chernobyl, visited space, spores, & the cradle of creation. Visited the world so fast, in fact, it became nonsensical to write a journal, which is what this "exam" had so clearly become an exhortation to do. The last instruction may indeed have been to identify the phylum of the Creator. It didn't much matter: we'd all dissolved. --Weave. * Playlist, Strut, KUSP-Santa Cruz, 3-7-96 David Murray Big Band/ Istanbul/ David Murray Big Band Cunducted by Lawrence "Butch" Morris Andre Jaume/ Ballade/ Musique Por 8: L'OC M'Mah Sylla (Le Rossignol de Guinee)/ Loukhore/ Au Coeur de Paris Adama Diabate/ Dunwolo Lalou/ Jako Baye Cameron w/ Paco de Lucia/ Que Desgraciaitos Son/ Soy Caminante Dimi Mint Abba/ Chaviou Elwara: El Barm/ Musique et Chants de Mauritanie ... Cesaria Evora/ Nha Cancera Ka Tem Medida/ Cesaria Evora Carlos Ward Quartet/ Pettiford Bridge/ Carlos Ward Quartet Orquestra Reve/ Rumberos Latino Americanos/ Rumberos Latino Americanos Maria Bethania/ Alibi/ Minha Historia Djavan/ Agua/ Djavan Roscoa Mitchell Creative Orchestra/ Sketches from Bamboo/ Sketches from Bamboo Salamat Ali Khan/ Raga Kanada/ Salamat Ali Khan ... Alemayehu Eshete/ Ambassel/ Aleymayehu Eshete * T H E L A S T _r_ _a_ _d_ _i_ _o_ D A Y S _f_ _r_ _e_ _e_ O F T H E _n_ _o_ _r_ _t_ _h_ _a_ W H I T E _m_ _e_ _r_ _i _c_ _a_ R A C E rrrr eeee aaaa dddd llll iiii ssss tttt r e a d l i s t always 1999 all selections from _Callaloo 18.2_ (1995) All whirled through my mind as filtered through Body's and the other's eyes and made concrete in their shouting pantomime of conflict, their accurately aimed pistol and rifle blasts, their dying falls with faces fixed in death's most dramatic agony as their imaginary sixshooters blazed one last poetic bullet of banging justice to bring their murderers down down down to hell, now heaving heaven high in wonder beneath our feet.... --Ralph Ellison, "The Roof, The Steeple and the People" Already the story's starting to unravel, the villagers stirring as your heart pounds into your throat. Why did you pick that idiot flower? Because it was the last one and you knew it was going to die. --Rita Dove, "Heroes" such blackness to brim over as cool rivers in the piedmont or a blanket of hills for the shudder in evening's plumpripe shoulders. --Rachel Elizabeth Harding, "Charcoal" remember me in your mouth through your nostrils consume the ashes of your loved one --Jill Battson, "Ashes Of A Loved One" there is only this in desperate times she dreams no dream but to walk full faced into the Western Sun knowing no one again will walk away from this place walk away with clean clean hands --Andrena Zawinski, "Desperate Times" III The dagger and the screams start in the same instant. Deep, long, helpless bellows; thick, grey tongue extended, recurved, stiff and drooling. The knife misses its aim for the spine, at the base of the neck. pulls out and stabs again. Again, twists, pulls out and stabs again. Blood gurgles, gushes out, drawing a red web on the bull's back live lava's hands about to blanket the city in silence. The legs falter then regroup. The dagger thumps down again. Again, the legs falter and fold. --Marilene Phipps, "The Bull at Nan Souvenance" All I remember today is the rapid chatter of tea-colored women, their plump arms, fingers reaching out to pinch us when we were small; lips passing hushed remarks about others in the town, like branches shifting in the wind. The grownups talked as if they hadn't heard any local news but had to inquire after rumors. --Reetika Vazirani, "Reading the Poem About the Yew Tree" And yet, I reminded myself, it might simply be a case of overreacting expressed in true Negro abandon, an extreme gesture springing from the frustration of having no adequate means of replying, or making himself heard above the majestic roar of a Senator. There was, of course, the recent incident involving a black man suffering from an impacted wisdom tooth who had been so maddened by the blaring of a moisture-shorted automobile horn which had blasted his sleep about three o'clock of an icy morning, that he ran out into the street clothed only in an old-fashioned nightshirt and blasted the hood of the offending automobile with both barrels of a twelve-gauge over-and-under shotgun. --Ralph Ellison, "Cadillac Flambe" * Your country is safe. Actual radio conversation released by the Chief of Naval Operations October 10, 1995. =========================================================================== #1: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision. #2: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision. #1: This is the Captain of a U.S. Navy vessel. I say again, divert your course. #2: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course. #1: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER ENTERPRISE, WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW! #2: This is a lighthouse. It's your call. hmmm.... this a found document... A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. --Davos, Switzerland February 8, 1996 *** descriptions of an imaginary universe to subscribe send a message SUBSCRIBE DIU-L your name to listserv@cnsibm.albany.edu for back issues, visit the EPC http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/diu for AHP Home Page, under construction http://www.albany.edu/~litmag/poe.html Imaginary Universe WWW Poet of the Week http://cnsvax.albany.edu/~poetry/iu.html send suggestions & writing c/o the logic of snowflakes (no matter what) new address: poetry@cnsvax.albany.edu * * *