Buried Text: Recent Episodes
Topological Poetics Research Institute
Discussions of poetic and theoretical texts we deem 'buried': understudied, under-read, subversive, suppressed and repressed.
In this excerpt from a recently recorded discussion with poet, Fulbright scholar, and translator Anna Aksenova, Anna reads her translation of a poem by activist, poet, and queer-feminist advocate Galina Rymbu. We briefly discuss the Russian War against Ukraine, as well as an oppositional literary magazine being published in response to the war, ROAR: Russian Opposition Arts Review. The first issue of ROAR collects an array of voices against the war in Ukraine, including poems, anonymous letters, sound, and art.
We strongly encourage listeners to visit ROAR's first issue online at:
https://roar-review.com/ROAR-First-Issue-9b481dcf93ce4ff696ec537cad10f3a9
In this episode we discuss the "Objects" section of N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix (recently republished by Ugly Duckling Presse and Primary Information, 2020), and Craig Dworkin's essay on Pritchard from Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality (University of Chicago, 2020). We are joined by special guest Amanda Hurtado, poet, artist, scholar, and fearless researcher of poetics.
N.H. Pritchard was a fixture of the NYC neo-avant-garde poetry and art scene at the dawn of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. He studied at NYU + Columbia, taught at the New School for Social Research, and was central to the 1962 Umbra Writers Workshop. In a recently published 1978 interview at Jacket2, Pritchard details his time in New York among the abstract expressionist painters, New York School Poets, Jazz Musicians, and Umbra and Black Arts Poets.
We discuss N.H. Pritchard's work alongside Craig Dworkin’s masterful materialist reading in Radium of the Word of N OCTUR N, a poem in The Matrix. Dworkin’s materialist poetic readings of 20th and 21st ctry. avant-garde poetry and art in Reading the Illegible, No Medium, Radium of the Word, and Radical Lexicography have opened literary criticism to a new alterverse of critical post-schizophrene, post-paranoid, beyond reparative language engagement.
We are joined today by Amanda Hurtado, poet, scholar, and fearless researcher of poetics. Her work, S ACE P, published by Eclipse Editions is a literally retyping of Clark Coolidge’s SPACE. She typed the book on an IBM Selectric composer, and split the book in half, presenting only those letters typed by the left hand on the left side of each spread, and those typed by the right hand on the right, bringing to light a new rhythmic time-space only intuitively grasped by the reader of Coolidge’s original. She is also the author of CELL from MonoD Press and Moth Iverson, from Stolen Escaped. Her work has appeared in Timglaset, OEI, and ToCall. She is currently at work on a dissertation at University Colorado, Boulder on a poetics of the literal measure.
On this episode we discuss Leslie Scalapino’s Seamless Antilandscape, a poem and essay published in a wonderful edition by Katie Lederer’s Spectactular Books series in 1999, with a wrap-around screenprinted cover of a blue spiral on eggshell white.Seamless Antilandscape is a series of "text thangkas" and a critical poetics essay by Scalapino responding to a handful of writings by and interactions with the critic Marjorie Perloff.
Leslie Scalapino was born in Santa Barbara, California, and is associated with the San Francisco side of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. She began publishing in the 70s and published continuously and prolifically until she passed in 2010. She ran O Books beginning 1986, an influential press that published work by Anne Tardos, Carla Harryman, Michael Davidson, Tom Raworth, Rodrigo Toscano, Norma Cole, P. Inman, Alice Notley, Abigail Child, Robert Grenier, Alan Davies, Ted Pearson, Judith Goldman, and many others, including several books of her own work, and the anthology collections War and Peace**, volumes 2-4 of which were edited with Judith Goldman. Scalapino’s work spans poetry, prose, fiction, multi-media experiment, criticism, and she frequently worked collaboratively with dancers, artists, and other poets to create over the course of her lifetime an incredible body of work that is certainly one of the late 20th and early 21st century’s most influential and idiosyncratic.
For more information and materials visit:
https://poeticsinstitute.com/episode-5-seamless-antilandscape-leslie-scalapino/
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Today on Buried Text we discuss a truncated publication of Theory of Vibe in the 2017 edition of Glass Bead: Site 1. Logic Gate: the Politics of the Artifactual Mind. We are joined today by poet Jake Reber, doctor of Poetics, co-founder of the online PDF publishing platform Hysterically Real, and author of the sort of recently published ZER000 excess, a book Tan Lin wrote, “unleashes a host of graphically pixelated contagions along the pathway of the book. The results blown out, dark matter, black holes you are reading, recombinant delays, auto scripts spliced to your eyes, fascination, terminal, and transgenic.”
Peli’s Theory of Vibe seems like it has been stalking the literary scene now for many years as a haunting ghost story told around acephalic campfires. Sure, his dissertation is freely available on ProQuest, but those watching on twitter have been witness to this concept’s ongoing development beyond a precocious literary theoretical Harvard dissertation, as it moves with ludic inertia toward divulging a secret that spells out the confounding idea that the mathematization of literature will in fact not destroy poetry, but instead lead to a new kind of defense of poetry’s necessity, one quite sympathetic, it turns out, to Kant, Shelley, Sylvia Wynter, and Adrian Piper. Math and computation, even a new rationalism, he claims, will not lead us toward the kind of stultifying soul-deadening neoliberal analyses endlessly performed by a certain realm of “digital humanities,” nor will it inevitably fall victim to some putrid and adolescent faux-Bataillean Manichean utility-as-hedonism accelerationist transhuman fantasy. Instead, Theory of Vibe, and its blockbuster future iteration Big Mood, suggests that computation might provide new insights into poetry’s identity as an essential generator of intersubjective moods, frameworks of structured experience and feeling that cannot be produced any other way but in and as poetry.
In this episode we discuss philosopher, artist, and yogi Adrian Piper. Piper’s work ranges from the textual to the conceptual, the minimal to the danceable, from performative to participatory, and beyond. In 2016 Piper was the subject of one of NY MOMA’s most extensive single artist retrospectives in history, covering over 5 decades of astonishing work by Piper. In addition to her work as an artist, she has been a professor of philosophy, and is the author of a two-volume philosophical treatise, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, where she argues for a modified Kantian conception of the self. In this episode we look at Piper’s early-career publications in Bernadette Mayer and Vito Aconci’s short-lived but influential magazine of avant-garde poetry and art, 0-9.
Participants in the discussion are Courtlin Byrd, Simon Eales, and Zack Brown.
Thanks for listening.
Read more at:
https://poeticsinstitute.com/episode-6-adrian-piper-in-0-9/
In this episode we discuss the work of Georges Bataille, in particular the program for his clandestine organization, Acéphale, a brief fragment, entitled, “Poetry,” and a passage on gifts and sacrifice.
To read our elaborated introduction on Bataille, the characteristics of his work, and who he has influenced, visit: https://poeticsinstitute.com/episode-2-georges-bataille-poetry/
In this, our inaugural episode, we discuss Professor Ming-Qian Ma's (Poetics Program, University at Buffalo ) article on the earth artist Robert Smithson's "Mirror Displacements" (1969). Ma argues that Smithson "stages an eco-phenomenology characterized by 'a wildnerness of unassimilated seeing'" and reads this work, compellingly, alongside Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of givenness.
Read our long notes to this episode at our website here: https://poeticsinstitute.com/episode-1-ming-qian-ma-negative-seeing/