VERY NICE
Hey, sorry, are you talking about BODY/our efforts at collaboration?
I am always a little concerned with these ‘what is the world coming to?’ people and the loss of community sounds a bit like that. Whenever my mother complains about the state of the world because somebody has smashed a window in the local bicycle repair shop and run off with 3 new bikes I tend to remind her that when she was a little girl and everything was good 6.000.000 jews were being gassed 500 kilometres away from where she lived.
Of course that was different, because back then your world was much smaller but I am not sure everyone did look after each other. (this is better discussed over a beer than at work where things are pretty damn hectic 5th month running…)
Regarding your second paragraph which seems to have more to do with our collaboration I don’t know. The idea of a place where everyone can communicate…I suppose it depends on what you mean by communicate. If you mean a place where everyone can understand each other I doubt it. (and you might very well ask me what I understand by understand…) Maybe the space in between is a place for the reader to fill, but I am not sure I necessarily would equate that to understanding…anyway, as I said, probably better discussed outside work…people here wouldn’t understand why I’d rather talk about this than sit and play computer games…
I do agree, nostalgia is dangereux and you could just as easily argue that we’re all communicating a hell of a lot more than ever before thanks to mobiles and email etc.
I was talking to my friend yesterday about the difficulties of practising art post-post modernism, in that in the past one learned a craft by studying and copying and recreating the masters, but then we got into this fractured place where everything that happened seemed to be about breaking up the word of the masters, so then after that there is the question of is there an open field now in which to make something new, or do you go back to study the work of the masters, or do you study/recreate the breakage of the breakers (perhaps an emptier route?)… Ulrich you’re much more up on all this than I am with your post-modernism expertise.
I guess hearing that had just made me consider what it is we’re trying to do with this sort of fractured yet ‘holisitic’ or collaborative writing – is it about breakage or actually about communication, actually a more dimensional way of writing than the false security of a single voice in a traditional fictional narrative.
Not being the expert you think I am, I do think there are a few issues in there. I do think that the idea of copying and recreating the masters stopped being ENOUGH, long time before anybody had ever thought about a term like post-modernism. While somebody like Picasso clearly had studied the art that had gone before him and was very aware that he was operating within a tradition he was simultaneously pushing the language of painting and adding something new to the tradition. (and arguably he would have been a less exciting painter had he not done so)
I can easily understand that it can be difficult to find your ‘place/space’ if you are practising art. The problem seems to me to be that in a post-modern world where ‘anything goes’ it is becomes almost impossible talking about what (good) art is, and to justify making art. (if one should feel a justification is needed).
Thinking back to the old masters, it seems as if the purpose and the role back then was more defined as well. The art served a specific purpose. (maybe the real ancestors of the ‘great masters’ are the people working for advertisement agencies and not the people trying to engage in contemporary art?)
I like how you put the thing about studying other people’s breakages – this is what I don’t like about lit theory – it’s all palimpsests and intertextuality and nothing seems to be ’saying’ anything anymore, some how seems boring? or it makesme in part want to say something very definitive and clear cut, a lot of my spanglish poems are like that. but then I get confused because I want ambiguity as well – and I think when you’re trying to do both at one time you end up in weird mysticism haha
but I think studying the masters is always really important. and even considering not picasso but El Greco or Da Vinci or whoever, the fact that they studied the masters does not mean they did their own break and their own contribution, which I don’t see as less radical than Picasso’s, maybe just more in accordance with their times? I think we’re living a really interesting historical period at the moment and whatever we do will be a reflection of that, whether we intend it or not!
i’m thinking about the nobel prize winner and something i heard on
radio 4 – folks talking about the best and worst the past 60 years -
the best being the end of the cold war and the internet, the worse
being our loss of community, of looking after one another
wondering if there’s a place we are on about, that we can find a way
together that we can express that without being cheesy we’re talking
about finding an in between space where everyone can communicate? is
this important?!?!
1. meaning is shifty water under the caskets of dictionaries. meaning is territory to be explored; its structures and borders are flexible; they may be bought, owned, shared, gifted, fought over, colonised, won, lost, mourned, loved.
2. text is a habitat; a geography to be activated by the reader who will not be led via the carrot of suspense.
3. poetry is the supreme act of communication. the novel is a branch of poetry.
4. we defy the will of market.
5. we call for other artforms to be the lovers of our page.
6. writing is a political act.
7. translation is a junket to other worlds.
8. who does language belong to? who does the text belong to? how does one move the lawn?
9. we are collectors and treasure hunters. we explore margins, gathering refuse and scraps. we are impoverished pirates, exiled, a cohort of strugglers. we search for the disappeared. we navigate by stars during daylight hours.
jennivora
ulrhansen
jlwpoetry