Comments on: Faits Divers de la Poesie Americaine et Britannique,

By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:14:05 +0000

The Supreme Court was at a loss. What a strange case! The Flarf group was suing the Feneon Collective. The Collective countersued. The School of Quietude submitted a ‘Friend of the Court’ brief recommending that they all be hung from the beams of the theater in Stratford-upon-Avon. M Whitman scratched his head and turned away. Mme Plath started laughing. It was reported that M Thoreau vomited on his shoes.
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By: john

john — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:46:07 +0000

Lawsuits! Now we’re talkin’! Let’s get some good avant-garde high dudgeon going.
Next up — a duel!
With unsold copies of each other’s books as weapons.
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By: "noah freed"

"noah freed" — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:25:00 +0000

… and why is it, I wonder, that the humorless Flarfistas so promptly threaten legal action at the slightest provocation — these poets whose art is entirely based on the unsanctioned appropriation of others’ discourse? How can it be that they who prankishly — sometimes quite amusingly — attempt to subvert the dominant solemnity of contemporary poetics are the first to seek recourse in the most oppressive of state institutions when someone dares to make fun of them in return? How insular!
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By: "noah freed"

"noah freed" — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:54:38 +0000

A lawsuit? Let it come down, as the murderer says in Macbeth. It will be terrifically entertaining for you (I mean, for the Fénéon Collective) & frustrating & embarrassing for the plaintiff. I doubt he or she will bother, but you should definitely encourage him or her, as if it went forward it would be tossed as frivolous, & you might be able to claim some damages. The person can’t really think being satirized is actionable? If he’s a known poet, he’s a public figure, even if a terribly inconsequential one, & courts have consistently ruled in favor of artists in such cases. Quite hilarious. And surely guaranteed to draw even more satire down on his head, I would imagine.
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:18:45 +0000

But they’d only ask for a Photoshopped dollar in damages, one presumes?
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:34:42 +0000

Oh my.
Someone has just told me (my source is unimpeachable) that a prominent member of the Flarf group has threatened suit against the feneon collective.
Kent
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By: john

john — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 05:30:26 +0000

p.s. I, too, enjoyed David-Baptiste Chirot’s post.
Just wanted to put a word in for the Greek Anthology, not take anything away from the great Martial (or the pointed, delightful puns thereon).
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By: john

john — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 02:33:54 +0000

“[Martial] is considered the creator of the modern epigram.”
While Martial codified the modern epigram, Greek poets Lucilius and Nikarchos gave the form its satiric, comic spin a few decades before Martial. This is from Nikarchos, trans. by Robin Skelton, from the Penguin edition of “The Greek Anthology,” edited by Peter Green:
If blocked, a fart can kill a man;
if let escape, a fart can sing
health-giving songs; farts kill and save:
a fart is powerful as a king.
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:20:00 +0000

The above by David-Baptiste Chirot is really quite sharp, and some of the pieces very funny. And he makes some excellent satirical points! (Also, as I’ve mentioned, his Feneon blog is a must see–probably the best collection of Feneon materials on the web.)
I see that the Faits Divers blog is now up and running again, with more entries.
Curious doings…
Kent
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By: david-baptiste chirot

david-baptiste chirot — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:48:19 +0000

“Faits dit vers” comme “faits d’hiver”—
“Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?”
Le collectif dit “Feneon” est plutot une groupe de “fais-neants” qui n’appartient point des “nouvelles,” mais de la tradition des epigrames de Martial.
Comme disait Fellini au sujet de son “Satyricon,” ‘c’est un film de la science fiction’ la mise-en-scene duquel se trouve au passé.”
Blaguer le blogger-!
A few “faits divers” re the FC-
Though working overtime, the Feneon collective’s goal of being mentioned on M Silliman’s blog has yet to bear fruit. Disgruntled workers staging a strike, set upon by goons, burned in effigy their FC bosses, who called in the Riot Squad. This incident, it is hoped, will finally draw M Silliman’s attention.
Anonymous donors, an anonymous Monk informs visitors, created the Shrine for the purpose of ten times a day prayers, the invocations of which are for Perpetual Notice to be taken of the FC on every Poetry blog, especially that of Canon Silliman.
Confusing epigrammatic satires of poetry cliques with social activism and avant-gardism, the FC asserts its “news items” exemplify Pound’s “Poetry is news that stays news.” Anarchist youths, chased by FC Police, are distributing FC tracts to the needy for use in litter boxes and parrot cages, chanting the slogan “Who needs yesterday’s papers.”
Having taken Secretary Rumsfeld under her wing as a 21st century Marinetti, Dr Perloff has won a no-bid Federal contract for the Stanford colleagues’ Institute of Opacity. Its Secrecy, Neo-Futurist Rumsfield jokes, “will top that of the Situationists’ “Bureau of Secrets.”
Applying for a Grant, the FC had described itself as a contemporary blog version of Martial. Enraged that a sardonic bureaucrat awarded instead a “real Martial Arts program,” the FC’s counter-attack has run afoul of a Ninja Anarchist Study group’s “hand delivered” “Propaganda of the Deed.”
Billed as an Exhibition of American Avant Poets’ Portraits, with Surprise Readers,
The Anonymous Gallery’s show is being held liable for the “psychological war fare post traumatic stress disorder” produced by the poets’ having been locked into a Hall of Mirrors and blasted with tape loops of their own readings.
The FC today began a Letter Campaign to collect signatures demanding the President and Supreme Court decree that the FC be a daily feature on Silliman’s Blog, the Poetics List and all other US poetry blogs. Under subpoena in the bribery investigations of Gov. “Blogo” the Illinois based FC may turn State’s Witness in exchange for this Federal favor. The FC denies any connection between these two ongoing stories.
In the early 1950′s, one of the Italian Neo_-realist directors proposed the idea of throwing a camera in the air; whoever caught camera would then be a director, a cameraman and simply film whatever was the course of the person’s day. (Several “natural” wags over the years have remarked that in Italy this is much easier to do than other countries, as Italians are “born actors/acting” and the beauty of the landscape and arts surrounding them make them “natural born” visual artists..)
(Naturalism however, is not the same thing as Neo-Realism–)
teachers of many spiritual traditions the world round have remarked to the effect that the person who prays in public prays not to the Divine, but to that spirit of egotism in themselves which demands that all around take notice of one’s great piety.
Or, as the poet has it–”Methinks he doth protest too much”–
The Feneon Collective so called is not a “new form” creating, but following in the old Roman footsteps of Martial (Although one might claim that the epigram in terms of epitaph–and epithet– is far more ancient, and is found first expressed in Archilocus’s verse.)
The more one travels into the “future,’ the closer one becomes to the past.
The continual promotional campaign of the “anonymous” blogs of an anonymous collective is a constant cry for attention, the opposite of Feneon’s “I aspire to silence,” which led him to not long after the writing of the faits divers to abandon al writing except for letters to friends and business associates.
Feneon is a writer whose trajectory is towards that “I prefer not to” of Bartleby marked by the encounter with Rimbaud’s “I is an other,” a “some one else” than “simply” a writer. Rimbaud went into gun running and coffee exports, the trading of trinkets and interior explorations whose accounts he sent to the new Geographical journals in France. After their minimal success, he abandoned these writings also. Feneon, the greatest art critic in France since Baudelaire, except for the rare catalog descriptions done for the auctions of friend’s collections, or notes for the art gallery in which he became a professional seller for the last decades of his life, also abandoned even the anonymous and pseudonymous writings of his artistic and anarchist past.
One of the major contradictions of many American poets’ works for over thirty years has been the constant assertion of “the death of the author,” the “critique of the self,” which have produced such opposite effects such as the advertising campaigns of the “Conceptual” works of Kenny G, the promotional forays of the Flarifists and the publicity driven “anonymous” FC.
“Be Street Smart. Don’t Get Caught”– was a sticker and t-shirt distributed by the anonymous Coup de Grace over twenty years ago in Boston.
This was also Feneon’s credo, until he was under the splotlights in the Trial of the Thirty, a publicity which sent him further into anonymity with the “faits divers” and his not long after realization of the aspiration to silence.
Look at it this way: does a person who wishes to be anonymous go about loudly trumpeting themselves, demanding to be heard on every blog and TV station and radio feed possible? To be like the “anonymous” Joe the Plumber and sign record and book deals, become a paid political pundit on Fox, or eventually run for some high degree office—
This is where, to me, the “anonymity” and “death of the author” und so weiter, perform the function of the “plant” who “magically appears out of nowhere, a no one, “un homme qui-conque” “una donna senza nome” “a face in the crowd”—and turns out to be—a star!!!
Using this model—a great favorite at concerts by Bobby Blue bland and B.B. King was the “Viola” who just so happened to be seated in the crowd as an anonymous Sister—and invited to come shyly onstage– could SING—and I mean, REALLY SING!—“as well as any professional”—because she was indeed just that—this was done so often and so well that it became in itself an enjoyable feature that though everyone knew, all acted surprised by the Violas, as a tribute to the skill with which it was pulled off year after year over hundreds and hundreds of shows—
Using this model of the plant, what one finds is that the “dead authors” now plant themselves as an “anonymous” face in the crowd, which is invited—by themselves—up onstage and turns under the spotlights—into a star!! An American idol!!
Another aspect of this “anonymous and hitherto unknown star hidden in our midst”—“just dying to be discovered” (the death wish of the “dead author”–?)—is that when using or citing earlier examples as models, such as in this case, Feneon, what is invoked is not the actual reading of Feneon’s works and ideas, but the projecting on to him of the “anonymous” “dead author’s” desires to be READ, not as a long buried classic brought to life largely by the actual death of the original writer–, but as an INSTANT CLASSIC—
Recognized and feted NOW—
In a bizarre and paradoxical way, the “attention deficit disorder’ which Americans are portrayed as having “en masse” as Whitman wd say– (to the great benefit of the pharmaceutical and health care guru industries–) is producing a drive for more than the “fifteen minutes/ seconds of fame” Andy Warhol once promised to be deliver to every one someday.
This drive for a more lasting and higher staying power as an attention getter may be examined then as the exploitation of “gimmicks” and “shticks” to keep the audiences’ eyes focused on one, as being a proven and dependable deliverer of the goods.
In this case, anonymity becomes a gimmick rather than an actual demonstration or investigation, just as the loud noises of the Flarfists and Conceptualists are mechanisms of “career advancement” and “placement in anthologies,” or recognition as the “most prominent spokesperson/s for the new movement” and so on—
It is as though the “dead authors” are even more ego obsessed than those critiqued by the “critique of the self,” and so, like the Living Dead, keep on “coming back”—
As sequels, prequels, post prequels, reverse engineered retro futurist post romantic chance operations pre programmed for post operative self examinations in the gigantic mirrors of the self—a Narcissus providing its own Echo—
And who knows, perhaps applying at some point MARTIAL LAW—
“In honor of Martial—“
“Marcus Valerius Martialis (known in English as Martial) (March 1, between 38 and 41 AD – between 102 and 104 AD), was a Latin poet from Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these short, witty poems he cheerfully satirizes city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets. He is considered the creator of the modern epigram.
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 23:13:03 +0000

“I am troubled.”, Ikkyu said. “Demon’s have been whispering to me while I sleep and tickle my ears.” “Don’t worry,” M Ginsberg replied, “just write me a letter.”
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:07:09 +0000

Ikkyu,
And it’s a darned good anthology, if I say so myself.
Thanks for remembering it!
Kent
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By: Ikkyu

Ikkyu — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 14:16:10 +0000

In his introduction to an anthology of Buddhism in contemporary American poetry, Gary Snyder writes the following about me:
“Ikkyu, a fifteenth-century Japanese Zen master and a fine (and strikingly fearless) poet himself, laughingly ridiculed his fellow poets, knowing as he did the distractions and temptations that might come with literary aspirations. His ‘intimacy with demons’ is not to be seen in the light of the occidental romance with alienation, however. In Japanese art, demons are funny little guys, as solid as horses and cows, who gnash their fangs and cross their eyes. Poetry is a way of celebrating the actuality of a nondual universe in all its facets. Its risk is that it declines to exclude demons. Buddhism offers demons a hand then tries to teach them to sit. But there are tricky little poetry/ego demons that do come along, tempting us with suffering or with insight, with success or failure. There are demons practicing meditation and writing poetry in the same room with the rest of us, and we are all indeed intimate. It didn’t really trouble Ikkyu.”
Mr. Snyder is right: it didn’t really trouble me when I was alive, and the work of the Feneon Collective doesn’t trouble me now that I’m dead. This whole blogging thing is new to me, but I’ll be sure to tell my buddies Han Shan, Buson and Li Po about this bolt and maybe they’ll agree to add a thread.
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By: Sean Brady

Sean Brady — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:48:59 +0000

How is satire writing about oneself? How do we know what actions–legal or illegal–the Feneon Collective has or has not engaged in? These novels-in-three-lines, while playfully utilizing Feneon’s format, constitute a new art form, one that relies on wit and imagination as opposed to journalism. (Not that journalism cannot at times employ these tactics.) It seems odd, then, to critique these “novels” by comparing them to Feneon’s, or to the theories of the original composer, when the old and the new “novels” arise from a unique soil and bend toward a unique sun.
Yes, these “novels” can be considered comic, but in the way we might consider Donald Rumsfeld with a pair of hedge clippers stumbling through a nursery comic. There’s humor but with a certain tension or threat involved. That gives them their bite. Ah, but I’m satirizing here a political figure, which is considered fair game, while poets, as we all know, rise far above such pedestrain traffic.
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By: David Harrison Horton

David Harrison Horton — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:16:14 +0000

To keep the record straight, the collective thinks it behooves me to remind folks that before the Faits Divers were a blog, the collective initially and anonymously contributed many of the early entries to my zine WORK (no. 10).
David Harrison Horton
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By: david chirot

david chirot — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:33:45 +0000

For several years now i’ve been studying those things which language is a symptom of–
the “unread” unwritten non writings which are below the surface of the language which is read, written, and taken to be a discourse which is so understood that it does not need to be articulated Unquestioningly believing the veracity of one’s form of discourse, the discourse becomes a viewpoint, a listening post, which can only receive those things which it recognizes. Anything said or written to the contrary is treated with ridicule,
Outrage, shouts of “you’re lying,” from a host of persons who may ironically believe in the insincerity of poetry as a form of truth.
A great deal of the language one reads & hears every day and “takes for granted,’ without questioning, as facts, information, is in actuality deliberately strewn with misinformation’s, dis-translations, alterations editings and “confessions” which in turn become the elements that persons use to write, listen, read with.
In many strange ways it is surprising how closely alike are methods used in avant writing exercises and many practices used by state and military propaganda and disinformation machines of communication.
, A great deal of what is claimed to be “resistant” or “critical” writing is instead a form of reflection of those things its “transgresses,” because of an unawareness of how similarly constructed the discourses are.
In order to create a critique of such things as the separation of poets from events, of a lack of engagement, I have chosen to approach this question as a separation of the “avant” from the historical basis of the avant-garde—the term itself, which is military in origin and shared with poetry and art by the early avant-gardes like Italian Futurism which embraced “War, the world’s hygiene,” and Dada which was vehemently anti war anti state anti institutions anti art—
With this reversal of terms—connecting them rather than separating-I started examining the language used in the military intelligence spheres and by extension those used in torture, ethnic cleanings, border fences, separation Walls (i.e. Apartheid), prisons, treatments of illegal aliens, the ways in which aspects that do not fit in with the accepted discourses are made to disappear, or are tortured into speaking out, confessing, being forced to speak.
As a Russian artist says, “Language is fascism because it censors, but because it forces one to speak.”
In order to make one’s case clear, one needs to cite specific examples rather than present a blanket statement. For example—poets in the US and Guantanamo—what is the connection, not as an “ignoring” and separation of these two elements, but what is it that connects them directly?
Poetry—the Guantanamo Poets book and the history of its being able to even make it into being published in the US, through an incredibly difficult route, and via “non-literary translators ‘ (the military being highly suspicious and believing that poems may much more readily conceal hidden codes than another form of language, to trigger Jihadists elsewhere reading the poems–)
Actually the translation methods are much like those in the “writing experiments” by Bernadette Mayer and Charles Bernstein which are widely used. In a sense, the military ordered translators are then are they not creating avant garde poetry of the texts from Guantanamo?
A further linkage is how are these poems read and commented on by Americn poets?
When faced with “bad poetry” by “bad people” “badly translated” which have already had to pass as many checkpoints almost as a Gaza does to cross the street, what are the response, the language, the “frames” by which American poets are not reading the unwritten works which are unseen before them hidden in plain site—or –completely obvious?
In what ways do the methods of reading and writing employed by the American poets relate to the military’s way of treating them—as person fundamentally both forced to speak and unheard, unread? Are not the methods, eyes and ears of the American poets another form of unquestioning belief that these poets are n fact “guilty” without the need to be proven either innocent guilty?
What one begins to find is that it is not simply that poets may seem unconcerned or not with Guantanamo, but that even when involved with it at the level of language, the approach to the poems begins very much with the same method of apprehension and suspicion that the military does.
And in this way, the poets remain in isolation, because their texts are isolated from being “true poetry” and also from being “convincing”
One of the curious aspects of this is that for the last several years there has been a continual streaming of “shocking revelations” that one memoir after another is false, isn’t by real Holocaust survivor, isn’t by a real teenager abused an driven to drugs, I not by anyone that the author has claimed to be.
Yet before the “shocking revelations” occurred these same books had sold tons of copies and been given much air time, video time and critical pace in journal and newspapers.
What does this reveal about the structure of belief and unbelief in relation to language which permeats American writing and reading to such an immense extent?
Effectively it reveals not only a double standard but an immediate “suspension of disbelief when confronting what’re supposed to be “authoritative authenticate voices.” When these authors turn out to be ironically producing works which ARE associated with willing suspension of disbelief. People are outraged—because they have so unquestioningly embraced fictions…
In the same way, there is the same unquestioning belief in Authority when certain VIPs of the poetry world write and speak about in authenticity, artifice, the “non-author” the new avant of boredom and machinery uses—al these things are believed in unquestioningly at some level as sincere even when loudly trumpeting their own avocations of insincerity.
On the one Transparency is demanded from the military corporate State and on the other opacity is called for in poetry…
The irony being that the military-corporate -state is itself already opaque—
Using some of these questions and stock piling date, examples, images, texts, etc—I began creating what I call the “New Extreme Experimental American Poetry and Arts”
This is a way of finding in examples all around things which are so obvious that they are almost never seen.
By linking these together one may be able to examine things not as separate, which is the intention, but reflecting each other—or being directly connected even when being denied by the practitioners who unquestioningly believe in them
Here are two examples re the Guantanamo Poets
And at both my blogs there is a great deal more
http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com
http://cronacasouversivafeneon.blogspot.com
two essays published in on-line journals:
David-Baptiste Chirot: “Waterboarding & Poetry”
Wordforword #13 Spring 2008
(also has Visual Poetry by chirot)
Poems from Guantánamo
The Detainees Speaktwo essays published in on-line journals:
David-Baptiste Chirot: “Waterboarding & Poetry”
Wordforword #13 Spring 2008
(also has Visual Poetry by chirot)
Poems from Guantánamo
The Detainees Speak
David Baptite ChirotNo
KAURAB Translation Site
David Baptite ChirotNo
KAURAB Translation Site
what follows is a further elaboration at the http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com
which crediets some of the literary sources and inspirations–
Torture , Rights & Writing: “The New Extreme Experimental American Poetry”
“As usual, the only symptoms we had were in the language.”
–Pier Paulo Pasolini
To degenerate as a result of the use of torture, & by its concealment & deception question human dignity & individual rights–
In the first lines of his Introduction to Torture: Cancer of Democracy France and Algeria 1954-62, Pierre Vidal-Naquet asks “Can a great nation, liberal by tradition, allows its institutions, its army, and its system of justice to degenerate over the span of a few years as a result of the use of torture, and by its concealment and deception of such a vital issue call the whole Western concept of human dignity and the rights of the individual into question?”
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change
In The Peloponnesian War, Book 3, Thucydides states:
“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change. What used to be thought of as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward, any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant one was totally unfitted for action; frenzied violence came to be considered an attribute of a real man. ”
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
These entries are ongoing found materials with which I work on various projects. They are an Anarkeyology of Site/Sight/Cites in which, by relinking the Military & Art meanings of “avant-garde,” I find different ways of investigating separations, Walls, silences, distranslations, forgeries, torture, “Newspeak,” censorship and propaganda as elements common to both war and writing/art historically & in the USA today.
The finding of these materials and the questions they open are, I find, “necessary,” as the Formal separations of the American “avant-gardes” from the Military & external/ internal imperialist realities are among the “symptoms . . . in language” that Pasolini notes “we (have) to go on.”
Separations in, of, and by language are “necessary” to Vidal-Naquet’s “concealment ” of “torture, cancer of democracy,” whose “deceptions” erect barriers, Walls, prisons, “Security,” Surveillance between not only the torturers and the tortured, Occupiers and the Occupied, but between actions and words, so that a culture conceals itself from itself.
Materials & questions that are “necessary” to examine separations, concealments, deceptions that are “necessary”–
“Necessary”–but how? For a long time I found materials but not the way, until an artist friend sent me in 2003 Distant Star by Roberto Bolano. 9/11 1973 and 9/11/2001–the link of the American backed Pinochet coup in Chile and the dawn of the Patriot Act & Shock and Awe opened this Pandora’s Box, and the connections which Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) most explicitly details the history of.
“Necessary”–to find among the “fictional” and the “factual,” among street debris and the debris of writing & arts, these interconnections and relinkings, the symptoms in language, is a work found by what I call “Necessity, the Motherfucker of Invention.”
In The Moro Affair, Leonardo Sciascia writes:
“Indeed when the truth which had been confined to literature emerged harsh and tragic within the context of everyday life, and could no longer be ignored, it seemed as if it were a product of literature.”
This “truth” ” is something so “obvious”that it becomes treated as a separation, a “fiction,” rather than a “real, true fact.”
To work the “Hidden in Plain Site/Sight/Cite” can in this way be considered a “fiction,” compared to the “reality” of a Formal Separation which is “immune to these things.”
Sciascia notes the “Hidden in Plain Site/Sight/Cite” in using an expression from Poe’s “The Purloined Letter:”
“(W)hat we called the invisibility of the obvious . . . (from Poe’s Dupin) . . others have called over-obviousness . . . an obviousness linked to other obviousnesses , all of them conforming to a . . . concept of the clandestine.”
This “invisibility” is separated from the “real, true fact,” which the account and appearances of events create as the version that is “believed” to have occurred.
Sciascia quotes a dictionary:
“One says: a real true fact. and such like. Real in this case seems to reinforce true, not simply as pleonasm but thus: a real true fact hasn’t simply occurred but it has occurred as it is told, as it appeared, as it is believed . . . ”
The separation of “what is told, as it appeared, as it is believed” from what is “the invisibility of the obvious” allows for the concealment and deception Vidal-Naquet writes of.
The entries here may be read as the raw materials of
as an examination of these separations and finding ways to relink them in the term common to the military & art”avant- garde” in Necessity the Motherfucker of Invention’s “New Extreme Experimental American Poetry.”
GITMOS ACROSS AMERICA–DETENTION & DEATHS ARTICLES & LINKS
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By: Marshall

Marshall — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:46:01 +0000

“By the light of phantasmagorical sunsets when clouds alone are sinking, with whatever man surrenders up to them of dreams, a treasure liquefaction crawls, gleams on the horizon: I thereby gain a notion of what sums can be, by the hundreds and beyond, equal to those whose enumeration, in the closing arguments during a trial involving high finance, leaves one, as far as their existence goes, cold. The inability of figures, however grandiloquent, to translate, here springs out of a case; one searches, with this hint that, if a number increases and backs up, toward the improbable, it inscribes more and more zeros: signifying that its total is spiritually equal to nothing, almost.
Mere smoke, those billions, outside the moment to grab some: or, the lack of resplendence or even interest shows that to elect a god is not so as to confine him to the shadow of iron safes and pockets.”
Mallarme, 1897
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By: Lydia Olidea

Lydia Olidea — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:36:49 +0000

I think that David B-C gets at the oddity of this quite well. It may be that the collection is merely a recapitulation of an historical form and style, substituting the name of contemporary poets — in which case it’s cute enough, as mild diversions go (though if this is the case, Angela G’s complaint seems well-founded). But if the project is meant to have a critical edge, it’s because it is in main satirizing poets for their political pretensions while noting that their forms of engagement are somewhere between politically fruitless and utterly blinkered? This, we trust, is the import of the images from Guantanamo et al — the political real, so distant from poets’ brickbats, from mere “language.”
But this is where things get hinky. The supposed hypocrisy being exposed is of failing to engage in actual political acts. And, as David B-C notes, Feneon himself could scarcely be accused of this, which gives him a leg to stand on: Mallarmé himself referred to The Thirty as “angels of purity.” But as Daisy suggests, there’s no reason to believe that this author is more politically engaged than any of his subjects, and indeed plenty of reason to believe otherwise (I myself have been in jail with at least two of the poets subjected to such comic scrutiny). In short, in taking up the position of Feneon in addition to the style, the author of this present amusement merely performs the hypocrisy he imagines himself to be illuminating.
He is merely writing about himself, since his form of “political action” resembles more a Mlinko or a Leithauser than a Feneon. Well, toujours gai, tuojours gai; this all provides its own comedy.
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By: Marshall Steiner

Marshall Steiner — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:11:17 +0000

Hmm. Would this apply to gender, sexual orientation, and class as well? After all, a welter of different ideologies are subsumed under each of those headings.
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By: Angela G.

Angela G. — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:31:08 +0000

Hi Daisy, Thank you for your comment.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:21:54 +0000

Huh? My point, clearly, was that to think in such terms is infantile. It’s a meaningless category.
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By: MarhsallSteiner

MarhsallSteiner — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:47:24 +0000

Wait a sec. Why is “white male” an infantile category? That’s a pretty harsh blanket generalization about white men, especially since “whiteness” is in actuality a bundle of equivalent ethnicities–the Irish, Italians, occasionally Asian Indians, and demographically at least, Hispanics.
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By: the feneon collective [authentic tendency]

the feneon collective [authentic tendency] — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 14:47:45 +0000

We have just seen the new entries posted at the Faits Divers de la Poesie blog.
Please note that at least half of the new entries over the past two days were written by current members of the feneon collective [authentic tendency]; incredibly, they have been posted *after* our separation from the original feneon collective.
In other words, the so-called feneon collective has brazenly appropriated our writing and claimed it as its own product. This only demonstrates to what unethical depths our former “colleagues” have sunk. Their project is now fully corrupted.
Given the situation, we plan to announce, in coming days, in this space, the actual identities of those who have taken it upon themselves to steal our creative property.
You will be surprised, we guarantee it.
–the feneon collective [authentic tendency]
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By: Daisy

Daisy — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 13:55:34 +0000

Angela–Actually, a number of fhe poets mentioned in the mini-novels are politically active and/or write political poetry. Daisy
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By: Angela G.

Angela G. — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:14:42 +0000

If it was the blog’s original intent is to criticize the lack of political involvement on the part of poets, that point was made a little too late. The three-line novels concerning that point should have accompanied the GB detainees photos. Otherwise, it simply read like a mockery of poets’ silly careers, lives, and blogs, using Feneon’s style.
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By: Angela G.

Angela G. — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:35:18 +0000

Never mind, I just saw the lastest posts. I get the point — and it’s a good one.
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By: the feneon collective [authentic tendency]

the feneon collective [authentic tendency] — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 23:49:10 +0000

We write to express our dismay and anger over the recent collapse of the original feneon collective.
The reasons for this collapse will be released, on the new blog of the feneon collective [authentic tendency], in due time.
For now, let us say that certain presumptuous members took it upon themselves to “edit” the contributions of others, which were then posted, without group approval, on the Faits Divers de la Poesie blog. In general, the literary execution of many of the faits divers presently posted is flawed and weak.
This said, with the outrage expressed by “Angela G.” we cannot really concur. The interaction between written and visual text is often a complicated thing, Mlle G., and often, then, these interactions are more figurative than literal in nature (a rather banal assertion, to be sure!). And though they are prisoners of a very different kind from those held at the illegal torture prison of Guantanamo, American and British poets are prisoners of imperialist culture, too. Not least the hypocritical “avant-garde” kind, who like to think of themselves advanced enough to be looking down, critically, from above. Yes, they wear ridiculous hats with mouse ears, dying for attention.
Of course, we count ourselves among them– even though one of us has two times been an actual prisoner, for political reasons, before.
Please boycott the corrupted Faits Diverse de la Poesie blog. It is no longer the blog of any true feneon collective.
We will have further updates.
–the feneon collective [authentic tendency]
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By: "noah freed"

"noah freed" — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:56:10 +0000

Angela, I find it helpful to read the text accompanying pictures if I wish to understand how the two are related.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:28:17 +0000

There will always be people who think that any attempt to expose cruelty & injustice for what they are must first gain the permission of the victims. A strange, blinkered idea, which must be of comfort to those who wish to imagine themselves victims. Of no help whatsoever to actual sufferers of injustice, of course, as anyone knows who doesn’t automatically think in such infantile categories as “white male.”
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By: Angela G.

Angela G. — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:20:59 +0000

Ryan, Did you look at the illustration? Do you know where it came from? In what context it was originally used? If so, please explain what a political cartoon about Guantanamo Bay has to do with the Feneon Collective and American poetry and how that is an appropriate analogy.
And Mr. Johnson, aka the Feneon Collective, perhaps you could explain it better than anyone.
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