Comments on: Poetry Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London

By: wystan curnow

wystan curnow — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:05:45 +0000

Hi Caroline, I like your added thought/s. I’ve been in two minds about ‘poetry’ for a while; ‘poetry’ is a genre, which is to say in the context of this marathon it harks back to a time when the visual arts were painting and sculpture, not to a present time of in which visual arts practice is largely ‘post-medium’ or ‘post-genre’. As is demonstrated by the Serpentine’s exhibition programme, and its inclusion of poetry. I prefer to think the literary arts are in some measure art similarly post-genre and post-medium, and certainly that any present day traffic between the visual and the literary is most likely to be of use on such a basis, but this is hardly received wisdom. It is not merely a matter of the relations between media or genres but of a different conception of the art object and its relation to its receiver. I agree that a longer term societal restructuring of the arts is going on, and is operative at many levels.

In Auckland there has been marked recent upsurge in publishing by commercial and artist-run galleries, the later are publishing literary writing by emerging artists, a quite new phenomenon. A local version of New York’s Printed Matter opened earlier this year. As at Chicago’s Art Institute, there are changes taking place at the University of Auckland in the composition of classes and the skills they possess. Fine Arts and Music School students have made a large impact on my current English Department Writing Poetry class, especially their knowledge of and feeling for modes of presentation and performance.

By: prom girl

prom girl — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:37:18 +0000

I think this is art.

By: mairead byrne

mairead byrne — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:40:56 +0000

Maybe they will!

By: Jordan

Jordan — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:08:45 +0000

> I’d be interested to read

Me too. Maybe somebody will pay me to write it.

> do you use

I use it as it is used in Pound’s very silly poem to Whitman.

By: jscape

jscape — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:38:18 +0000

Caroline, I’m really goaded by your second comment and by Mairead’s thoughts about student communities at RISD & SAIC, as this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I remember this train of issues being spurred powerfully by a night at the Stone four years ago at which you were present, and also by the Openport festival. These are emergent issues that arise from an experience and stultification of work, as receiver and maker, & out of collaboration with a younger generation in teaching, which also, lastly, beg for a kind of theorization, & thus far I don’t see the latter happening in a satisfying way; prose that thinks about the alteration of reading and authority incipient in production generously is still quite specific to distinct media sets. Commitment to reckoning with a “multi-sensory, less unified approach to artistic experience, knowledge and public influence” (yes!) calls for the expansiveness to press well beyond given categories, to recognize the continuum between scanning and interpretation, reception and composition, gesture and authority, between distraction and orchestration of knowledge. And also beyond the discursive–so that, it seems to me, the best thinking in these environs is in art itself. Some initial groping reflections of mine around a poetic/aesthetic tendency toward alloverness & ambience are due out soon in boundary 2, if you’re interested. But the stress on the “psycho-social” implications is terrifically compelling, as it impinges on the ways that communities of knowledge are being altered in this moment. A colleague of mine at UC, Lauren Berlant, is working on what she’s calling “ambient citizenship.” That’s a direction with potential. As teachers we can form responsive curricula that take a longer historical view; as poets I suppose a kind of abeyance is obliged, so that one floats the work before a forum is necessarily there, & hope it takes somewhere.

By: john

john — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:19:05 +0000

20 years ago *is* now.

And Brakhage’s film is more than 40 years old . . .

In the realm of the “individual” arts of poetry, music, painting, sculpture, I pretty much agree with you; film I see as a “collective” art, though, and, while directors get the glory, they rely on a lot of other people, including composers and writers, even poets.

By: mairead byrne

mairead byrne — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:39:05 +0000

Jordan, I admit my perspective is informed by immigration (between cultures) and migration (from university to art school), and know that a predilection for migration/mixture/diversity marks my poetics too. I’d be interested to read a more expansive treatment of your argument for *now* as a time
“when interart commerce is limited.” Also, do you use “commerce” as a metaphor or are you talking about money-making enterprise?

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:28:41 +0000

Oh, twenty years ago — I thought we were talking about now.

By: john

john — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:14:16 +0000

I disagree about movie makers — they’re always working with visual artists and musicians, and even, sometimes, poets. The degree of dialog versus dictation varies from filmmaker to filmmaker, of course.

Heck, Stan Brakhage made a movie of . . . Louis Zukofsky! I saw it 20 years ago; don’t remember it much.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:47:11 +0000

The movies are another insular art form – there doesn’t appear to be much dialogue between movie makers and… well, anyone (dictation isn’t dialogue).

Of course movies are art.