James Copeland Discusses Content

James Copeland—poet, sole paid employee of Ugly Duckling Presse, former editor of Supermachine, recording artist (bringing it back!), and now, publisher—is launching Content, a new book series that has for its first contributor none other than Jon Leon. The Faster Times' Andrew Gorin caught up with Copeland to talk about the project, about which Copeland says, "it’s there to be a rectangular space that an individual impulse can occupy for 80 pages. Within those pages, it’s up to them. That’s the deal. Could be writing, pictures, blank pages, works of imagination, theft, revelation, triviality." They also talk about Content's first volume, Leon's Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta, which is not quite poetry. As Gorin says, "You will be surprised, confused, turned on, fascinated, and chastised. Skip all that if you want to and be interested because it is interesting and beautifully packaged."

Jon Leon has a book forthcoming from Futurepoem (The Malady of the Century), and is the author of The Hot Tub, which shares its dress with Dan Hoy's Glory Hole, but he also talks of getting further and further from poetry, telling Hoy in an interview last year that "I understood intuitively Rimbaud's refutation of poetry and subsequent activities almost before I began to write poetry. So from the beginning of my practice I've courted the idea that poetry is something to be left behind, abandoned. With each successive book I've produced I'm getting further from poetry. My practice is a deliberate expenditure, or waste, of talent, in an effort to absolve myself of what I consider a pathogen. I want everyone to stop writing poetry."

Leon left Los Angeles last year in somewhat of a sleight of hand, or as Copeland says: "We hadn’t spoken at all but I’d gotten to know more through a bootleg copy of his work. He responded via email from a hotel in North Carolina called the Velvet Cloak." Gorin inquires after Leon's disappearing act and his relationship with Copeland, and treks on into branding and Bataille:

TFT: I’m interested in the marketing of material and immaterial things touched by Leon. I was actually introduced to his work through secondary literature–a series of Montevidayo blogposts written by Leon’s interlocutor and co-creative sibling Dan Hoy–which can seem as much a part of this artist’s project as his own original issuances. Hoy, in part, is writing about the way someone like Leon engages with his own identity in the way a marketing agency treats a brand. Can you talk a bit about Hoy’s terms: “the image-artist” and his fairly messianic and far more interesting subcategory “the pin-up artist”?

JC: To help fund the series Jon gave me an empty can of Fanta that he’d signed. As if I would sell it. The point of Dan’s phrases is, as I see it, not to become anything, which is time consuming and reduces clientele, but to be immediately in the penthouse. You could go about writing artist statements, or you could write the line, “I feel like dancing some so I dance some.” It’s very easy to get infected by this mentality, and to go off lip syncing into the rear view mirror of your imaginary S Class. It’s not like poets are immune to the demented power of the lights.

TFT: This book, Leon tells us in his blog post on Content, is the result of his intention “[t]o kill off the poems.” If Leon were treated as a visual artist working within the commercial framework of contemporary art, I’m not sure his stance would be read as so surprising or unique, though it would certainly stand it’s ground. So there is something very interesting about his escape from poetry and also the way we can read what he does as poems.

JC: Generally if you call something a poem, it is. Maybe because not that many people would care to. He has a book coming out next year from Futurepoem, so there you go. You could take a couple dozen screen captures of Lindsay Lohan and call it a sonnet sequence and nobody would object. Not that Jon’s doing that, using the word poetry, not in regard to Content. He might use it for his other works. A line like “I smoke crack because I’m Satan” is poetical enough.

Continue to read the interview here, and go to the launch party on Friday, if you're in New York. Trailer for Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta below (slightly NSFW).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mv7ztjWJ-0&feature=player_embedded