So, as is the case when I blog, this space has lapsed significantly.

But, this morning, 8:27AM in Boulder, CO, I feel compelled to report–mostly because I am here teaching at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in a week devoted to different manifestations and forms of technology and hybridity.

The week’s description is:

Gender & Hybridity, and Should We Consider the Cyborg?

“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” – Donna Haraway

How is our writing mediated and motivated by considerations of gender and hybridity? We’ll look at some of the movements in recent decades across less represented writing communities: gay, trans, war vets. We’ll take inspiration from Homi K. Bhabha’s diasporas and Cole Swensen and David St. John’s American Hybrid anthology. How has the “democracy” of the Internet opened up floodgates of “untested” material? What of the cult of blogs, everyone’s story, confession, the manufactured memoir? What is interesting? Do our bodies become speedier and more mechanized as we plug in? What capabilities are gained in the age of the ebook and text message novels?

**

On Monday, there was an amazing panel about the “hybrid.” On Tuesday, there was a panel (which I was on) about “Writing Diaspora: Live & Virtual.” And, my class this week is titled “Prosthesis and Procedure.” So, my mind is on many things related to the kind of things that happen when one blogs, when one brings technology into the classroom, etc…The implications of the posthuman–and why is it that I truly believe that I am a “cyborg,” particularly when the term is actually quite problematic.

I ended my panel statement with the following:

“When N. Katherine Hayles refers to Alan Turing’s “imitation game” in her “Introduction” to How We Became Posthuman, what she really seems to be pushing us towards is a question of embodiment. If a computer can fulfill the same activities that a human can, what’s left to differentiate? Hayles also states that the idea of the posthuman both “evokes terror and excites pleasure.” But, what do we really make of any of this as writers? Particularly in the context of the vocabulary chosen for the title of this panel. Live and virtual are easy enough to handle. But, diaspora. Is the posthuman a way to finally locate a home? Is the virtual the way to house that which has no home?”

But, even now, I am not so sure I agree with that…

**

Another highlight for me was Samuel R. Delany’s talk on writing–refreshingly not connected to hybrid or diaspora–but more an excavation/explanation of the cliche–a history of sorts, framed by a student conference.

**

And, so, some questions:

• Why does this conversation on technology–particularly with regards to pedagogy–always produce some kind of binary? For example, either technology is good or it is bad. Either we use technology in a class or we don’t.
• What is a hybrid? There were some really interesting definitions offered on the panel on Monday, but I am curious about how one might define “hybrid” under the auspices of the classroom?

this seems to have become the way I now listen. the notetaking. then the sonnet. and so they continue. although it is may.

“Let me recite what history teaches” (Stein)

i’ve never done this before, come up

with a job description like a good

stubborn plagiarist, approachable

depleted but it’s only spring

so break the mattress the waitress

at last be generous with your form

arms extended always giving

like the rendering of Jesus on the walk

to center city just one experience

of tempo of self-proclaimed pastoral

but i do not hear a language

need all those signs to need me

first turn paragraph to portraiture

embrace the nod & greet basis

On January 16, 1959, Elgin Baylor sat on the bench, dressed in street clothes, intentionally sitting out a game against the Royals. Of course, the Lakers lost to Cincinnati, Baylor was an incredible ball player–king of the hanging jump shots, 11-time NBA all star.

But, today I am interested in this particular game, one in which Baylor did not play. He wasn’t injured. He wasn’t under the weather. He refused to play in “protest”–the hotel the team was originally supposed to stay at refused to accept African Americans–turning away Baylor, Boo Ellis, and Ed Fleming. So, despite the fact that the team found a new place to sleep–Baylor wouldn’t play. He later said “he wouldn’t have played even if it cost him his entire year’s salary.” Baylor’s actions received mixed responses, but he both the Lakers and the NBA opted not to take disciplinary action.

In 1959, the protest made national news, and I feel like it is important that we revisit this story in 2011, when most Lakers fans were raised on Kobe and Shaq. This is an entirely different team, one that becomes more and more disappointing as playoff after playoff pass. In 2004, my dad wrote the following:

“So here is where the Los Angeles Lakers stand, despite any protestations to the contrary: the inmate-in-chief, Mr. Bryant, chucking his way to the empty accomplishment of scoring titles (ask Tracy McGrady about this), is running the asylum now. And in 2004-2005, as the Lakers win 42-45 games with Bryant at the helm, and bow out in the first round of the playoffs, they won’t even be fun to watch. Not unless you enjoy watching teammates come to blows on court, because basketball of the sort we are about to see can’t be played with one ball, and David Stern, unless he changes the rules quickly, doesn’t let the players use more than one at a time.”

I guess I never realized that my dad is able to see into the future. And, in 2004, I also probably never realized the depths of repellent behavior Kobe would resort to.

Pay close attention to 00:36.

Bryant’s response/attempt to weasel his way out of yet another instance of completely repellent behavior– It “should not be taken literally…My actions were out of frustration during the heat of the game, period. The words expressed do not reflect my feelings towards the gay and lesbian communities and were not meant to offend anyone.” Kobe is getting fined a whopping $100,000–that is like a penny to him, isn’t it?

I was somewhat happy (or at least mildly relieved) to see John Amaechi’s response to Kobe’s actions. He writes:

“Right now in America young people are being killed and killing themselves simply because of the words and behaviors they are subjected to for being perceived as lesbian or gay, or frankly just different. This is not an indictment of the individuals suffocated by their mistreatment, it is an indication of the power of that word, and others like it, to brutalize and dehumanize. This F-word, which so many people seem to think is no big deal, is the postscript to too many of those lives cut short.

As for the original apology, I am amazed that people still think apologizing in such a way as to make it clear that it was the victims who misunderstood is acceptable. I had hoped that the sorry-if-you-are-oversensitive school of apology would by now have been thoroughly discredited.”

How did the Lakers go from being a team with players whose actions are well thought out, intentional, and had a real purpose/impact turn into the absurd festival of bigotry and hatred that Kobe really represents (for me)? He should be kicked out of the NBA, fined millions, and put in jail. Derek Fisher is the Laker who should be getting attention–once the third highest scorer (following on the heels of Shaq & Kobe)–but also a person with real values–someone who put family before career, and who is conscious of how his actions affect others.

But, I’ve been thinking about poems, and about the 4C’s, and about posting more sonnets, but it is not happening yet.

Poet, prose writer, fiction writer, and all around genius, Eileen Myles, has been up to some of her usual radness:

May 1–Poet’s Strike!

“Why don’t we all refuse to write or read poetry on May 1st and turn our energies towards political acts all over the country and you know why not the world. This idea was floated in the 60s maybe as a joke but today I’m thinking that rather than it being about who cares if we write or not we can use our resistance as an organizing tool.

Everyone can do it locally – I’m thinking we should NOT do things in poetry spaces (except maybe to plan and organize.) Though certainly art world spaces could be used, or any other space inside or out. I’m not thinking top down organizing at all. Pick your issue, your group of poets and we don’t have to limit our groups to poets only, but poet organized.

The point is to get attention to your issue whether its about women’s rights, tax cuts for the rich, spending cuts, environmental disasters and defunding, whatever you want to devote your energies to publicly or privately that day. Any takers?”

**

I LOVE the idea of “using our resistance as an organizing tool.” Count me in on May 1.

It makes me think about the “Serious Play” Conference I worked on last week up at Bard’s Institute for Writing & Thinking. I asked my teacher/students to write about the following prompt–What is the use of poetry? What is poetry’s job? Why do we teach it? What can it do?

**

And, here’s Eileen over at the Harriet Blog—

She writes about the Rainbow Book Festival at the gay community center a few weeks (or months?) back–

“…they can’t always ‘get’ gay. I can’t always either. Nobody feels it’s a trusty category finally so we have to use it I think carefully, but once inside be wild. So I just want to say in light of all that I was frankly comfortable to be spending my afternoon with LGBT poets reading and there were a multitude of approaches that everyone in the group used to denote being queer or gay. Like gay was a bump in the road and every driver took note. Cause today there was a sign. Most of us when we go to an event like this deliberately choose our most gay work but that still is not a uniform perspective – what makes my work gay in the context of other gay writers. Is it content, is it feeling, is it lineage – i.e. which well-known gay poet am I most clearly influenced by. And I suppose there was also such a thing as reception going on as well. Meaning that we had been invited that way and had accepted the invitation among a group of others who did also meant by their presence they agreed to be frankly homosexual as poets so that it was a very comfortable event.”

I love how she describes this particular event (which I also read at, but had to leave early). I felt a real level of simpatico that day–in a small sunny room with a lot of people I didn’t know, vaguely know, etc. It was strange and it was great.

The rest of the post deals with issues of the body and poetics–“female embodiment” and “what does this have to do with the craft of poetry”? I’m always thinking about the body, but usually a cyborg one. I can’t wait to see where this goes…Myles writes, “it won’t happen, my answer, till after the poetry month is over. So we’ll just have to see. I’ll see. And I’ll try and make it that you’ll see too.”

“What is it that recurs?” (Perl)

“the politics of literacy = the politics of working conditions” (Berman)

for Richard E. Miller

dare i say spreadsheet, dare

i say engine economy retail

court this hard headed approach

to empathy because remember

it’s a read/write world, a scale

tilting no longer grounded

in printing press, no longer low cost

authority functionally fluffed

a single phrase multiply produced

but i really want to underscore,

to vet interest in the blood run

economy as much fun as the whole

of childhood or the glee club

approach to sequence and trial

Session L. 31: High School to College: Student Learning, the Common Core Standards for College Readiness, and the Politics of Literacy

Anne Gere (Chair), Russell Berman, Doug Hesse, Richard E. Miller

“literacy…a plot against speaking?” (Elbow)

the last time we sat in a room and pretended

to meet i got a coffee cup out of it

and the word missing redefined as state

adjusted autonomy, with all the pretenses

of greeting complexity as standard fugitive

practice through which relationships

materialize and we drive the car forward

and be “creative” because we can’t add

anything else and not all conspiracies

are conscious uncontestable so let’s join

hands and fight the lost war, chant—

money money importance money compose

money and when a bacterial cell dies it leaves

behind packets of dna, i say they’re like diaries

Session FSp.8: What are the Linguistic and Rhetorical Virtues in Casual Spontaneous Speech that can Strengthen Careful Writing—Even Academic Writing?

Peter Elbow

Because it is national poetry month (whatever that means), and because I am just back (and feeling very recharged) from the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication), I decided to create some kind of “academic” “blog” “space.”

Because it is national poetry month (whatever that means), and because my research straddles poetry, poetics, and composition/pedagogy, I decided to compose one sonnet for every session I attended at the C’s.

My procedure/restraints were:

1. Use a quote from the presentation as the poem’s title
2. Dedicate the poem to one of the panelists
3. Limit the poem’s language to words heard either during the session or prior to the session (en route to the session)
4. The last two lines of the sonnet should construct some kind of turn or reflection that indicates what I loved about the panel or a specific paper/part of the panel

Here goes…

“in the hideous dropping off of the veil” (Poe)

for Dominique Zino

what does it mean to want nothing more

than tall spires, to experience my sentence

and feel safe in that sort of writhing.

clear, candid, sluggish—this intonation

of glorious astroturf, fractal flesh-

bots with the style and structure

of credo building, a “this i believe”

moment at the foot of a mountain

where consensus constructing is no longer

familiar and bull versus cow commentary

becomes parrot versus frog no longer

“only a metaphor” but a metaphor

in progress, a constellation in utero

ideal because the tangent is learning

Session G.19: Making Metaphor, Discovering Relations

Katherine Sohn (chair), Ruth Josimovich, Georgia Reid, Dominique Zino