here's my first installment, quickly, as i need sustenance!

i have been thinking a lot about architecture and archiTEXTure [this includes acoustics] and exploring that in my work, so i was especially excited that Renee Gladman opened the conference by introducing this idea of writing the city and walking through that space and its effects.

when i read in SF a student came up to me after she bought my book and was surprised to see all the capitalization in the work. she said that she always read capitals as yelling.

but, for me, words are structures. they are physical buildings. the caps mean SKYSCRAPER and INSTITUTION.

Renee also spoke a lot about the inability of narrative prose to make way for UTTERANCE in the Cecil Taylor sense... which i have thought a lot about and asked her about, too, last night, trying to figure out if a/ she really believed that narrative prose cannot do and b/ if that was what drove her to continue working in that mode

i didn't get a clear sense of how she felt, but, i continue to strive towards an articulation of utterance that can make way on the page, as well as in the ear and vocal cords....

i asked a lot of questions of cecilia and myung about echo and their articulations of architecture [on the page as well as in utterance] and how that connected to the body and identity.... i have this obsession with sound being able to alter /// adjust /// create /// manifest /// [upon//to] MATTER.... and was interested in both their answers [which i will get into in my second installment].

i also brought up echo and einstein and how he thought of time as being an echo, a continual presencing.

i didn't get to my questions about containment, but i think perhaps they were addressed anyway.


then, for eileen and susan, who were both so quotable.... we again got into matter and sound... because susan said "it's in the structure of the spelled words of that period" regard Lake George, i believe, and the violence that occurred in that area over history. i asked her to elaborate on that, and she spoke at length....which i, again, need to process, [and please do not take these as she exactly said this, etc, because i'm mostly conveying my singular experience and interests... i made sure to HOG as much of their time as i could and ask as many questions as i could get away with for my own practice of poetry!].... and eileen, too, spoke of sounds [poems] manifesting in people and then, imprinting the landscape, and [i get the feeling, had it before, and was delighted to have come back to me out of the mouths of my heros, vice versa!]


i am still processing this morning and last night, but,

david, dianne, tanya, maggie, patrick, joe, eden, and more all floated out our best reads for the wonderful audience that did stick around

o, ps

my obsession with utterance and matter was born when i studied British Romanticism as an undergrad and the film, Dark City, as a part of that class. in Dark City, aliens [and this is what i immediately thought about when Christian Bök spoke of his extremophile poem] structure a city in the a world that is only a city AS WELL AS control identity.

this, coupled with Romanticism [Shelley and Byron, but also, and of course Blake!] has really been a major influence on my lifelong project of writing about identity as formed by the USA ['s landscape, structures, infrastructures].