25 Points on Ideisms: Beginnings Toward the Poetics of Always After
Being a Review of Notes
on Conceptualisms
by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place
Notes on Conceptualisms
by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009
80 pages / $10 buy from UDP
As it is high time that our growing faction of Ideists had a manifesto around which they could unite, we, that is, Joel Kopplin and Kurt Milberger, humbly offer these notes toward a report of the history and conceptions of Ideisms with particular emphasis on the practice’s aesthetics, specifically poems.
1) The poetry of Ideism: the hangnail that breeds, that bleeds when finally plucked.
2) Books are bound to remain unread because to really read is a kind of rape.
3) Ideism thinks through houses, beyond their walls and windows, and out into the atmosphere where it burns as falling space junk.
4) Ideism is the eternal window out, the rhombus artfully set before venetian blinds, condensed so as to see the street below to approach the equation: what, finally, is next?
5) The permutations of the phrase reveal the poetics of Ideism. Id-e-ism. I-deism. Id-eism. The symbol multivocates, illuminates, and refuses to condense its referent.
6) Ideist poetry reconstructs new acronyms which compress and describe discourse-specific speak: philistines and neophytes fall down and weep with shame upon the altar of each letter of the new word. READ MORE >
1 Comment
July 2nd, 2013 / 1:08 pm
July 2nd, 2013 / 1:08 pm
Another way to generate text #7: Gysin & Burroughs vs. Tristan Tzara
A while back, I ran a little series, “Another way to generate text.” The first one proved fairly popular, and I’ve been meaning to make more of them, but generative techniques haven’t been on my mind. However, my post last week, “Experimental fiction as principle and as genre,” generated a lot of text (haha), in the form of comments. Some people who chimed in questioned whether the Cut-Up Technique that Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs developed and used in the 1950s was ever all that experimental. Specifically, PedestrianX wrote:
I find it hard to accept this argument when its main example, the Cut-up, didn’t start when you’re claiming it did. I’m sure you know Tzara was doing it in the 20s, and Burroughs himself has pointed to predecessors like “The Waste Land.” Eliot may not have been literally cutting and pasting, but Tzara was.
This comment got me thinking about the role influence plays in experimentation; more about that next week. Today I want to address the point PedestrianX is making, as it strikes me as pretty interesting. Were Gysin and Burroughs merely repeating Tzara? Or were they doing something substantially different?
To figure that out, I decided to run through the respective techniques, documenting what happened along the way. Because if I’ve learned anything in my studies of experimental art, it’s that thinking about the techniques is usually no substitute for sitting down and getting one’s hands dirty.
If you want to get dirty, too, then kindly join me after the jump . . .