Labor Day 2010: notes

I promised myself I would write up some thoughts, impressions, notes re: the Labor Day gathering ASAP.

I wrote that sentence and many of these notes three weeks ago—work has absorbed all creative or any other energy since then. My job so fully occupies my mind. (I’m open to offers of better-paying, less obliterating labor, btw.)

But to the Labor Day 2010 gathering: I wanted to record a few things here, for now, finally—this will be scattered, no time to cohere.

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Of course, as always happens, so much interesting conversation happened 'off the record' or in the interstice: during the breaks, at the bars afterwards each day, or on the patio or getting a coffee or in the bathroom. Standout extended one-on-one conversations, for me, were with Jacqueline Waters, Samantha Giles, Steve Farmer, Brian Stefans, Brian Whitener, Jason Morris, and then so many shorter encounters and exchanges notably different only in length, not intensity, with a dozen others. Will note some bits and pieces of all of those as I go/if I can.

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Recurrent themes: liminality, domestic space (Steve Farmer, Dana Teen Lomax, Samantha Giles); distraction (probably everyone); the different economies of the art world vs the poetry world (this included support systems such as granting agencies or patron models, direct or brokered sale, and especially, to my mind, the existence of 'objective' --that is, non-practioner-authored---critical apparatus in the artworld, or the impoverishment of critical infrastructures in poetry world (that last bit raised by Brian Stefans); the problem of an ever-growing academicized poet class.

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Brian Whitener, re: 'the wig': "Is stealing time the best we can come up with?" and also, re: the university system as a (false? failing?) respite from precarity---and this came up again on Monday via Tim Kreiner, who also voiced precarity (respite from) as a motive for taking up pursuit of advanced degree.

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Related to this: Brian Stefans asking (in Sunday eve Q/A) why the subject of labor particularly, how is it not then about or the same as gardening, that is, why were participants not speaking more directly to issues of poetics and poetry. (weren't they/we though? cf: Steve Farmer's 'poetry buckets', that is, the places that can catch the little daily drips, droplets of language that happen in between or in the sly spaces during the 70hr work-weeks).

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Also related to this: David Buuck saying that the ‘real hard work’ lies in other forms of community organizing (as though somehow this (community organized) gathering itself and the articulations inside it did not represent “real” “hard work”? )

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Taylor Brady wanted to talk about my own very favorite subject, which is, rather than just how does the labor economy affect the formal poetic one, instead, how do the poetics inform (infect) [reform] the workplace.

This is the subject and form and practice of so much of my  own work, in all modes—collapse of the code-switching. I have great faith in the neologistic construction as the resorting, reorganizing tool in social, cultural spaces, in spaces of life and work. It's what's visionary (effectively, actively) in poetry, right? whether you're operating at the level of the phrase, the line, the lyric or the not-lyric, or operating a neologistics at the level of organizational intervention in the social world. The neologistic "makes possible", is the guard against that old stand-by, that stupid old duck employed by capitulated paper-pushers everywhere—"That's impossible."

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Lara Durback produced a phenomenal chapbook/zine for or in/around themes of the event. Bound in re-used standard-issue file-folder, the book documents a couple of weeks Lara spent working for that creepy Levi’s ‘community print shop’ masquerade that appeared on Valencia Street for a couple of months this summer. Lara details working conditions that did not include actual payment in dollars, but in ‘coolness’: that is, free clothes, beer, late night parties—for the long long workdays. Long long uncontracted, unpaid workdays.

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All of our volunteers—that is, people offering time, energy, labor, “human resources”—were women.

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More on the presentations themselves (and I haven't yet gone back to listen to them again—you can and will or have already I hope, at the Labor Day 2010 blog): The continually reiterated experience of 'liminality' or 'two bodies', or competing terms of existence, wherein one is 'a worker' and one is 'a poet'. This beautifully evoked in Jason Morris's talk ('bar community' and it's likenesses and difference to 'poetry community', the confusion between which is the waking dream and which sleeping life or ghost life?), Samantha Giles's (she really has three bodies, that is, caretaker/homemaker, arts administrator, poet), Steve Farmer's talk, Brandon Brown's, Kevin Killian's. Also, distraction a constant theme, not separable really from the two bodies/liminality problem, that is, mode switching between roles takes up so much energy, creates so schizoid an experience—in Kevin's case, as David Brazil pointed out, the result is pataphoric (Kevin writes while working; he writes a line like, 'there was a knock on the door and Jack opened..." and the office telephone rings to interrupt him; on returning to the sentence Kevin finishes with, Jack opened his mouth and I pressed my tongue...." (inexact rendering on my part, obvs)

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(leaving me to wander into my own consideration of the implication of a full system of pataphoric fantasies (into realities) that office work of any kind nearly insists on—i've written/talked abt the pataphor before so want to have time to wonder/consider further this angle of view of it)

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re: Rodrigo's talk: this one was immediately brought up for conversation in the first (super short) Q/A session. That is, the first presentation to be addressed during discussion time was the piece most definitively schematized and thus easiest target really. Or possibly the piece structured along the most familiar rhetorical lines. (oddly!) So, easily taken up as questionable (that is, 'arguable') by anyone prone to that mode. Brian Stefans asked the broad question re: how everyone felt about it. Juliana Spahr answered saying that she had questions about it/found it questionable, but she didn't feel it was appropriate to discuss/argue against RT's piece when he wasn't in the room (which also implied that it was made possible for Rodrigo to make the criticism /slash/ dish it out yet be removed from/ be held safe from/ taking it too.). I reminded the audience that RT was aware that his text would be discussed critically without him being present, and additionally that we could text RT real time (he and I had discussed this). Juliana's answer was that of course she could email Rodrigo in her personal life, "that's not the point". Unfortunately, it really IS the point. No doubt unintended on her part, but this brief exchange neatly described a set of power relations regarding who is allowed to listen in on, participate in, talk about, contribute to discussion, and who gets to set the terms of 'appropriateness' re: discussion of a concern at hand (in this case, a 'work of art' and one deeply critical of the academy).  RT's piece was via this short exchange removed from public discussion and tucked back into the pocket/email box of those who already have direct access to a conversation with the writer. Fortunately, we were able to take RT’s piece up again the following day during the open discussion, where issues of academy in/out were talked through at some length.

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Class-passing, from  Samantha's talk: what a surprise for me too to hear about this, that this might be a mode one would adopt, or wish or want or need to adopt, and like Samantha I thought, wow, who would want to labor under that/also who of us isn't laboring under that every minute? Also, you can class pass in academy by reading enough issues of the New Yorker?—that is, class passing is about language acquisition—Again, one of the hidden themes of the weekend being who owns speech (the right to speak, the space to speak, the proper subjects on which to speak) "in "the" "community".

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And of course, that very question or argument around the academy---that the gathering both was and was not a response to a perceived split between those who do, and those who do not, 'academy'. Samantha Giles arguing on Monday that our decision was divisive, and that we should have included those workers as participants, and others in the room arguing that as a first step it was absolutely necessary to make a statement about inclusion/exclusion in current hierarchical structures of aestheticizing, of aesthetico-politicizing of poetry that's taking place right now so definitively divisively, in the academy.

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My own bit added to the part of the conversation re: academy, was adjacent to BKS's noting, the previous day, the 'impoverishment' of cirtical structures in poetry world as against a model of plenty found in the art world (and as so much more easily supported in that arena by capital)---and that the thing to be noted of much importance is that, unlike any other art form or cultural form I can think of, poetry theory/poetics/'rethinkings" in the academy are almost entirely dominated by practitioners, with undeniably personal reasons for advancing particular (aesthetic)(and other) agendas. This stating the obvious to an embarrassing degree (I mean, I’m stating it and feel embarrassed).

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Also much raised or revealed, in Laura's talk, and Steve Farmer's, and Andrew Joron's, and Pamela Lu's—the all academy/all the time situation for poets, and poetics, that we're "enjoying" now is so recent a development (two decades?). Someone (in private conversation) argued that 'we've' always looked to the academy for---guidelines?---on how and what and who to read or to care for (much arguable, but not incorrect), and so why is this so different now?

One answer for me, related to the all-theorists-are-practioners (but not vice-versa) problem comes from a conversation I had—a few months back—with a poet (/critic/academic) who I won't name. This person told me they liked another poet's work—Poet X—quite a lot, found it quite interesting, but didn't want to write publicly or critically about PoetX's work because Poet X's theoretical writing on Poet X's own work was "weak"—and so, my interlocutor explained, to write about Poet X's work could subject him/her (this poet-critic) to ridicule in the academy, what? did i hear this right? was I or my conversationalist drunk? (well, yes). The person told me outright he/she would not write positive (or any other) critical writing—even in an 'informal' blog setting—about Poet X's work, because Poet X can't do good theory.

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I speak English, art museum politics, yoga, tax evasion by forgetfulness, friendship, how to ask a question, B vitamins in kale, Facebook, a little Mandarin, Spanish when lost in a border town.

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A wonderful and wide-ranging conversation at the bar Sunday night with Brian Whitener, only one part of which I’ll relate at the moment. He said something along the lines of this gathering as basic starter-issue organizing (let everyone talk about their common condition etc), and then get to the 'real issues', that is, health care and gender and race and capital etc, to which claim, sounding to my ears a bit paternal or even patronizing—so unlikely a mode (either way) to have come from Brian Whitener, I accept responsiblity for projecting it—I answered a bit frustratedly that I was listening to conversations all evening and weekend from both university employees and 'everyone else', and encountering a really different, totally bifurcated, trajectory of response. Which was, on the side of those who don't work for the university, real excitement and relief, to have the chance to speak, first of all, to be heard, next of all, and to hear about this common and so hidden condition, our labor, and how we manage to be poets despite, a strong sense of liberation and excitement at the opportunity to talk together about work first of all, and how it extends to every part of creative life, social life, and political life, next of all. On the side of the university workers, much of what I heard was, well, why aren't we talking enough about poetics? why aren't we talking about 'real' community organizing? why aren't we talking about labor and health care? I very frustratedly said to Brian that yes, we are discussing all of those things also, but there is first of all, in the sphere of local (and extralocal) poetics, life in poetry, a set of public space issues, related to a politics of aesthetics, regarding who gets to speak, be heard, listened to, contribute; a group so disenfranchised in this way that the 'dominant class' (here this was Brian’s phrase, not mine) simply were refusing to hear this set of concerns, evcen while they were being stated repeatedly over the weekend. Mainly, it seems, because those concerns do not concern them. If half your 'colleagues'’—that is, people who make and think poetry—are silenced by circumstance of work life (where one is or is not) (or by, as per Rodrigo, 'straight up erasure'), what do we all lose?

And finally, with all the questions about elitism / accessibility in, and collapse of, the university, might not it be useful to turn to your colleagues outside the system for some sort of constructive collaboration and expansion of modes of learning (and on the sly instituting!!)

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There was a lot of argument around/against a positioning of inside/outside—I think this is partly to do with a fear of acknowleging a frame of unequal access (to the speech state) (among those who are assumed to be ‘of the same class’), as though such acknowledgment states something definitive or unshakeable, and as though it positions one 'side' or the other 'side' as in a weaker or more dominant position 'overall'—

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Chris Daniels, saying he used to care more about the academy’s dismissal, used to be more angry, until he had the means of book production in his own hands.

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For the first time in more than a decade of coming around this particular 'poetry scene' I saw and heard talking to each other in the same room, respectfully and courageously and patiently and generously, people I have never yet seen talking in this way with each other, many, many of whom I've never seen speak up in public poetry space AT ALL.

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I think that we managed to successfully negotiate or provide a comfortable space where those who don't always feel free or 'empowered' to speak, did speak, and those who do often take the floor seemed to listen with more patience and less out of let-me-tear-apart-your-argument [or your gentle, fearfully offered statement] mode. Regarding mode—I think that, aside from or in addition to Bay Area Langpo legacy of aggressive speech-topping, my evocation of a kind of wolves-and-rabbits public speaking space has very much to do with university training, vs other kinds of training, regarding what modes of address and exchange are ‘appropriate’ in the round. If you're trained to schematize, and especially to argue schematizations, it could and I think has become the default mode—listening and speaking skills less highly prized or at any rate less often put to use in public speaking (poetry) space are those modes of compassionate listening, and gentle, exploratory questioning and responding. As though those modes necessarily eschew rigor.

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Monday's in-the-round dialogue began with Samantha Giles saying she thought our decision not to include university workers was unduly divisive. While I think that conversation was frustrating for many of us who felt that the inclusionary model—that is, including as many possible NON-academy workers, was an absolute necessity for carving out desperately needed conversational space, one of the very marvelous things to come out of it was a mutual recognition from both "sides" (if there can be said to be sides here) that we have mainly or many like social aims, and that building a new space of dialogue among us would be one possible, incredibly constructive, next step. Monday's discussion did leave us w/ a couple of potential "locations" of "activity" going forward, some of which I hope we'll work on taking up in coming months. Worth noting that, for me anyway, it seemed that many of those locations of activity being suggested are really around a poetics of politics, or straight up activism.

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The worst moment for me came in the ladies room, between the morning and evening sessions of the long day. I saw someone who'd been all morning at the first session and had just returned from the lunch break for the second half of the day, and I thanked her for coming back for the round two. "Well," she said, "I went and had a beer and now I'm going to power through". Considering the lucidity, generosity, care, and indeed listenability, really, of the presentations generally, this was quite the disagreeable dismissal, and it was received in the manner it was intended, that is, a slap in the face. I blushed. (Although its other intention, that of emotional undermining, I have finally learned not to take in).  No one was asked to 'power through' anything not to their liking. That's appropriate perhaps when looking to add points for your next job interview, but this was neither work nor an academic conference.  I would have preferred this person just go on home. What would one 'power thru' for? What's the cultural capital likely to have accrued for this listener by sticking around/powering thru?

Aside from this, I experienced compassionate listening and generous offering, and real openness in almost every exchange I had during the weekend. Absolutely astonishing. “Heartening” is a word I’ve used a dozen times or more in describing the way everything unfolded, both in the months of planning with DB, BB, SL, AW, and the weekend itself. The generosity of our presenters, deputizers et al. The generosity of so many others, with their time and money. The generosity of the listening and speaking.

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By the second half of Sunday we had a strong house at Studio One, about 60 people. And 30 people showed up for the open discussion at 21Grand, on an absolutely gorgeous, hot and bright Labor Day Monday morning. As Sara Larsen likes to say, "Fuck yeah"

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Like I said, totally scattered, and so much has been left out—more to come as/if I can.