Murat Nemet-Nejat, "A Historical Postscript"

Murat Nemet-Nejat

A Historical Postscript

Takes or Mistakes from the Revolutionary Poetry Symposium, The Poetry Project, May 5-8, 1994*

1.

“My strategies [as a playwright] is creating the experience of reading.” Richard Foreman

“[Listening to a performance] I tune it out.” Richard Foreman

“This failure of mine [is the essence of my theater] performed by other others, under my direction.” Richard Foreman

“Framing” [lines, words] with “activities” noise “straight lines” on page “recreate the experience of reading.”

“Loops of music” as white activity. Activity as sound. White activity.

Richard Foreman: “As my wife said, pausing the VCR to pick something from the kitchen, [that frozen image] the composition of frozen moments [is the experience of reading].”

A question Murat did not ask Richard Foreman: “Are you saying that there is a connection between reading a text and watching T.V., and your play and going to the kitchen? —does any of the loop activities in your play involve going to the kitchen?”

Richard Foreman in response to someone’s question, maybe Jackson Mac Low's: “My actors are free to choose their activities [improvisation? white improvisation?] but I choose my own text.”

2.

“I love background noise in a cabaret while I am performing.” Emily XYZ

“Double column [on the page] is raucous.” Emily XYZ

“Sunset is dream—gave way to dreams men can never admit to.” Emily XYZ

“cherry cherry cherry cherry cherry
cash” Emily XYZ

Murat asking Richard Foreman, “Is sound in poetry the same as music in poetry?”

“A different kind of music” Jackson Mac Low

Music as noise, “raucous.” or as silence. White noise as silence. Robert Altman as the godfather of sound in poetry.

“Half of the show is my audience” Emily XYZ

“I don't worship language, I use it.” Emily XYZ

“Say what you say before it arrives in understandable language.” Richard Foreman

“I don't write to communicate... I want to make them(it)] alive” Jackson Mac Low

Emily XYZ responding to Jackson, “What—alive? I couldn't hear it?”

Jackson, “Them—my work”

The concept of an “alive” work. “Alive” A loop. “Loops of music” as Noise.

“Do my utmost to make it hearable to the audience” Emily XYZ

3.

“I am a Korean.” Walter Lew

“[Revolutionary poetics is] robbing the mainstream culture from its seductive power” Walter Lew

“An object observed close by is a revolutionary act” Melanie Neilson

“Poetically, agonizingly, HAL's lobotomy mimics natural death, grinding down into senility, and finally into second childhood. Querulously, faltering, singsong: ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL-9000 computer…Mr. Langley taught me to sing a song…It’s called ‘Daisy’…Dai-sy, dai-sy, give—’ falters HAL, going down to death.” Melanie Neilson

“Rosebud. Bob said. Boob sled.” Murat

“[Revolutionary poetics is] digging up the unspoken history and world of feeling associated with a [peripheral] culture” Walter Lew

“Its strategy is making itself inassimilable to master narratives” Walter Lew

Murat asking Walter Lew, “Does that mean that there is a revolutionary version of a translation?”

Translation as a revolutionary act.
Translation creating noise.
Noisy translation the essence of revolution.
Translation as inassimilable.

Ed Sanders’s advice approaching a hostile interviewee, “Choose what you wear. Study psychological stress techniques.”

“Poet—psychological war against aggression” Darius James

Paul Beatty describing the experience of putting one's work on T.V.: “An English to English translation.”

“Speaking English as a second language in North America,” Gale Scott speaking as a Quebequois

“I am from Tobago living in Canada,” M. Nourbese Philip.
“No mother tongue, English is not my mother tongue. English is a foreign anguish.” M. Nourbese Philip.

“Translating a non existent mother tongue [existing in the mind] into English” is anguish, is accent, is revolution.

M. Nourbese Philip’s “multiple choice test” on the larger brain (of the white male), conceived by [I forgot his name].

“Choose what you wear,” Ed Sander’s Advice for interviewing a hostile interviewee in his / her house.

Transparency as subversion.

The icon of Dr. Livingstone [explo(re)/(r )aider] meeting Stanley.

4.

From the workshop Poetry and Technology: “What is the difference between a bear and a virtual bear?”

“That's the biggest garbage I've heard.”

“What's the difference between God and virtual God?”
“Virtual God is real.” It's the software programmer.

“Paranoia as normalcy in investigative poetics”

“Computer is a wall [for me] to bounce against” Jackson Mac Low

From the Poetry and Technology workshop: “Give free shit to lure them.... Commodity lives.” Eric Swenson, the “Enema” of the BLAM! manifesto Necro Enema Amalgamated Agenda

Note:

* This is the text of the author’s talk in the final panel of the symposium where each panelist gave his/her reactions, the review of what happened during the four days of the symposium.
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Murat Nemet-Nejat is the poet of Turkish Voices and Io’s Song. He is also the writer of the essay, The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integer 2003) and the editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman House 2004). He is presently working on the long poem, The Structure of Escape, and on the translation of the Turkish poet Seyhan Erozçelik’s complete book of poetry, Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Gül ve Telve).

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
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