// Editor's Notes: (a) (Partial) Post-Avant Graph;
 

 

 

(b) Glyphic: [ “The Mayaologist Linda Schele notes that the world 'vulture' could be written in pictographic form, geometric form, or syllabic form. A pictographic vulture with a crown was one of the many ways of writing ahau , which meant both 'lord' and one of the day-names of the Maya calendar. The pictographic vulture could also refer specifically to the black-headed vulture called tahol (literally, 'shithead'). From that, the vulture glyphs… were also used to represent ta '('shit') or ta (a preposition meaning 'to, on, from').... This meant not only that each word was an assembled object, but that each object was in a state of perpetual metamorphosis.”— from “Lost Way / Found Objects” by Eliot Weinbeger ] / [“The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice-versa.”— from Karl Marx (quoted in “Seeing Power: Politics of Visual Writing” by Harry Polkinhorn) ]   (*1)   (*2)   (*3);

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(c) Gestural: [ "Olson's claim that ‘art does not seek to describe but to enact,' also sought to reinstate gesture as projective verse animated poetry. Humans labor to make meaning; language sloughs off predetermined constructions and sign/signified relationships. Poetry is a source for agency.”—from "Poetry of Play, Poetry of Purpose: The Continuity of American Language Poetry" by John R. Woznicki ] / [ “There can be no gesture        now / that does not incorporate        (i.e. to bring the into the body of)/ the body, moving         outward; there can be / no gesture /        inward”—from Goest by Cole Swensen ]  (*4)   (*5)   (*6);

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(d) Marginal: [ “But a self-critical writing, poetry, minus / the shortcircuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege, / might dissolve the antinomies of marginality.”—from “The Marginalization of Poetry” by Bob Perelman ] / [ "Thus from that edge or brink or borderline we call the margin, we are able to create another center...a laboratory in which to look for the unknown elements we suspect are there."—from "The Tradition of Marginality" by Kathleen Fraser ] / [ "The necessity of carving out [intuiting/enacting] one's own treatment of a particular arena of language"—from Commons by Myung Mi Kim ]   (*7)   (*8)   (*9);

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(e) New Brutalism / Post-Lyricism: [ In reaction to the predominant "picturesque" aesthetic of British architecture in the 1950's, Reyner Banham and other members of the Independent Group in London helped evolve “brutalism,” which Banham described as a “violent and sustained polemic on style.” Rather than contest the increasingly disparate and irrational forms of a mass-production society, Banham developed a “brutal” and "rough-hewn" architectural aesthetic that sought "truth to the materials" and an expansive, industrialized notion of subjectivity. This included a rough handling of concrete that left it visibly pock-marked and coarse, and a sense of scale that emphasized mass and intervention rather than unity.” ] / [ "Those who have missed or mourned the absence of a discernable poetics among the tribe's most recent emissaries may do well to consider the 'shape-shifting' character of today's assembly workers and their associated assemblies. If you happen to be at the right place at the right time, you may catch a glimpse of what you're looking for, but don't expect too much. The vision will be fleeting, an illusion of sorts, and what's more the people around you may have an entirely different sense of what they just saw, and there will be much excitement but little agreement."—from “ Blog Assembly (in parts) ” by Bill Marsh (quoted in "The New Brutalism and Poetry Blogging" by Stephanie Young ] / [ “We felt...that there are far fewer houses that were participating in the kind of work we most value....We think Roberto Tejada and Peter Gizzi to be prime examples of this aesthetic that we find compelling—that is, poets who are revisiting in vastly different ways the questions of lyric subjectivity after the various problematics have been brought to light.”—from the Phylum Press Mission Statement ] (*10)   (*11)   (*12);

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(f) Flarf / Assemblage: [ In addition to “brutalism,” the British Independent Group promoted a “pop” aesthetic that reflected the fragmented “sublime of everyday life.” Pop art sought to shift the transcendent “is” of Romanticist aesthetics to the “as is” of ordinary objects that “just happen to be around.” In 1957, the painter Richard Hamilton defined “Pop art” as “Popular (designed for a mass audience),” “Transient,” and “Mass produced.” ] / [ "The use of Google being extremely common, the flarf method resembles in some sense: a) the use of a thesaurus; b) eavesdropping and quoting; c) sampling; d) collage / cut-&-paste….What makes the flarf methodology different, to my mind, is the willful democratization of the method: the EXTENSIVE and even sole use of Googled material and the...SPEED (or seeming speed) of composition."Michael Magee: from The Flarf Files ] / [ “ The lost/found place of ‘as is' thus could be seen as a poetic methodology, through / which we / might revise the modernist ‘fragment'…. I think world presses on language and language on world at every point, and by / world I mean material, / spiritual, political and cultural presence, / a continuous flux of is recouperated as is.”— from "On Flaws : Toward a Poetics of the Whole Fragment" by Ann Lauterbach ]   (*13)   (*14);

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(g);

 

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