trenchart monographs hurry up please its time, eds. Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place

We started Les Figues Press in 2005 to publish the TrenchArt series. In other words, the idea of the Press was the idea of the series. Or, simply put: we wanted to publish books as a conversation or group curation. As writers, we frequently discussed our work in terms of other people’s writing, even as our individual efforts were writing into, or against, a larger social inscription or text. This larger text could be what Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginary,” defined as “the ways people imagine their social existence,” including their expectations, relationships, and the “deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (23). To Taylor, the social imaginary is held together by the stuff of the imagination—images, stories, legends. If, as writers, we are making texts (poems, prose bits, novellas) in an increasingly networked world, what might our individual works, placed side-by-side, reveal about a social imaginary, which is also in/forming these individual texts? Fred Moten, in a talk at the University of Denver, refused to talk about writing “beginning,” because writing, he said (and I’m paraphrasing) is simply a way our ongoing sociality sometimes emerges. Writing, in other words, is a form of sociality. Writing never comes from one alone.

When we founded Les Figues, we (or to be exact, I) did not have this language for writing. Yet demonstrating this intuitively-held relationship between individual texts—and the larger social text—felt worthy of publishing. Vanessa Place, Pam Ore, and I had been talking about this “something” we wanted to make for a few years, and one afternoon we imagined a publication structure: TrenchArt. (Teresa Carmody, “For What Reason Is This Writing: Publisher’s Preface”)

I’m amazed by the remarkable anthology trenchart monographs hurry up please its time (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2015), edited by Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, an anthology collecting nearly a decade’s worth of publications created as part of the TrenchArt series produced by Les Figues Press. As Carmody’s introduction explains, the original TrenchArt essays, grouped together to be published as short monographs, were the origins of the press itself: to present work as a conversation, and works that would have no home anywhere else. Moving beyond those first, small publications, Les Figues is a press that has evolved over the past decade-plus to be one of the leading publishers of innovative, experimental and conceptual writing in North America, producing book-length works by Jennifer Calkins, Vanessa Place, Redell Olsen, derek beaulieu, Sophie Robinson, Timothy Yu, Claire Huot and Robert Majzels, Colin Winnette, Sawako Nakayasu, Doug Nufer, Urs Allemann, Dodie Bellamy, Sandra Doller and multiple others, as well as producing another important anthology: I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012) [see my review of such here].

Depictions of the present are complacent; depictions of the future are implausible. For this reason, depictions are generally unimportant, unless they are made by important people like economists or real estate agents. These important people describe only the future, which they make sure is boring and plausible. A plausible future is just more of the present. The Empire never ends because the people in it are more important than the world that they deserve. Better to have a world that exists than a world that is better but might rock the boat: this is a good general view. Because if you rock the boat, the boat will take on water, and it might well sink. There are already people drowning in the bottom of the boat. Poetry succeeds as if the boat can lift off from the water and become an airy structure, with a few words surrounded by wide open space where the sun gleams off-white. This is not an important thing for the world to be able to do; it is not an important thing to be able to do with the world. Turn it into an essay where the dead things of the present are nailed to a bulletin board: that is at least a little bit useful. I’ve nailed every dead bit of my ego to this bulletin board that you have just read, and illustrated each one with a corny metaphor. Enjoy. I’ll see you in the future, or else in an extrapolative satire, or else I won’t see you. You are too important to be able to get out of this present world that wants to be with you till death. (Stan Apps, “On Unimportant Art”)

Originally solicited for publication in annual limited editions sets of four or five authors submitting an essay each, the anthology collects the entirety of the series in a single volume, with essays on writing, art and thinking by Harold Abramowitz, Danielle Adair, Stan Apps, Nuala Archer, Dodie Bellamy, Sissy Boyd, Melissa Buzzeo, Amina Cain, Jennifer Calkins, Teresa Carmody, Allison Carter, Molly Corey, Vincent Dachy, Lisa Darms, Ken Ehrlich, Alex Forman, Lily Hoang, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Alta Ifland, Klaus Killisch, Alice Könitz, Myriam Moscona, Doug Nufer, Redell Olsen, Pam Ore, Renée Petropoulos, Vanessa Place, Michael du Plessis, Frances Richard, Sophie Robinson, Kim Rosenfield, Mark Rutkoski, Susan Simpson, Stephanie Taylor, Axel Thormählen, Mathew Timmons, Chris Tysh, Julie Thi Underhill, Divya Victor, Matias Vieneger and Christine Wertheim. As editor Place writes to end her introduction: “And so, the TrenchArt series followed the sound-sensical manner of Alice’s Queen of Hearts—sentence first, verdict afterwards. Which is an admirable way to run anything, especially sentences.” The pieces gathered in this anthology breathe a collective sigh in a multitude of directions, ways and purposes, each asking, why are we continuing to create in the same ways we have already done?

What of the making of things together? Collaboration. We get together to make a thing, a thing that will trigger an uncanny shift of perception in those who see it. This shift will expose a particular societal delusion so ubiquitous as to have been previously invisible. This object we imagine will perpetuate an act of radical haunting, that awakens the viewer to the world around it, but its success depends wholly on our collaborative BOO. I show up as Boris Karloff but my collaborator was hoping for a more Henry James-like spooking. Her laugh is not fiendish enough. He thinks my cape ridiculous. There is always a gap. We mind the gap fastidiously, obsessively. It is not what I had envisioned. My collaborators have deprived me of the sight I’ve grown used to. They have haunted my haunting … generously. “Have you ever really looked carefully at the thing we are making?” they ask. (Susan Simpson, “Untitled Aesthetic”)

As Place points out in her introduction, “[…] Les Figues Press was also born from a women’s art salon, Mrs. Porter’s, held most regularly from 2004 until 2013 or thereabouts. Everyone who attended presented some item for aesthetic contemplation (one’s own or another’s) during the first half of the evening; the second half was devoted to teasing out connections and distinctions between the works. To a consideration of how these scraps of writing or bits of art might tat together, not a telos, but an essay. As in essaie, as in try. Try as in trial. The trail, of course, in the TrenchArt series, was the work itself.” An anthology of this sort functions as a curated montage of divergent ideas on approaches to writing, attempting to prompt new ways of thinking about how writing is created, presented and absorbed, and there is a great deal within that can’t help but to startle the attentive reader into seeing writing in a potentially new way, whether their own, or simply writing in general. A book such as this wants to shake the complacency out of so much of what is currently being produced, disseminated and absorbed and somehow called “writing.” The possibilities are far larger than what most writing might suggest, and perhaps more (including myself) should be better at paying attention to the writers who are working to continuously push at the boundaries.

My art is guided by history: art history, social history, political history, and personal history. The historical and the personal are inextricably linked, like two sides of the same sheet of paper. My work is about how memory itself is political, and the process by which the political is transformed into memory.

I am driven by an urge to retrieve something lost or something that will soon be lost. Walter Benjamin has written about this impulse to return to the past in order to rescue it from disappearance. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History he says, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” In uncovering the historic in my work, I don’t mean to tell the story, but rather I am interested in telling a story—something highly constructed and subjective. In rescuing and remembering the past, the work allegorically reinvents meaning—a new story is told. (Molly Corey, “Aesthetic/Politic”)

One of the more intriguing of an already-impressive gathering of exploratory pieces is Lisa Darms’ erasure essay, “½ EARTH ½ ETHER,” a piece she attempts to salvage through the process of erasure. As she writes in her “Postscript: Under Erasure” (dated 2014):

When I was asked to republish this essay, I thought of it in terms of my job as an archivist. I knew I’d probably be embarrassed by my writing, but that it would be a way to enact my belief that the highest function of the textual archive is to preserve mistakes, imperfections and failures.

And then, I re-read it.

The archive documents failure, yes. But it doesn’t have to perpetuate it. This is the voice of someone who, after three vaguely demoralizing years in a studio art graduate program, has spent a year unable to find work, reading only holocaust memoirs and back issues of Artforum. The original essay’s stylistic pomposity and its humorlessness are qualities I’ve spent the last eight years trying to purge from my writing (and life). My first inclination, when I saw this essay in proofs, was to kill it.

But instead, I decided to retun it with extensive redactions—a sort of faux-bureaucratic disavowal of the more facile ideas, and an homage to the sharpie marker sous rapture of riot grrrl zines. I’ve found that the essay now expresses its stuttering logic more accurately. Because we don’t want to stop time; we want to reanimate it.

I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, eds. Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Camody and Vanessa Place

Why the term “conceptual” now? Why not come up with a new term, one which is actually new? And yet the term “conceptual,” because of its long association with visual arts, merits a wider gaze than it has been given in relation to writing. In other words, it is not a term which can belong to a select few, or be defined too narrowly, at least not at this point in time. The term “conceptual writing” warrants a period of discovery and describes, as illustrated in this book, a wide proliferation of forms and approaches. This anthology is hopefully the beginning of opening such a passage of debate and conversation. The fact is, that the term “conceptual writing,” for better and for worse, has thus far often been employed to describe a set of writing practices which seem, nonsensically, to preclude particular content. Not coincidentally, this content is often chosen by women. In this collection of work by women a reader may find that process and restraint driven writing is often expressive and intellectual, and that the assumption of a dualistic paradigm which claims that conceptual writing creates only ego-less works is actually another false construction. While looking at the work of women in this collection, it is evident that in conceptual writing methodologies do not dictate or predict the writing that follows, nor is methodology the only indicator of conceptual writing. (Laynie Browne, “A Conceptual Assemblage An Introduction”)

Perhaps one of the most highly anticipated anthologies of recent memory is the new I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2012), edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place. The editors include the work of “64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work.” This collection comes on the heels of some fiery debate, including the founding of both the VIDA (Women in Literary Arts) and CWILA (Canadian Women in Literary Arts) organizations, working for the sake of an increased dialogue with and about women writing and writers. In terms of Canadian writing, also, this new collection follows some other important works in a similar field, including Nate Dorward’s ANTIOPHONES: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (Toronto ON: The Gig, 2008), Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne’s Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009) and Eichhorn and Barbara Godard’s guest-edited “Beyond Stasis: Poetics and Feminism Today” issue of Open Letter (Thirteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2009). It seems baffling that still, after enough examples have been forwarded of women writers over the years, why does so much of it still get overlooked? Why is there still such a disconnect? Only recently, Ottawa poet, publisher and bookseller jwcurry lamented the list of Canadian critical studies on small press publishing, visual/concrete poetry and women’s works that have nearly erased the contributions of Vancouver’s Judith Copithorne, said to be the first woman publisher in British Columbia, producing works alongside Gerry Gilbert and bill bissett. Despite the fact that her work has been ongoing, with her first pieces published back in the 1950s, the critical silence is deafening.

                                                OF BETWEEN

Between the precious and the radical

Between the strategic and the tragic

Radiant and strained

Fountain is a folding fan of water.

The pressure of errant streams

massages precious togetherness open.

From the fissure clear water issues

as though from a purse

between clasps of discourses

and their embroidered surfaces

Between the institutions of pairs

The middle is a guess of worn surfaces

Between the privilege of two

Between the two of conformity

or the two of caution

if vanity is between us

as much as

we have yet to break

Between the surfaces of singing

and the surfaces of speaking

entre tes braz trestoute nue (Angela Carr)

With their contributions of sixty-four writers from ten countries, one might suspect that those contained within might all be aware of each others’ work, but borders are stronger than one might imagine, even with the added bonus of the internet, and journals such as Jacket magazine and Jacket2. The range of writers are enough that those in the anthology might even be introduced to someo f the others within for the first time, or for the first substantial time. The collection is organized in sections—1. Process (Constraint, Mimicry, Mediation, Translative, Versioning); 2. Structure (Appropriation, Erasure, Constraint, Formula, Pattern, Palimpsest); 3. Matter (Baroque, Hybrid, Generative, Corporeal, Dissensual); 4. Event (Documenta, Investigative, Intertextual, Historicism, Speculative); and 5. Concluding Remarks. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women is an important book in many ways, in no small part for the lively range of statements included by each author. As Sarah Dowling opens her statement, included after a couple of pages of her visual works: “I come to conceptual writing with a scholarly interested in description.”  In her statement, “Some Ambivalence about the term ‘Conceptual Poetry,’” Rosmarie Waldrop writes: “By these criteria, I am certainly not a conceptual writer.” She opens her piece, writing:

When visual artists go to conceptual work they stress the part of their process that depends least on the nature of their medium, which is sensuous. They in fact leave their medium and cross over into language.

            For writers, the situation is very different. The concept is an essential part of the word, hence the very nature, the very medium of writing—its bane, many would say, for it makes the language arts the most abstract, the least sensuous of the arts. I, like most poets, work at subverting the word’s transparency for its concept (loved by philosophers and other discursive writers) by stressing the “body” of the word, its sound, sometimes its shape. The literary movement that actually corresponds to conceptual art is concrete poetry, which tries to cross over into the visual.

On the other hand, Laura Moriarty includes as her sole contribution, the piece “The Writing Practice Formerly Known As,” which discusses the difficulty and complication of naming:

Experimentality in writing is universally acknowledged to comprise innovation, pushing the limits of literary genres or combining genres. These days, there seems to be an impulse to name experimental writing practice, perhaps from a desire to distinguish contemporary writing from older innovative practices or what could be called traditional writing. […] I recently participated in a conference that was called “post_moot” by its organizers, cris cheek, Cathy Wagner and Bill Howe. They used the term “post_moot” rather than employ the dreaded “post language” or “post” anything, as well as to emphasize the communality of current practice. “Moot” means “meeting” with the additional senses of “discussion” and “judging.” Many writers prefer not to characterize their writing or label it at all.

As Laynie Browne writes in her introduction (Caroline Bergvall includes one as well, and Vanessa Place contributes an “Afterword”): “The writers in this collection are not bound by a singular aesthetic intent, but rather by practices which, when considered side by side, form a mosaic of possibilities which resonate as a whole, perhaps because of a commitment to common concerns which span many practices, languages and cultures.” What is fascinating about having two distinct introductions (three with the “Afterword”) to the anthology is that it highlights the difficulties with wanting to place the collection in a singular context, as well as the complication of such a loaded term as “conceptual poetry”; instead, this collection holds a fluidity of approaches, styles, contradictions and geographies, existing as an anthology-as-container, and containing multitudes. The approach feels entirely appropriate for the concept and the materials, attempting to articulate a complicated and contradictory idea, instead of arbitrarily fixing a moving target. To define in almost any way would be to reduce, and therefore negate, that with which they are working to engage. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women is an ambitious work, large, rich and slightly contradictory, and entirely brilliant, and something that anyone interested in contemporary writing should immediately attempt to get their hands upon. In her “Afterword,” co-editor Vanessa Place speaks of the parable of the five blind men and the elephant, and their incomplete descriptions.

I have previously identified many forms of conceptualism, ranging from the pure to the baroque. These are matters of form. I have come to consider conceptualism, qua conceptualism, that is, as writing that does not self-interpret, is not self-reflexive, at least not on the page. In other words, writing in which the content does not dictate the content: what appears on the surface of the page is pure textual materiality, no more (and often much less) than what you see on the surface of the page. Conversely, in the way of positive and negative space, conceptualism is also writing in which the context is the primary locus of meaning-making.

Open Letter: Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics, eds. Nancy Gillespie and Peter Jaeger

How do literary poetics in the discourse of the university appear? Remember that for Lacan the discourse of the university exists in a hegemonic relationship with power, and is further based on the phenomenological consciousness of the autonomous ego as unified subject who knows. From this perspective, it becomes clear why so many English and Creative Writing departments focus on the type of poem which upholds the sort of unified self that is most typically represented in lyric poetry – a self which typically ruminates on a serious topic through the use of rich imagery and figurative language, and then concludes with a pithy observation. The logic of the autonomous self of the lyric dominates the popular representation of contemporary poetry as well, not only on the university English department syllabus, but also in the list of set texts for secondary schools and in the media (for example, The Guardian’s Saturday poem and virtually all of the poems published in Geist magazine or the TLS or the London Review of Books are written from the perspective of the lyric “I”). This type of self-expression finds a safe home in Creative Writing departments, which are especially friendly to the discourse of the university, because they are based on the workshop situation: where people worry about adjusting a comma here or a word there, rather than inquiring into the rationale for writing itself, or considering the relationships formed among writing, subjectivity, and power. (Peter Jaeger, “The Freudian Readymade”)

I freely admit that much of the theory presented in the new issue of Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (Fourteenth Series, Number 8, Spring 2012), subtitled “Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics,” breezes easily over the top of my head, but there is a great deal to admire in this issue, including impressive critical and creative works by Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson, Amy De’Ath, Sean Bonney, Jeff Derksen, Eve Watson, Carol Watts, Vanessa Place, Nicole Markotić, Andrew Levy and Peter Jaeger. Guest-edited by Nancy Gillespie and Peter Jaeger, I’m fascinated by the selection of authors, a slight shift in contributors from across the Atlantic, which I can presume comes, in large part, to expat-Canadian poet and critic Peter Jaeger. Some time ago, Jaeger studied at the University of Western Ontario, and has spent the past decade or so writing and teaching in England, engaging with a number of highly active and engaged writers, including Bonney, Hilson and Levy, while maintaining a number of his Canadian relationships. In 2000, he published the critical study ABC of Reading TRG: Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, and the Toronto Research Group through Talonbooks.

So I see you’re a teacher again. November 10^th was ridiculous, we were all caught unawares. And that “we” is the same as the “we” in these poems, as against “them,” and maybe against “you,” in that a rapid collectivizing of subjectivity equally rapidly involves locked doors, barricades, self-definition through antagonism etc. If you weren’t there, you just won’t get it. But anyway, a few months later, or was it before, I can’t remember anymore, I sat down to write an essay on Rimbaud. I’d been to a talk at Marx House and was amazed that people could still only talk through all the myths: Verlaine etc nasty-assed punk bitch etc gun running, colonialism, etc. Slightly less about that last one. As if there was nothing to say about what it was in Rimbaud’s work – or in avant-garde poetry in general – that could be read as the subjective counterpart to the objective upheavals of any revolutionary moment. How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognize ourselves in it. the form would be monstrous. That kinda romanticism doesn’t help much either. I mean, obviously a rant against the government, even delivered via a brick through the window, is not nearly enough. I started thinking the reason the student movement failed was down to the fucking slogans. They were awful. As feeble as poems. (Sean Bonney, “Letter on Poetics”)

I’m fascinated by much of this issue for the way that it forces me to consider writing differently, yet again, from all the structures I might have previously known. It reads as such a simple thing, but a constant struggle, working to approach a work on its own merits, or even attempt to expand the borders of one’s own writing. “The Social Bond of Poetics,” by itself, could mean a great number of approaches, from the writer’s circle to activism, and the issue originally came out of a series of readings and talks run through Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, as Gillespie writes in her introduction:

The initial idea for this issue developed out of a year long series of poetry readings and critical seminars that I ran, with the generous funding of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the organizing assistance of Nikki Reimer and other members of the collective at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, under the same title as this issue “Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics.” Participants included Peter Jaeger, Steve McCaffery, David Marriott, Kaia Sand, Jules Boykoff, Rachel Zolf, Roger Farr, Jeff Derksen, Meredith Quartermain, Nicole Markotić, Clint Burnham, and Louis Cabri. Peter Jaeger was the first participant, and our continuing dialogue brought about our work on this issue. Although both of us are interested in psycho-analysis and poetics, Peter edited the poetry contributions and I edited the articles. Like the series, this issue draws on Jacques Lacan’s late work – in particular, his Seminar XVII – in order to examine the social bond of poetics and the links between Lacanian analysis and the act of writing. Seminar XVII, which as I noted above, took place in 1969, was delivered shortly after the student and social revolt of May 68, a historical moment in which Lacan was immersed. While Lacan is concerned with the limitations of the master’s discourse and the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in the analyst’s discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to make an “hysterization” of the analysand’s discourse in the process of analysis – because this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse – he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the analyst’s discourse for real change to occur (Other 33). These seemingly discouraging words can be seen as a provocation to go further, however, and to not fall into the same relationship to repetition, so does the revolutionary. As we do find in moments of Lacan’s seminars in which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other discourses to enact some social change. (“Introduction: Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics”)

One of the highlights of the issue included the work of London, England poet and activist Sean Bonney, both his “Letter on Poetics” and the magnificent concrete poems, a selection from hi “Baudelaire in English.” Other highlights include magnificent poems by Holly Pester, Britishpoet Amy De’Ath (currently studying in Vancouver), Jeff Derksen, Carol Watts and the luscious “Portraits” by Elizabeth Guthrie, as well as Vanessa Place’s “Purlo ned Letter” and Nicole Markotić’s “The Body in Pieces: Lacan and the crisis of the unified fragmentary” (which I suspect is part of a larger, ongoing critical work).

At Par s, just after dark one gusty even ng n the autumn of 18--, was enjoy ng the twofold luxury of med tat on and a meerschaum, n company w th my fr end C. Auguste Dup n, n h s l ttle back l brary, or book-closet, au tro s eme, No. 33, Rue Donot, Faubourg St. Germa n. For one hour at least we had ma nta ned a profound s lence; wh le each, to any casual observer, m ght have seemed ntently and exclus vley occup ed w th the curl ng edd es of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself, however, was mentally d scuss ng certa n top cs wh ch had formed matter for conversat on between us at an earl er per od of the even ng; mean the affa r of the Rue Morgue, and the mystery atten ng the murder of Mar e Roget. looked upon t, therefore, as someth ng of a co nc dense, when the door of our apartment was thrown open and adm tted our old acqua ntance, Mons eur G--, the Prefect of the Par s an pol ce. (Vanessa Place, “The Puro ned Letter”)

And there is just something about the selections here of Jeff Hilson’s “Organ Music” that I think might need to be heard aloud:

why john dunstaple I hardly know you/

can I borrow your memorable face/ your

english countenance is quite quire rare/ o

constaple I have fallen for john/ john

dunstaple/ in the 1440s he is very forward/

he is finished with gloria & he is finished

with carol/ & I am finished with john

dunstaple/ o god we are all plantagenets/

a tudor is neither male nor female/ whoever

is besieging the house of carpets/nobody

painted their burgundian kitchen/ why

john dunstaple why/ because I was

in my coat of arms in the burning house

of windsor/embattled & dancetty

I left my shield in your ordinary extra

field/& I lied in the ground of eton college/

& I liked in the ground in armed corsets/

& I lied in the ground on dunstaple downs