Joanne Kyger / Food / Cunningham

We're going to hear/see Joanne Kyger this evening--I'm very excited!

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The pictures are of me with food that I like: tacos and rubens. MMM. See how happy I am?

Thinking about the following from the Roger Copeland book on Merce Cunningham:

"Certainly, when it comes to current academic fashion(s), this book is vigorously polemical. It champions a number of the ideas most vilified by the race/class/gender gurus: formalism, objectivity, disinterestedness, the value of
the visual (as opposed to the tactile)--terms often associated (naively, in my view) with patriarchy, 'the prevailing culture,' the West, phallocentrism, and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Indeed, the primitivism that Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg collectively repudiated has enjoyed a revival of sorts in recent years in the work of many feminist choreographers and performance artists" (24)

Martha Graham's work deals in heavy archetypes, for sure. I think any art that seeks to be comforted by unexamined primal or natural instincts is going to be problematic--I want to explore and examine earth mother possibilities, not embrace them as my true self.

Even if my poems come out as more loose lyric type things, I need my poems to have an awareness of form that they highlight. Joanne Kyger's poems have an awareness of form that is rooted in speech, rather, in talking. That's not as obvious an attention to structure as a procedural poem, or something working with constraints, but it is a kind of formalism, I think, rooted in the tactile. Jessica and I have been talking about kinesic / gestural memory, trying to imagine/feel out what a poem rooted in a form based on gestural memory might be.

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My yoga studio of choice in town has a workstudy position available. Keep your fingers (or whatever you do) crossed for me.

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The guy next door is playing that same shitty rap he always plays. C'mon dude, play some interesting rap instead.