OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

It is 10:56am and we, Sister Spit, have been on the road since about 11pm last night. I made it as co-pilot and navigator until around 5am, drinking the very tallest, fattest cans of Red Bull, sugar free. I learned on past tours that sugar free Red Bulls do not crack one out as hard core as the sugared-up cans. So I got my sugar elsewhere – a six-pack of powdered sugar Donettes, a bag of almond Hershey’s Kisses, a sour apple Blow Pop and a thing of Ding Dongs. I tried to keep the driver alert and entertained by reading her Facebook statuses off my new Google phone, until a series of hallucinations (most disturbingly, seeing myself somehow sitting on the hood of the van like a gremlin on the wing of a plane, though this gremlin was wearing a black bobbed wig) forced me to cfawl into a back seat and attempt to sleep on a pile of coats. I came to somewhere in Oregon, at a rest stop where some nice Lutherans were handing out free coffee and cookies. I’m still wearing my outfit from the show last night, a teeny tiny Spandex-y dress made by local designer Chelsea Starr; a pair of seamed stockings, the seam wound round to the front of my leg, and shiny stiletto shoes. Watching me teeter-totter up the landscaped incline to the rest stop bathrooms, Beth Lisick, one of many hilarious writers in the van, observes that I look like the group has maybe kidnapped me and is allowing me to hit the restroom under their watchful gaze. Loaded up with free, Christian coffee and pastries we return to the road, a This American Life episode playing off someone’s iPod.

If I wasn’t performing in the pacific northwest with Sister Spit this weekend I’d be going to Open Studios, specifically to Art Explosion, the one at 744 Alabama Street. The writer and artist Ali Liebegott is going to be showing a bunch of new work and I love Ali Liebegott’s work. Her books are on my bookshelves and her art is hung on the walls in my bedroom and office. Ali’s books – the book length road poem The Beautifully Worthless and the darkly hilarious alcoholic pancake waitress novel The IHOP Papers – do a wild trick of mixing real, intricate, complicated poetry with plainspoken smart-assed and vibrant prose, mashing up the emotional experience in the process, hurling the reader between uncanny heartache and absurd humor, touching on one page and the next a gross-out, vulnerable and tough and really truly unique, a singular literary voice unafraid to follow her writerly obsession to the next illogical conclusion.

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[Charles Bernstein responds to recent discussions about his review "Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?" in last winter's Parkett. --SS]

Suzanne Stein has asked me to make some comments on two posts on Open Space, one by Kevin Killian and then Julian Myers’s response (to which several responses were subsequently posted). Both Killian (whom I know for many years) and Myers (whose name is new to me) focused at least in part on a review I wrote for Parkett magazine of Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, titled “Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?“. I wrote my review of Shaw’s book in December 2008 and it was published by Parkett this past winter.

In his post, Killian gently chides me for not giving the original source of my ironic title, which I guess I took for granted. But the sentiment has become a kind of received wisdom, removed from the specifics of Brion Gysin’s original remark:

Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint . . . lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. Do it for yourself. Use any system which suggests itself to you. Take your own words or the words said to be “the very own words” of anyone else living or dead. You’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action.

Killian and I would both be sympathetic to Gysin’s point—and indeed my “experiments list” (based in part on Bernadette Mayer’s) is deeply indebted to Gysin. Gysin was arguing for a poetry that challenged the conventional norms of “official verse culture”—that would use cut-ups, visual display, parataxis, and appropriated language to create a new kind of poetry. (See William Burroughs/Brion Gysin, The Third Mind.) But it was never true that the actual practice of poetry was ahead or behind the visual arts. Gertrude Stein may get less respect in the mainstream than Pablo Picasso, but the one is neither ahead nor behind the other. Frank O’Hara is as significant in his poetry as Robert Rauschenberg in his art, to take an example from my review. And poetry has one advantage in the postwar period: its publication and criticism is not dominated by market values. (Of course, for the poète chétif this is hardly an advantage at all.) Certainly, naïve conceptions of representations, narrative continuity, and expression (what I once called “ideational mimesis”) have great credibility in official verse culture, but no more so than in the stylistically strait-jacketed critical writing (and enforced copyediting) of the major art magazines. (As I’ve said before: I don’t blame the writers but the market-driven focus of the editors/publishers.) (more…)