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.

Little Red Leaves: Tynes, Alexander + Hofer,

As I slowly sift through my stack of elegantly designed chapbooks from Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, designed and sewn by Dawn Pendergast, today I’m focusing on Jen Tynes’ here’s the deal (2013), Charles Alexander’s SOME SENTENCES LOOK FOR SOME PERIODS (2013) and Jen Hofer’s Front Page News (2013). It is interesting how all three titles are composed out of variations on fragment and accumulation, each utilizing such in entirely different ways to achieve their goals. Michigan poet and horse less press publisher Jen Tynes’ here’s the deal is a sequence of untitled fragments structured as a single, extended chapbook-length poem, reminiscent of some of the work of Washington State poet Sarah Mangold or Vancouver poet Stephen Collis for her use of sequence, accumulation, the fragment and space on the page. What intrigues about her chapbook-length piece is in the way it doesn’t necessarily have a beginning or an ending, but a sense of being an ongoing stretch of narrative, whether one excerpted from a larger structure, looping back to the beginning, or able to re-order for the sake of a different series of connections.

we have more

than enough occupations

between us to register

a dream with a habit

in its middle blood flow

is migration ruby

throated Laundromat never

again having a three-

digit silence

Tucson, Arizona poet and CHAX publisher Charles Alexander’s SOME SENTENCES LOOK FOR SOME PERIODS is constructed as a prose-poem triptych. As he works through butterflies, ideas of perfection, piano chords, Hamlet and ballet, his prose accumulations twist and turn in on themselves in an intriguing way, and the rush of words have a particular level of velocity I wouldn’t mind hearing read aloud, if possible. Each piece appears to build upon what came before, accumulating and piling upon the exploration of perfection. Are there more to the sequence, or does it hold at three?

I tell myself that nothing can be perfect. I tell myself in nothing words that nothing words that can be perfect. I tell nothing myself nothing words. I tell myself words. Once a butterfly, then a burning hand, a memory of a burning hand. Everyone left me at eight years old, so I left, too, walking a road out of the city, toward a lake. Step one and two. A piano next to the mirror. My sister has beautiful red hair, and she plays piano. Notes are sometimes red. Near the piano, I tell my mother’s hard drinking friend to leave the house. After Tennyson, I always hear the bells. The beauty of a liberty (bell). To cry with a beast, truly the only human present. Also lost in Japan, wandering where water goes. The truck knocks me down, and perhaps out.

As the blurb for Jen Hofer’s Front Page News reads: “From one birthday to another birthday (2011 – 2012), Jen Hofer made a cut-up poem using the front page of the newspaper in the city where she woke every day. The result is a beautiful portrait of what ‘daily’ means wen tempered with poetic, political and personal endeavor. This larger than normal LRL chapbook features custom-printed fabric and color facsimiles of a selection of Hofer’s poems.” Knowing that this is part of a potentially far larger structure intrigues, and yet, it doesn’t necessarily confirm that such will appear later on in a larger state (although I certainly hope so). Pendergast wonderfully reproduces from Hofer’s original collages, allowing an imperfect linearity between certain passages and words to float through the text, and her daily ‘day-book’ structure incorporates the cut-up strategies of Susan Howe and others into the poetic journal played so well by Robert Creeley and Gil McElroy, as well as, more recently, Jessica Smith (who utilizes similar strategies in her own current work-in-progress, “The Daybooks”). (Her method, however intriguing, also makes it tricky to attempt to replicate via the blog-review.) As she writes for Wednesday, April 27, 2011, the poem “borders”: “commanders / air war / strikes against / command /// officials / support / drones / to sever / and supply / army units / as / private / official / strike direct // into the heart [.]”

Aufgabe 11

What am I doing—catless—here,

level-headed and certain,

without cause to judge?

What am I doing without my own face,

without either feet or staggering? Who is it that seeks me out

and doesn’t discover my telephone on its tiny coffee table?

    I am but scarcely

the description of someone that knows me,

an identity card that has cast off first one foot

and then the other

and who will sleep until it is far too early.

(My flesh does not know of flesh. The saliva

coagulates and, oh, once again it is mid-afternoon

and the rain has not arrived.)

What time will I be born, that I don’t remember the light?

What time will I be dead, that my hands don’t hurt? (“Untitled,” Rafael Menjivar Ochoa, trans. Emily Abendroth)

I recently received a copy of the eleventh annual Aufgabe, a journal produced out of Brooklyn, New York through Litmus Press, and edited by an editorial board of E.Tracy Grinnell, Julian Talamentez Brolaski, erica kaufman, Jen Hofer and Canadian poet Nathanaël. Along with their usual generous amount of poetry and “essays, notes, reviews,” this issue features a section of Salvadoran poetry, guest edited by Christian Nagler, including translations from the Spanish by Emily Abendroth, Karen Lepri, Christian Nagler, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brian Whitener. In Nagler’s lengthy introduction to the section on Salvadoran poetry, he writes:

‘The quest for identity’ is a concept that perhaps signifies anachronistically in the intellectual climate of North America, where a ‘post-identity’ discourse provides some semblance of a contemporary mood, even if is not embraced or fully elaborated. We—some of us—are perhaps experiencing a milder form of what Huezo-Mixco cites as the presiding trend of the 1970s and 80s in El Salvador, when the “collision of social movements with entrenched power tend[ed] to displace identity issues.” In his lecture, Huezo-Mixco tracks the continued vitality of the concept of identity with regards to mass-events that have served to vitally confuse the idea of interior and exterior, namely a thirty year mass migration that now locates a quarter to a third of Salvadoran citizens outside the national borders. At the end of his lecture, Huezo-Mixco, arrives at a provocative conclusion that the younger generation of writers “re-creates the catastrophe of a fragmented and impoverished society.” It’s a gernation that does not write with “any enthusiasm for the political gains wrested from one of the bloodiest periods in Latin America.”

I’m impressed that a journal would so heavily and regularly be involved with translation, interested in engaging with other poetries, poetics and cultures, and in seeing the differences of subject matter, cadence and the line, as the issue features not only the special section but translated works within the section of general works. Some of the highlights of the issue include works by Noah Eli Gordon and j/j hastain, as well as Mathieu Bergeron (translated by Nathanaël). The pieces by Gordon are from a work-in-progress I’ve seen sections from before, his “The Problem,” which feature drawings by Sommer Browning. Given the drawings appear to be tailor-made for the work, one can only hope that a trade edition of the finished work might also include drawings?

What is to be done? A note on a page torn from a notebook says: a note in a defused cage. Further along, as a matter of fact, the grey skeleton of a human cage: a whole series of sawed, twisted bars. At the back, in the hay, as they say, lies a page torn from a notebook. From here, it is impossible to read it, but the repeated patterns trick the field: we are holding the page in our hand, we have already, necessarily, entered. On the front, we read: Turn the page; on the back: Turn around. Do you follow me? (“The Unformed Suite,” Mathieu Bergeron)

From the previous issue [see my review of such here] to this current one, there seems an entire different flavour, a different cadence of the works presented, and I’m uncertain if this is accident of submissions or a deliberate attempt to shape different issues (or if the difference is entirely in my own mind). 

Still, a particularly interesting feature of the current issue is an essay by Ariel Goldberg, “Selections from The Estrangement Principle: A Poetic Criticism,” which questions a number of different directions of art and writing, in regards to definition, self-definition and the question of “queer,” writing “NPR tells the news with clips from an old interview, with no mention Ryan is a lesbian. If there is nothing about being a dyke in her poetry then should the word lesbian be uttered? Is Kay Ryan making history as the first out lesbian Poet Laureate with a Pulitzer Prize, or is this actively not being treated as history?” The piece continues:

The term “queer art” is both persisting and failing at a rapid pace, and for multiple reasons. Mostly the anti-definition catchall capability of the word “queer” sets the stage. For instance, I am resistant to a dead on defining of the word. Different queernesses float up here, and more specific identifiers inside of the “LGBTQ” acronym come in to sharper focus. I am working backwards, piecing together scraps. There is a sort of pact, in the word queer, anyway, to resist the task of definition. I am identifying with it, but also varying from it, throwing back to lesbian, or dyke. I pluck and examine. I am inconsistent. As important as it is to identify a gender or sexuality, so is it to name my race, my white privilege. My excellent education privilege. Being Jewish, whatever that means. The identifiers don’t exactly end. Being gender queer or a dyke or both collapses in this long exhale where it’s not important that I know the answer to a question someone is always asking.