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week 2 trash poem

While rummaging through my trash, I encountered a collection of old papers from my Japanese class last quarter. These papers were mostly composed of vocabulary lists and explanations of syntactical concepts. My method for composing this poem was to cut out disparate words from these papers and rearrange them on the page. My thought process was heavily influenced by Cecilia Vicuna’s conception of language that she discussed during her lecture at the Neurbaum Collegium. As I understood it, her idea of language is that words are mysterious little vessels in which different forces and meanings collide and combine (in a somewhat sensual and erotic manner). While she emphasized the lovely internal chaos of single words (that she broke down into constituent words), I sought to investigate something analogous between individual words. The basic idea for this poem was to explore the way relationships between words create meaning in a sort of alchemical manner in which the individual meanings of each word transmute and alter via contact with another word, creating an entirely new meaning that is still related but somehow other than the original words. The sentence forming a circle is basically a description of this idea. I sought to arrange the words in the middle in such a way that the reader could imagine a multiplicity of connections between words (could detect the presence of “an invisible red thread” between all of the words)(incidentally, I think it’s pretty serendipitous that I found a chunk of text describing a red thread, considering Vicuna’s use of similar imagery). For example, a small planet could be described as a stone bell, and a bell’s sound resembles a giggle, and a giggle is perhaps similar to a flower, and flowers—like planets—are cyclical entities that could be thought of as a circle, and so on. Creating the poem in this fashion forced me to focus on the visual dimension of the page, which is a style of writing poetry that I don’t often do. So, making the words physical arrangement a centrality was an attempt to get out of my comfort zone and learn more about writing with attention to the visual. One thing I wish I had done better and will continue to think about is color. I couldn’t find any colorful bits of trash that were aesthetically pleasing or relevant enough for me to want to incorporate into the poem. I feel like there’s a little too much empty space, and adding some other colorful visual element could add a lot.

-nathan

#nathan mcclendon #week 2 #week 2 writing assignment #trash

Final Project

audio for c v dark:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1y7hdxaV3gVQ_W8fOhFuYwF1TDFhW5Xxv

audio for str tl d wn :

https://drive.google.com/open?id=12qzHYVvgw_R_-Z04-TbQvVBkS9EanCup

str tl d wn score / companion piece:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tm9vZgfmrSVfgAJsCRk6zVoiYb0l-7k_

working notes:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1J_sm2qmt37bc7mWkDeoBLipc0b0LgXiF

-nathan

#nathan mcclendon #week 10 #week 10 writing assignment #pls dont make fun of my ugly voice

Week 9 Reading Response

One work I enjoyed this week was Yepez’s Contexts and Signs of an Urban Visual Poetics. His sign-poems emphasize the social and material context of the poem as an integral part of the poem itself, which I see as an attempt to democratize poetry and make it more accessible to everyone. Yepez notes that there are many stylistic similarities between visual poetry and commonplace forms of discourse like advertisements and street signs, and consequently, visual poetry installed in public spaces can draw upon rhetorical techniques that are immediately familiar and understandable to people outside of the literary world. Moreover, once context poetry is installed in the street, it can no longer be said to “belong” to the author (nor, for that matter, may it belong to anyone at all, which is why Yepez thinks context poetry is resistant to commodification), which further de-privileges the status of the poet and turns the poem into something available for anyone to derive meaning from. To me, this idea of poetry fully synthesized with architecture and the landscape is exciting.

Another work I enjoyed was Buried Treasure Island. Here, the spatial context—the island itself—became a sort of frame within which the BARGE crew conducted a multi-faceted series of investigations. I thought the most interesting part of this piece was the way it exists in numerous forms—as a guidebook, a performance, an installation, and an audio tour—without any particular form being the primary one. Various forms of language are united through their focus on the real and imagined histories of treasure island, such that the space of the island seems to become source material (sometimes literally, like in the case of their soil sampling) which is then shaped into widely-varying texts.

-nathan

#nathan mcclendon #week 9 #week 9 reading response #reading response

Week 9 Writing Assignment

https://drive.google.com/open?id=15iKUVxJ0Pf2-EMWHNXBO3kOjMIpgqPN6

^link to transcript

My poem this week is written in chalk on the ground of some little path off of the Midway across from the law school library, and it offers some thoughts on transiency, presence, and absence. The poem itself was written to be read alongside the bushes and flowers surrounding it. The images and ideas contained within the words, I hoped, would somehow resonate with the material surroundings in a recognizable but open-ended way. I thought chalk was an appropriate medium to write in due to its extreme transiency. As soon as it rains, this poem will be gone, which to me is sort of interesting and appealing. I also liked chalk’s connotation as childish and playful. I saw the silliness of this medium as falling in line with Yepez’s argument for the de-privileging of poetry and his claim that poetry has no essence. Much of the work this week challenged the typical academic/institutional mystification of poetry into something that belongs in a privileged sphere of “high art” separate from everyday reality. I thought of the use of chalk as a move in this direction as well.

-nathan

#nathan mcclendon #week 9 #week 9 writing assingment #writing assignment

Week 8 Writing Assignment

https://twitter.com/atlastonemoon

poems accessible here^^ feel free to follow:)

For this week’s poem, I constructed a twitter bot. For those who don’t know, a twitter bot is an automated twitter account that randomly generates tweets according to some pre-determined conditions. The bot generates sentences to fit certain syntactical patterns drawing on a list of words that I compiled. These patterns were loosely based on the haiku form, which seemed fitting for a medium as transient and ephemeral as twitter. For example, one pattern is [adjective] [kigo] [kireji] [adverb] [preposition] [noun]. In line with the 21st century spirit of this project, the kigo (seasonal references) and kireji (words that connect or draw relations between parts of the poem) are not limited to traditional haiku things. Many kireji here, for instance, are digital symbols. The bot is also programmed to randomly generate an image consisting of a series of lines to accompany the haiku. The end product is a randomly generated text – image couplet. I initially set it to produce a tweet every ten minutes so there would be plenty to look at before class, but it is now set to tweet every 6 hours, and will continue to do so indefinitely. Also, I should give credit to my friend Madeline who helped extensively with the programming side of this project, and who also designed the header and profile pictures.

#nathan mcclendon #week 8 #week 8 writing assignment #writing assignment

Week 8 Reading Response

Rapidly advancing technological advancement and its accompanying societal changes form the social backdrop to which the concrete poets were responding. I think Marinetti succinctly identifies some of these conditions, even though he was writing earlier. For instance, the acceleration of all facets of life, the love of new and exciting things, the mechanization of human sensibility, and a sense of the earth’s smallness are important consequences of advancing technology that alter the way we perceive the world. Many of the concrete poets’ poems seem to embrace at least part of the new forms of technologically induced consciousness. For example, de Campos’s flashing gif-like poem hearthead seems to embrace the faster speed and shorter attention span of modern readers, drawing them in with flashy colors and holding their interest with quickly changing letters. These poets’ techniques seem somewhat applicable today. However, I worry that these sorts of poems too closely mirror neoliberal ideology in a problematic way—to me, they seem to be easily-commodifiable and fall in line with our spectacle-driven mode of consumption, affirming and strengthening a mode of consciousness conducive to late capitalism’s style of accumulation. I feel like the acceleration of society that these poems variously embrace, for example, is inseparable from the values of efficiency and profitability that capitalism dictates.

I feel similarly about the contemporary poems. A lot of them do really interesting things to language by causing/allowing the reader to consume the poem in the style that is most familiar to us these days—browsing. For me at least, these poems lent themselves toward being read similarly to how we might browse twitter or youtube or whatever; they are quick, exciting, weird, often funny, and demand very little of the reader, who may sit back and enjoy it and then move on. I’m thinking specifically of The Dreamlife of Letters and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Flash Art. I enjoyed these poems, and I think there’s something really interesting about the transiency of these moving texts, which disappear almost as soon as you are able to read them. However, these poems also caused me (and maybe this is just my fault) to consume them in a shallower manner than I would a different sort of text. Since the texts were constantly changing and moving, I felt myself to be more passive, simply sitting back and absorbing everything that happens. I’m not entirely sure if or how I would/could incorporate these sorts of techniques into my poetry. The biggest problem is that I have no programming knowledge whatsoever, which seems like a requirement to produce these sorts of poems without difficulty. I also just don’t like the internet that much. However, it does seem like the questions these poems are grappling with (speed, transiency, digitization, globalization, etc.) are really urgent and relevant, and I do feel like poetry is probably obliged to deal with the world of the internet somehow, even if it isn’t necessarily through E-Poetry.

-nathan

#nathan mcclendon #week 8 #week 8 reading response #reading response

“A Mad [Noun]”, Anna Wood-- in-class performance by LW

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e-BXovwtVPevC8Qzti6KSDvapzxIFCXM/view?usp=sharing

“density and daylightning”, Nathan McClendon

Whole class-- performance 1

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NQ-rsprSzg76Btwo-7Nm7PEiAoZ20v2H/view?usp=sharing

Whole class-- performance 2

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nzcg7gTV1F4uc3fKWB_GNcldw9mcsbd4/view?usp=sharing

#poetry #anna wood #nathan mcclendon #in class performance #week 7 #density and daylightning #a mad [noun]

Week 7 Reading Response

These poems’ relationship to time creates an emphasis on process over product. Rather than attempt to create a finished, “complete” work, these poets seem more concerned with creating a certain relationship and energy with an audience, a sort of atmosphere that is unique to each performance. I think of these energetic spaces as sort of similar to Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” or Nietzsche’s Dionysus—the “goal” of these poems seems to be to create a collective feeling or experience in which both the poet and the audience reside. Moreover, the poet and the audience both contribute to the creation of this experience—in Benson’s improvisations, for example, he seems to react to what is happening around him, such that the energy, laughter, reactions, and behavior of the audience influence how Benson composes. This sort of blurring together of the audience and poet is further compounded by the fact that duration/time as medium creates a strong susceptibility for change and chaos within the poems. A poem that doesn’t use duration as a medium (i.e., a poem that exists only on a page—although one might argue that these still engage with duration in a different way) is static and unchanging, whereas a poem that unfolds in time has the possibility to turn into something completely different at any moment. It’s possible that this sort of volatility could interfere with language and meaning if the poet is attempting to intentionally communicate a clear, specific idea; however, I get the sense that artists who create this sort of poetry, especially those who incorporate improvisation, have a looser, more fluid sense of the meaning of their works, allowing them to shift and transform organically.

#nathan mcclendon #week 7 #reading response #week 7 reading response