The Mind of Hakim Bey

Back when I was a teenager, my brother turned me on to a contemporary philosopher and mystic named Hakim Bey. Bey is a writer, luddite and philosopher whose work has inspired a range of cultural and creative movements (Burning Man as an example). I have posted a sample of his work below, entitled, Poetic Terrorism. I thought of this in relation to the public poetics that Jill encouraged us to create. I immediately thought of Hakim Bey's short essay concerning creative acts as a radical tool against the status quo. His complete works are available for free online at http://hermetic.com/bey/
Bey does not believe in copyright, but if you steal his words, he asks that you mention him... To quote Bey, "Words only belong to somebody until somebody steals them back." Enjoy. - Ryan

Poetic Terrorism - by Hakim Bey

WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.

Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.

Go naked for a sign.

Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.

Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...

The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.

PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is
not money but CHANGE.

Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.

Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught.

Art as crime; crime as art.

Two Pieces for Oppen

1.

crowd all neither

light nor praise

walking borrowed

distance said

“small and close

the wounds of measure”

clothe her phrase

borrowed, razed

small distance

where praise is

2.

that smoke

would remain

born in hollow places

with concave fog

touch all is us

never either

touch in their small wells

spool water

pools of ether

selves, Divination

drinking streets, faces

trees, workmen

haunted, becoming

begin

the work of digging

silently on –

hollow wells

would remain. thirst

us crowd close

sacrament

Stephanie Young at the Poetry Project

Stephanie Young opens by shaking her hands at her sides to denote both nervousness and excitement. She has never read at the project, and she is “profoundly overstimulated” by New York; not at all the suburbia that Oakland “has finally become”. She is somehow both conversational/accessible and profoundly authoritative: a feat for a reader, I think. She never falters, but seems to attack reading as though it were a physical task (well, I suppose it is) to be completed.

Her reading centers around a long poem - “My Life in France” - which she frames as “calling out” to its origination with friends Dana and Ally, and for a reading at Kinessa Gallery in Oakland. The poem had come out of an assignment to write either “location” or “correspondence”: this prompted a conversation in which the three friends came to the conclusion that the two are inseparable. Their friendship is a kind of a location made through correspondence. Or, in Young's own words: "A face is not a location. A poem is making a location possible".

The poem artfully mixes the mundane (“I am hurt by facebook”) and the startling, rushing

onwards in a kind of litany of locational complaint. There is an anger and a tenderness suffusing the work; as it skewers or re-routes narrative tropes in favor of an ever shifting present location, a present presently re-made, vivid enough to invoke both the past and the absent. “Looking for a resolution,” she writes “no / not this time / not a story / not a scene / not a forest for the trees / not even on their behalf.” This “even” demarcates the space outside of the poem as a space in which the story, the scene, and the resolution will be demanded (or at the very least ardently desired). The poem's strength lies in it's wish to fulfill these needs “on their behalf,” coupled with its refusal to do so as expected.

An entire section follows the life of Julia Child, writing the Art of French Cooking with her

dear friend and co-conspirator “Simka”. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that this was the story that the poem was following, at present. (Alright: I am not particularly familiar with the life of Julia Child). Is it Stephanie Young's “Life in France” or Julia Child's that we are hearing? The poem is flush with life stories, falsities, revealing asides; a kind of maddening gossip and chatter which, in Stacey Szymaszek's words makes “biography as a process rather than a product” happen.

Young had opened her poem with a quote from Bachalard: “we are unable to live duration that

has been destroyed”. “But it is not,” is the retort of Young's first line. “My Life in France” is a poem that “calls out” to the other locations where it was multiply born. In so naming, it creates a series of lines, a number of durations, drawing continuity implausibly from disjunction.

Jennifer Moxley & Miles Champion at the Poetry Project

Stacey Szymaszek introduces Miles Champion by speaking of poetry as a practice which she associates with altering the pace of things: in most cases, slowing the pace down. But Miles' work, claims Szymaszek, has the effect of making one feel that a kettle is screaming and “boiling over”. Shortly after, Miles starts reading so quickly that I can literally barely understand his words. There is an urgent rush to get the words out of himself: I imagine a kind of childhood game, the desire to repeat and to repeat as quickly as possible certain tongue twisters until their meaning becomes distorted (perhaps renewed?). The sense-quickening that Szymaszek has spoken of becomes literalized in the poet's body, almost comically; but with a peculiar kind of decidedly unpretentious force as well.

Eventually I get the hang of it, of him, of listening: and the words continue to spill out; absurd, acrobatic, tangential: “red, totems, stone, leaflet, comrade, normal, blood vessel, orange juice”. And yet in spite of the apparent “absurdity” of the work, I am convinced that the absurd is only present on the surface-level. There is also a certain “rightness” that I can't quite name; the sense that an absolutely rational language has emerged to speak from chaos. “Colors do not smell when you edit them,” says Champion, “time is a colander with fresh holes”- (at which the entire audience sighs audibly with recognition) - "wet cups leaves blisters/exudation of cumbersome parts/I check faults with reverie/they loosen our heads/the rope names in their celibacy/question space/mute bells”.

Moxley reads next: Szymaszek opens by quoting Moxley as saying in an interview, “experience is not merely what happens to us”. As she reads, I find that experience also seems to be what happens around us, atmospherically, or what happens without us, or what happens to others, or what we deny is happening all the time that it is happening: a multiplicity of presents and pasts in which we are continuously implicated. “We watched the news in disbelief,” writes Moxley, as a speaker in a beautiful California garden, “eucalyptus debris/the surreality of being so thoughtlessly content.” The cherished “private self” of poetry is constantly undermined: both a self-critical and a generous stance. “I edit the pulse of my mind/distraction establishes me”: the outside filters in, asked or unasked, situating both the writer and the writing deeply in the world.

In Szymaszek's introduction, she also speaks of Moxley's work as a space in which “political injustice can never be too removed from us psychically”. This impossibility of a separation from political injustice pervades the work. There is no entirely innocent contentment, outside of the haunting knowledge of our “country's bounty as impoverishment”. Again and again, Moxley's poems return to a call for collective and individual responsibility, even as taking this responsibility often seems nearly impossible. “In relative safety,” writes Moxley “and in search of goods/nauseous with fear for the capacious sky/it feels like our carcasses have been pushed out into the open.” Meanwhile, “poems in journals have forgotten that there's a world”.

I was surprised by the plainness of much of the language in these poems – and the mastery with which such plainness was utilized. Lines almost affably conversational in tone carry the heavy weight of psychic culpability: draw us into a conversation that seems, at first, easy, and later probes perhaps too deeply. “I get more narrative by the year” writes Moxley, “saying things to get them said/feeling no leisure to take old risks”. The need to say things “to get them said” is the strategic language of a writer who refuses to forget that there's a world.

Myung Mi Kim

Myung Mi Kim was born in Seoul, Korea in 1957, on December 6th. She migrated to America directly following the Korean War when she was nine years old. Myung attended the University of Iowa, where she earned a degree in fine arts. She also earned other degrees from Johns Hopkins University, as well as Oberlin College. She remained in the world of academia as she went on to teach creative writing at the University of San Francisco, and now she currently is a professor of English at the University of Buffalo in upstate New York. Myung is recognized for her post-modern style of writing. There are three books of poetry she has written: Dura, The Bounty, and Under Flag. She has won 2 Gertrude Stein Awards for her works of North American Poetry. One of the most important things for Myung Mi Kim is her traditional influence from her childhood. She feels as though her abrupt removal from Korea made a profound impact on her connection with language. She stated, "There's something about being nine or so—you have enough access to the language, you feel a connection to the culture fully. And yet again, that culture is and will be embedded in you. In this strange region of knowing and not knowing, I have access to Korea as a language and culture but this access is shaped by rupture (leaving the country, the language). When I engage 'Korea'—what resemblance does it have to any 'real' place, culture, or the language spoken there? So in this effort and failure of bridging, reconfiguring, shaping, and being shaped by loss and absence, one enters a difficult negotiation with an Imaginary and a manner of listening which to me is the state of writing."
What I take this to mean is that Myung uses writing to bridge the gap between a previous place in her life, and her current state of being. Language can be often times hard to articulate within speech, however poetry and creative writing have helped Myung and many other writers (especially those whose first language wasn’t English, but had it forced upon them) find a common language which they could use to communicate.
In Myung’s personal life she moved a lot when she came to America because her father was a surgeon whose job placement caused them to continuously change zones. She excelled in High School, and would up graduating a year early. During high school she wrote her first English poem at the age of 14. It being such an outstanding poem not just for the fact that she was 14 year old who only recently learned English, but because it was actually beautifully written, wound up in a local literary magazine. Though Myung did not consider writing as a career until much later in life.

Jacket Magazine

Jacket Magazine was founded in 1997 by poet, John Tranter. It is an online poetry publication that issues a new edition two or three times a year. Jacket Magazine has no advertizing on their site. Tranter and his volunteer contributors work for free. An amazing feat considering the amount of poetry that appears in Jacket Magazine. In 2004 Tranter brought on poet, Pam Brown to assist the team as the Associate Editor.


Tranter is based in Australia; however, Jacket Magazine reaches households around the globe. There are over seven thousand printed pages on the internet that include poetry, articles, book reviews, and photographs, to name a few. Often each issue is themed. Jacket Magazine has also featured poetry from across the globe. A quirk of the site: Tranter shamelessly promotes his books of poetry on the homepage.


Issue 39 is Jacket Magazine’s most recent edition. It contains 900 printed pages of… stuff! A poet’s dream. There’s a multitude of poets listed with their poem(s), a few poets are featured with their photograph. Issue 39 received poems from so many contributors that they had to spill some of the poetry over to Issue 40 which will appear from April to July 2010. When you click on issue 40 you are able to see the work Tranter’s done already, a list of poets, but the site is labeled under construction and you cannot click any of the links.


Apparently after issue 40 Tranter will retire from his work at Jacket Magazine, after 13 years of work. Don’t fret, Jacket Magazine is not dead to the world. All of Jacket’s servers will be moved to the University of Pennsylvania and will remain intact. However, Jacket2 will have its beginnings! The Kelly Writer’s House and PennSound will host the new Jacket2. It will continue to be a free website publication.


Here are a few links to Jacket Magazine pages I found interesting:

http://jacketmagazine.com/00/home.shtml

http://jacketmagazine.com/00/jacket-reviewed.shtml#time

http://jacketmagazine.com/39/index.shtml

Octopus Books

Octopus Books is a small press in Denver,CO since 2006. Octopus Books publishes two books of poetry a year. They accept unsolicited submissions! But...the deadline is tomorrow (April 30, 2010). You can subscribe to receive the biannual OctopusBook online. They also publish books from various poets that you can buy on their website: www.octopusbooks.net

I was surprised to find that the most recent book published by Octopus was written by none other than Matvei Yankelevich who is the editor and founder of Ugly Duckling Press. I like the interconnectedness of these small presses. The book by Yankelevich is called Boris by the Sea and it is truly a masterpiece. There are YouTubes of him reading parts of it- check it out here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780980193824/boris-by-the-sea.aspx

Octopus Magazine is an online poetry magazine that was started in 2003. One of the only pieces of information offered on their website, besides the poetry itself, is:
"It is named after a sea creature that is intelligent, lives in dens, and uses ink as a defense mechanism. Every issue features a combination of 8."

The current issue is #13 http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue13/html/main.html" and it consists of poems, reviews, and recovery projects. As you can see on the website, there are 3 columns of 8 poets. The 8th poet in each column has been translated. Our good friend and idol, Bhanu Kapil, is featured in this issue: http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue13/Kapil.htm"
The review section of the magazine has, obviously, reviews of recently published books of poetry. There is a review in this issue of a SONG by Bhanu Kapil (if you just can't get enough of her... http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue13/Reinkordt.htm)
The recovery projects section is very cool- here is the explanation from the website:
In addition to poetry we always welcome submissions of Book Reviews & Recovery Projects. Recovery projects are brief essays celebrating a single book that you feel people should be reading but are not reading. The recovery should be about 1000 words, about a book that is at least 20 years old & out of print, but all those are flexible. The only real requirement is that the recovery inspires a reader to want to track down that book and read it as soon as possible. Please write us to pitch a Recovery Project.

I found an interview with one of the editors, Zachary Schomburg. He is both an editor and a poet himself. I think what he says is a nice blending of a poetics statement and the philosophy of his small press:

Q: How does your role as an editor influence your writing?

A: As an editor of a journal that gets a bulk of its unsolicited submissions from hip young poets in master of fine arts programs, I feel like I am at an advantage as a writer. I get to cheat and look at everyone else's tests. Mostly, I've been able to shape exactly what it is I don't want poems to do.

Mathias and I have a similar taste in poetry (though we debate quite a bit as well), so each issue of Octopus is like a snapshot of the kind of poetry I've been into since 2003. It is fair to say that reading for the magazine and writing are inextricably linked.

The poems I write are the poems I most want to read. Ultimately, I'm a slow and inspired and confused reader while I write. It's the best kind of reading I think, writing is.




I've emailed the press in hopes to find out more information. The website is rather limited.

ps sorry, but i couldn't figure out how to make the links clickable.