the illinois river

at 3:50 - 6:12 an old Bluegrass hymn from the rivers of Appalachia

as sung by Allison Krauss, Bluegrass singer and fiddler from Decatur, Illinois

inequality's passion

I'm sure Glenn Beck is also convinced his peer group is stupid and lazy.

Rancière, in writing about 19thC French pedagogical theorist Joseph Jacotot, calls it inequality's passion: "The love of domination requires people to protect themselves from each other in the heart of a conventional order that cannot be reasonable, since it is made up of nothing but....that submission to another's laws that the desire to be superior to him fatally entails." (pp 80-1, "The Society of Contempt," from The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière, Stanford UP, 1991, trans Kristin Ross.)

See also: Kohut; NPD and athleticism; fetish of technique as a social defense; Agatha Trunchbull; Bök

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my one hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

- Lucille Clifton (June 27 1936 - February 13 2010)

poetics as an industry of technical fantasy

Revolutionary Road comes to poetry.

Received the below book release from Northwestern UP a few months ago. Though the book is titled Contemporary Poetics its essays are pretty much all from the 80s and 90s, the heyday of postmodernism. I was struck again this morning by the grandiose subtitle: "Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century," and I hope it isn't considered rude to point out the extent to which the exuberance of the book's title hugely fails to comport with the age, gender, interests, and ethnicity of the authors.

Given the book's TOC, pasted below, you have to wonder how the boundaries, whatever and wherever they are, of poetics are to be redefined on behalf of the the entire upcoming century by authors who are nearly all anglophone, with only two women, with people who are presumably almost all white, with essays that seem still to retain the key concerns of the mid-20th century (principally modernist worries [text and technical issues]), and with the book's two keynote essays by theorists born in the first half of the 20th Century, one of whom is 60, the other 79.

The book offers a fantasy. If "sudden change" is what can be hoped for, and not sodden change, why compile such a collection under a bumptious and totalizing title only to reach back into the late 1980s. The revolutionists stopped for orangeade indeed.

The essays here are useful, sure, but to compile them under this intention? Anne Lauterbach was right to suggest experiment "means you must put what you know at risk to what you do not yet know." Such an attitude has nothing to do with totalizing efforts to prefigure the not-yet-known as a mere recapitulation of the not-so-recent past's canonical struggles. Let's concretize the poetics fads of the 1980s/1990s as fate? Where's ethnopoetics? Ecopoetics? Translation theory?

It was Wittgenstein after all, w/out whom langpo just couldn't have been, who repudiated such radical and totalizing redefinition as a metaphysical delusion and a theoretical fantasy.

I wouldn't be surprised if all self-consciously revolutionary movements do not in some way succumb to self-parody when viewed from even a decade or two later. But everything from the masculinist trope of exploration to the canard of renewal and redefinition, when this seems more an attempt to anchor the outworn concerns of an old guard, makes this book more unfortunate joke than self-parody.

---

"Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century"

Edited by Louis Armand

ISBN 0-8101-2359-2 (paperback). 384pp.

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, Evanston.

http://nupress.northwestern.edu

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and even cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"--beginning with Stephane Mallarme in the late nineteenth century--that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary.

Charles Bernstein's Swiftian satire of generative poetics and the textual apparatus, together with Marjorie Perloff's critical-historical treatment of "writing after" Bernstein and other proponents of language poetry, provides an itinerary of contemporary poetics in terms of both theory and practice. The other essays consider "precursors," recognizable figures within the histories or prehistories of contemporary poetics, from Kafka and Joyce to Wallace Stevens and Kathy Acker; "conjunctions," in which more strictly theoretical and poetical texts enact a concerted engagement with rhetoric, prosody, and the vicissitudes of "intelligibility"; "cursors," which points to the open possibilities of invention, from Augusto de Campos's "concrete poetics" to the "codework" of Alan Sondheim; and "transpositions," defining the limits of poetic invention by way of technology.

"An epoch-defining collection of manifestos and essays: its list of contributors reads as a who's who of current important theorists in the field." --Michael Golston

"Puts a number of excellent essays back in print and makes several others easily available for the first time." --Craig Dworkin

CONTENTS

1. END GAME

Charles Bernstein: How Empty is my Bread Pudding?

Marjorie Perloff: After Language Poetry: Modernity & its Discontents

2. PRECURSORS

Kevin Nolan: Getting Past Odradek

Donald F Theall: The Avant-Garde & the Wake of Radical Modernism

Bob Perelman: Doctor Williams's Position, Updated

Simon Critchley: Wallace Stevens and the Infinite Evasion of As

DJ Huppatz: Corporeal Poetics: Kathy Acker's Writing

Michel Delville & Andrew Norris: Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism

3. CONJUNCTIONS

Ricardo Nirenberg: Metaphor: The Colour of Being

Keston Sutherland: Vagueness

DJ Huppatz, Nicole Tomlinson & Julian Savage: AND &

Bruce Andrews: Readings Notes

Bruce Andrews: Lost and Found

4. CURSORS

Augusto de Campos: Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto

Augusto de Campos: Questionnaire of the Yale Symposium

Darren Tofts: Epigrams, Particle Theory and Hypertext

Gregory L Ulmer: Image Heuretics

J. Hillis Miller: The Poetics of Cyberspace: Two Ways to Get a Life

McKenzie Wark: From Hypertext to Codework

Alan Sondheim: Codeworld

5. TRANSPOSITIONS

Louis Armand: Techno-Poetics in the Vortext

Steve McCaffery: Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap

Allen Fisher: Traps or Tools and Damage

Steve McCaffery: Discontinued Meditations

Marjorie Perloff: Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text

Louis Armand is director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. His books include Solicitations: Essays on Criticism & Culture; Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology; and Incendiary Devices: Discourses of the Other. www.litterariapragensia.com

the very dear paws of procyon lotor found under the goodfield bridge after kayaking ten miles on an icy mackinac in company w/ three bald eagles

le pays des illinois

Liette, 1687: “The Illinois country is undeniably the most beautiful that is known anywhere between the mouth of the St. Lawrence River and that of the Mississippi, which are a thousand leagues apart. You begin to see its fertility at Chicago which is 140 leagues from Michillimackinac, at the end of Lake Michigan.” -- Pierre Liette, Memoir of De Gannes Concerning the Illinois Country, as found in The French Foundations: 1680-1693, Edited with Introduction and Notes by Theodore Calvin Pease and Raymond C. Werner, Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, Volume 23, Springfield (1934)

Charlevoix, 1721: "The 27th of September we arrived at the Forks, that being the name given by the Canadians to the place where the Theakiki [Kankakee] and the river of the Illinois join. ....I can assure you, Madam, it is not possible to behold a finer and a better country than this which it waters, at least as far as the place from whence I write.” p. 199 -- Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de, Journal of a voyage to North-America undertaken by order of the French King : containing the geographical description and natural history of that country, particularly Canada, together with an account of the customs, characters, religion, manners and traditions of the original inhabitants, in a series of letters to the Duchess of Lesdiguieres, Translated from the French, edited, with Historical Introduction, Notes and Index, by Louise Phelps Kellogg, Ph.D., Chicago, The Caxton Club, 1923

Marquette, 1673: “We left it [the Mississippi] ... to enter another river, [the Illinois]....We had seen nothing like this river for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, parrots, and even beaver; its many little lakes and rivers. That on which we sailed, is broad, deep, and gentle for sixty-five leagues.” -- Jacques Marquette, Relation of the voyages, discoveries, and death, of Father James Marquette ... By Henri de Tonti, Hiram Williams Beckwith, Illinois State Historical Library, p. 40 (1900)

Joliet, 1673: "The river which we named for Saint Louis [the Illinois River], which rises near the lower end of the lake of the Illinois, seemed to me the most beautiful, and most suitable for settlement. ... The river is wide and deep, abounding in catfish and sturgeon. Game is abundant there; oxen, cows, stags, does, and turkeys are found there in greater numbers than elsewhere. For a distance of eighty leagues, I did not pass a quarter of an hour without seeing some." The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, vol. 58, p. 107, Ruben Gold Thwaites, ed.

Jones, 1838: "I can imagine no richer soil, ... no greater variety of beautiful landscape." - Abner Jones, aboard the paddlewheeler Ashley, as found in

The Illinois River

By James Sterling Ayars, 1968.

low water thaw after high water freeze january 2010

"...and nearly three miles beyond came to the Mackinaw, a fine clear stream watering Tazewell County which we forded and about half a mile beyond came to a house where live a Quaker family of the name of Wilson. Here we got a nice breakfast which we enjoyed with great relish and some corn for our horses.”

William Cullen Bryant, poet, June 1832,

from The Life and Works of William Cullen Bryant, Vol. 6, p. 20

"Mackinaw River—....This stream is one of the most variable in the State in quantity of water, being subject to great floods in wet seasons and becoming nearly dry in seasons of drought. The variability is due to several causes, rapid fall, compact drift beds, and absence of headwater marshes being the principal ones."

The Illinois River and its Tributaries, 1901

p. 106

The Illinois State Board of Health

"In March, 1833, Hiram Havens went to More's mill on Panther Creek, in company with a man named Platt. But on his return he found it impossible to cross the Mackinaw. His companion, Platt, managed to cross on the ice with a pole, intending to go home and return with something for Havens to 'eat, but on his return it was impossible to re-cross the Mackinaw, as it had risen to an enormous height. Havens was left to lay all night on an open sled, on the bank of the Mackinaw in a sleeting storm. But he fortunately had his feet protected by a big dog, which kept them warm. The wolves came unpleasantly near and seemed very anxious to make mutton of him. The next morning he rode eight miles in the storm on one of his horses, leading the other. He obtained some parched corn for breakfast, of a man named More, then rode two miles farther to a house where he was given some boiled corn and venison. He lived there sixteen days before he could re-cross the Mackinaw."

- p. 632, The Good Old Times in McLean County, Illinois:

Containing Two Hundred and Sixty One Sketches of Old Settlers

and a Complete Historical Sketch of the Black Hawk War,

by Dr. E. Duis, Professor of German in the Bloomington Schools, 1874

"The Mackinaw is a very uncertain stream, and sometimes rises very high, and Mr. Thompson built a canoe to be used in this stream when it overflowed its channel. It was used several years for this purpose until a bridge was built."

- ibid., p. 137

"Mr. Wilcox has often hunted turkeys and killed as many as twelve in a day. He once chased a turkey to the bank of the Mackinaw and struck at it with his whip, as it was about to fly across, and the lash coiled around its neck and held it fast."

- ibid., p. 708

old forgotten people from illinois

Owen Lovejoy, resident of Princeton Illinois, lover of the Illinois River, abolitionist, conductor on the Underground Railroad, trafficking many slaves up the Illinois to Canada, called by Abraham Lincoln "my most generous friend," whose abolitionist brother Elijah was murdered in Alton by a pro-slavery mob, writing a frightening twenty page open letter to the entire city of Alton, admonishing them for their "public, premeditated, atrocious murder," never naming himself as his brother's brother, refusing to wish them harm but warning that the ghost of Justice would haunt the streets of Alton, her moan resounding on its cliffs "for ages to come," unless atonement be made, or "until a generation unstained by this action has taken your places," having moved northward to Princeton after that murder, becoming there an activist Congregationalist minister in that community, defending once there at his home's porch, refusing with a rifle to let anyone enter his home, a freed man named John, who had been employed for a few months in that community and well liked, from a mob and John's previous owner, and who from that porch gave a speech with the rifle in his arms on the "obligations of mutual benevolence and charity, and love upon the earth," member of the Illinois state legislature, and whose hair does kind of look a greasy in this photograph, elected to the House of Representatives, and who eventually after much persuasion moved finally Lincoln to join the fledgling anti-slavery party called then the Republican party, a party currently now morally loosened, adolescent and stuporous, having been a founding member of that party in the courthouse at Bloomington, a mile from my house, who joined also with Frederick Douglass in 1850 to found the Free Democratic Party and was good friends with Jesse Fell (a Quaker who founded Bloomington, and on whose street I once lived) and who refused tactically to yield, as even Lincoln did, on the issue of African-American suffrage, who refused to obey unjust laws and urged his congregants from the pulpit to ignore such laws, such that even Stephen Douglas, a judge and senator, in his debate with Lincoln in Ottawa, would mockingly accuse the future president of "learning Parson Lovejoy's catechism by heart," and of whom it was shouted, by a freed slave on the train, as it carried his body back to Illinois, when she learned that Owen Lovejoy was aboard and dead, "Such men should never die!," and who wrote of his own brother Elijah, "What a spectacle he was to angels and to men! Why was that sacred man there?"