WE7

Chih-Chung Tsai

LTWR113: Rivera-Garza

WE:3

WE7: High Fidelity

In the past 13 years, the entire field of writing has both broadened and deepened socially, mostly for the better.

The other part of this primary decision was that the idea of writing a single poem that was somehow “the same” over such a long period of time seemed intensely problematic to me – the question of boredom’s no abstraction.

Having said that, one section, “Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect,” has taken me years to complete and it’s nowhere near done at the moment. That section in fact has become – I don’t think I intended it as such – the secret spine of The Alphabet as a whole.

That logic is ultimately intuitive. I seem to know where a given section is going to be headed sometimes years in advance, but very little about what it will look like when it gets there. I’ve been thinking about a poem – sometimes this thinking is little more than a sense of shape upon the page or vocabulary or tone, the sort of thing that comes to you when you first wake in the morning even before you remember your name, very amorphous.

In San Francisco in the 1970s, one could go inexpensively to the SF Art Institute and see independent film that was, in fact, just that – Bruce Connors, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow. Kathy Acker, whom I first met in 1972 or ’73, was a walking encyclopedia of every avant-garde movement possible

I’m not a very mathematical person, or at least I don’t think of myself as one. In my day job, I struggle with some of the basic formulae used to calculate a firm’s net present value, for example, that sort of thing. I barely got through math in high school and took only one course in college (largely just to prove to myself that I could do it).

Still, one of my eight-year-old sons wrote me a note the other day that was simply a schematic of Pascal’s triangle – so that must come from somewhere.

            Having grown up without a father, I was extraordinarily hesitant about dealing with older male writers, so generally stayed at arm’s length.

When I had finished Crow in 1970, I knew that it would be the only book that looked even somewhat like the poetry I’d grown up with during the previous decade. But I struggled with what my work needed to become for years.

Themes are always a consideration, though just one of many. What, in this sense, is a theme?

I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for formal reasons and partly because I'm not interested in "making things up."

Literature needs audiences, but not a "public."

Disputes as to the "excellence" of one kind of writing or another are in fact sub rosa arguments as to which social group will dominate the other.

And there is no such thing as naturalism in literature. It, too, is simply an affected style. At the same time, there is no such thing as "simple individuals."

My poetic forms are addressed to very specific people who are more easily addressed in those forms. In

WE5

Chih-Chung Tsai

LTWR113: Rivera-Garza

WE:5

Work

            While in San Francisco, he (Ron Silliman) served on numerous community boards including the 1980 Census Oversight Committee, the Arson Task Force of the San Francisco Fire Department, and the State Department of Health's Task Force on Health Conditions in Locale Detention Facilities.

“It’s a cold world out there. Criminals need to be put away. They’re the side of society that no one wants to see, no one wants to pass on the street at midnight in an unlit part of the city. We put them where we don’t have to see them. And then we forget them. But the worst part is that we forget them. Because we forget that they too are humans, and we do a very un-human thing, treating a person like an object. In the end, we all become a little less human. It’s not a question of ‘who started it’, but a statement of ‘There’s a better way’.

            “Deterrence is a future oriented concept: Rob now, and you will pay later. Phil Zombardo, chairman of Stanford’s Psychiatric Department says Orientation towards the future is a middle class concept. Unemployed people with few job skills don’t even have weekends to look forward to.”

            Our prisons have everything to do with us. Even the perfect, white, suburban family with 2.5 kids, a minivan and a sedan, both sets of grandparents who visit only on holidays and bring heaps of gifts, even they are deeply involved in this discussion of where we put killers, rapists, and shoplifters. In a store, where we stock the shelves with factory made products to be sold, we never put out the defective products. We don’t want the customers to see those. So we set them aside, in some clearance aisle. Or we ship them off to be sold at a 99 cent store or some other lower cost retailer. In society, where the ideal lifestyle is the ultimate product, we don’t want to have to see crime in its ugly face. We don’t want to know that someone who did something wrong might be our neighbor, or even know that we live down the street from someone who once stole a car ten years ago. People are merely products, and we put the defective ones away in these prisons we built. How much do we spend just to make sure that we don’t have to see them again? When indeed it could be cheaper to rehabilitate, to fix, and ultimately take the price tag off of humans?

            “Have you ever visited a prison? I doubt it. I doubt you’ve ever talked to someone who’s been to prison before.”

            “No I haven’t.”

            “Well let me tell you. It’s nothing like what the movies say, it’s nothing like what the politicians say, and it’s nothing like you would ever imagine it to be. Fuck prisons. They make people crazy. You got the guards who hate the prisoners, and go to work each day just trying to make sure they don’t get stabbed, and to make sure the prisoners don’t take the easy way out and get killed themselves. They have to be in it for the long haul. Then the prisoners hate the guards, simply for being there. Even the nicer guards get shit sometimes, being “the man”, you know? The face of the institution. Something like that. I know on the outside you got people trying to make prisons a nicer place. But it’s a place filled with hate. People are angry here, they’ll just get out and stay angry. I don’t blame them though. They’re angry for what others do to them. They’re angry cuz most of them feel like they’ve been put here against their will, like someone put them here. Even though they admit that they pulled the trigger or pushed the knife, they get the sense that someone else was involved, everyone else was involved. So what’s the point?”

In 2002, United States prisons and jails

held more than 2 million inmates for the

first time. In Massachusetts, more than 20,000

residents are incarcerated and over 40,000 more

are on probation or parole.

The criminal justice population suffers a high

prevalence of health problems. Most inmates have

not had access to non-emergency medical care,

creating an immense financial burden to the state

in expensive medical interventions that could have

been avoided through improved detection,

prevention and treatment.

Incarcerated populations have significantly higher

rates of substance abuse and risk behaviors, such

as intravenous drug use and violence, than the

general population. This contributes to the high

rates of infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS,

hepatitis C, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted

diseases found in the incarcerated population.

Additionally, drug addiction, lack of access to

health care, poverty, substandard nutrition, poor

housing conditions, and homelessness often

contribute to increased risk for chronic conditions

such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, skin

conditions, poor oral health, gastrointestinal

disease, diabetes and asthma.

The ramifications of these health problems are

experienced not only by people moving through the

criminal justice system, but also by the

communities to which they return.

• If infectious diseases are not prevented,

detected and treated adequately, the

public’s health is being put in jeopardy.

• If the chronic illnesses and behavioral risk

factors of the incarcerated population are

not addressed comprehensively, vast

financial resources will continue to be spent

on preventable expensive medical

interventions.

• If substance abuse and mental health

treatment are not adequate and integrated,

opportunities will be missed to use costeffective

means to protect the public’s

safety

WE3 Words published and Unpublished

Chih-Chung Tsai

LTWR113: Rivera-Garza

WE:3

Words published and Unpublished:

The trinity of privacy

            The door slams. A voice shouts. A woman weeps. A fist slams against the wall. The husband hollers at her. The house is enveloped in chaos, a verbal storm, complete with lightning bolts of violent outbursts, and the thunder of raging words. But between their house and mine, crickets chirp in the warm air of a summer night. The house falls silent, and lights turn dark. The crickets win this night.

            The next morning, the husband waves to me as he clutches the mug of coffee, walking down the driveway to pick up the newspaper. On that newspaper he will read the same words I will read over my breakfast, the same words a million others will read. These are words that we will all share. At the office, I can talk to a coworker for hours about the words printed on the sports page, as we have our verbal brainstorm. But the next door husband will never realize that I hear his words, words that were meant for his wife. His words were as the headlines, splayed out before me.

            I take no pleasure in hearing these words of his. I’ve closed my window, buried myself under a pillow, yet these words reach me, like the rays of a dying sun. They are private words, words that mean nothing to me, but in their privacy, they are a roaring voice.

            I asked the wife one day if everything is all right. I told her that I can hear him yelling every night. She looked at the ground and told me that everything was fine. She will go home and one of these days, she will tell her husband what I just told her. Those words will not be private, for they will be shared with the husband, but they are not public, for no one knows of it but the three of us.

            Words are an intricate form, for they dance through the delicate relationships of context. They can be secluded by silence, or propagated by prevalence. They exist in one place, but disappear in another, shaping our ever evolving landscape of reality. Words are the reason that man cannot perceive an objective reality, but always subjective, bringing our surroundings under subjugation of judgments, decisions, and opinions. Or are words the symptoms of our inability to see objectively?

            His words to her, his words to me, my words to her, and her words to him. So far, we three pronouns, he, she, and me, have not yet spoken to the world. We have been the trinity of privacy, speaking amongst ourselves to protect this delicate prose of privacy. Who amongst us will dare to break this seal, to speak to the world that is blind to these words?

            We have no privacy anymore these days. In the postmodern landscape, like a city filled with the hard surfaces of skyscrapers and cement, sharp corners and edges, the sound of words reverberate and travel, continuing to the places where they are not warranted.

            One morning, the wife ran from the front door of their pristine house, tears streaming down her face. Her nightgown flowed in the morning wind, the hem flailing like a curtain trying to hide an open window during a storm. She wore a bruise on her face, a bruise that glowed dark with pain. She ran to me, and I lifted the phone. I spoke. Words that became public. Words that evolved into a court mandated restraining order. His face wore an expressionless mask. He was without words. He realized what he had done, and he cried out, “Why are you leaving me? I’ll never do it again. I’m SORRY! Don’t forsake me!”

            His words never grew. They never evolved. They fell dead, in the grave of silence. The world heard his anguished voice, but saw no words. She heard his words, but saw no grace. I heard his words, and tasted fury. Perhaps this is the reason words are kept so private, because they have the ability to unleash a myriad of unpredictable emotions, reactions that could never be gauged. And so in the public sphere, we exchange meaningless, arbitrary, objective words that we can all agree upon. Words like sports, like numbers and names, of places that bring pleasant memories. Words that we all know, and feel nothing about. These words are spoken by voices that we care nothing for, because they are not ours.

we 7

Pavel Sterin

Writing Exercise #7

Intercultural Writing

1.22.11

DH: When and why did you begin writing?

RS: I began in fifth grade. My teacher that year, Vance Teague, had us write for an hour each week, every Wednesday morning. There were no rules, no genre limitations, just write. It very quickly became my favorite time at school.

DH: When did you first consider yourself a writer?

RS: When I was a teenager, about a couple of years before I seriously started to try to do the real stuff, as distinct from the kid writing projects I did in school.

            Ever opened a book of poetry and had absolutely no idea how to interact with or process the text because it was so far beyond your ken? Ever read a poem that felt like abstract algebraic theory? Welcome to Ron Silliman and the addictive joy of unlocking his text. This man is deep down the rabbit hole, falling into the category of language poet after becoming bored by, termed by Silliman himself, “The School of Quietude.” Silliman sees all his poetry as being part of the same poem, or lifework. His poems often involve circularity, mismatched logic, games, and general horseplay. Ketjack, for example, from his book The Age of Huts is a poem of approximately 100 pages that took over a decade to compose.

TAV: How have developments in Internet technology (especially email, blogs, sites like the Electronic Poetry Center, Modern American Poetry) affected your personal sense of a poetic community? Do you have a vision of further developments along these lines?

RS: The Internet is a communications technology, but so is the book. Both enable asynchronous communication – I write this now and you read it at a later date, maybe hours, maybe centuries. But the Internet also can be synchronous – instant messaging, for example. The book as an object is a one-to-one technology in its essence: one reader at a time & most often one author. Yet that can be altered somewhat – an anthology or a magazine, for that manner, is a many to one technology. And printing enables multiples, which can be shipped out to be sold in lots at every Wal-Mart in the world. So for a John Grisham, the idea of the book as a one to many technology may seem “ordinary” .The Internet can do every one of these kinds of combinations. And it’s still a very young technology in historic terms. The gap from the Gutenberg Bible to Tottel’s Miscellaney, the first anthology of poetry in English, was 103 years.. University rare book and manuscript libraries thus far have taken the position that hard copy is truth. They don’t want your collected letters on a platform that won’t exist in twenty years, in spite of the cost of page-by-page physical preservation, which is daunting.

        

Ron Silliman's fame and notoriety have grown considerably since

2002, due in large part to his popular and controversial blog: Silliman's Blog. Debuting on August 29, 2002 to little fanfare and without expectations of an audience, it is now arguably the most influential English-language blog on the web that is devoted to contemporary poetry and poetics. In early February 2007, Silliman's Blog had surpassed 1,000,000 hits.

SG: I suspect some readers have a difficult time placing your work within a tradition, fiction or poetry or journalism or prose poetry or whatever. What do you consider your work to be?

RS: I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for formal reasons and partly because I'm not interested in "making things up." And although most readers aren't familiar with it, there is a tradition of the prose poem, extending back 160 years to the work of Aloysius Bertrand, which is seldom incorporated into the teaching of creative writing in the academy. Creative prose is subsumed under the term fiction, with the result that works that don't fit the category are ignored. But subsuming prose under the term fiction is like subsuming all of what can occur in a text under the rubric of character, or narrative. For example, the work of Baudelaire in prose is extraordinarily interesting. He was the first person capable of using prose as a closed, stanzaic form. I often use Theodor Adomo's Minima Moralia to demonstrate how his essays, which may be only six or seven sentences long, use sentence length and prosody as elements clearly integral to his argumentation. Wittgenstein is another writer whose prose can be viewed from the same perspective. It's not an accident that a person who is an interesting stylist, like Derrida, can have a far greater impact than perhaps the weight of his ideas would suggest he should have, while equally useful thinkers who are not such compelling writers may be perceived as less important. By organizing our academic institutions around fiction rather than around prose, by subsuming all forms of prose into fiction instead of the other way around, a great deal of confusion has set in. At Berkeley, linguistics and rhetoric are departments apart from literature—compartmental aphasia.

            Canyons, paths


dug thru the snow
                       

Tunnels

The walls as high as

Shoulders

The weight of it

Heavier

When it begins to melt

& then, at sunset

still midafternoon

the temperature drops

wind over the ridge

so that by dawn

each surface

hardens into face

DH: Do you have a specific writing style? RS: I'm a straightforward realist.

DH: Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?  It sounds silly to say "Be Here Now," but I think that's the message of all good writing.

we 6

                                                Pavel Sterin

                                                                                                     Writing Exercise #6

                                                                                                            Option B. Translation

Canyons, paths


dug thru the snow
                       

Tunnels


the walls as high as


shoulders


The weight of it


heavier


when it begins to melt


& then, at sunset


still midafternoon
t

he temperature drops


wind over the ridge


so that by dawn


each surface


hardens into ice



Dams clog the drains


to turn the window


facing north


into a waterfall . . . 

Каньоны, пути 


вырыл в снегу 


Тоннели 


стены выше, чем


плечи 


вес его


тяжелее 


когда он начинает таять


и тогда, на закате


еще полдень 
Т

он перепады температуры 


ветер над хребтом 


таким образом, чтобы к рассвету 


каждая поверхность


затвердевает в лед 
 


Плотины забивают стоки


в свою очередь окне


на север 


в водопад. . .

峡谷，小路


通过挖雪


隧道


城墙一样高


肩膀


它的重量


较重


当它开始融化


＆然后，在夕阳


仍然午后
吨

他体温下降


在风岭


因此到天亮


每个表面

成冰


变硬

大坝堵塞排水沟


打开窗口


朝北


成瀑布。 。 。

Cañones, rutas 


excavado en la nieve 


Túneles 


las paredes tan altas como

Hombros 
 


El peso de la misma


 
más pesado

cuando empieza a derretirse


y luego, al atardecer



media tarde todavía t

que la temperatura desciende 


viento sobre la cresta 


por lo que al amanecer 


cada superficie

Endurece 

 
en el hielo

Las represas obstruyen los desagües


para activar la ventana



hacia el norte

en una cascada. . .

والأخاديد ، ومسارات 


حفرت خلال 
الثلوج

الأنفاق 


الجدران مرتفعا كما



الكتفين

وزن منه



أثقل

عندما تبدأ في الذوبان


وبعد ذلك، عند غروب الشمس

تي لا تزال 

وضح النهار

انه تنخفض درجة الحرارة 


الرياح فوق 
ريدج

حتى قبل ان 
الفجر

كل سطح


تتحجر في الجليد 
 


السدود تسد فتحات تصريف المياه


لتحويل النافذة


تواجه شمال 


الى الشلال. . .

Translation is the comprehension of the meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an equivalent text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language.

        

Ron was influenced by a variety of authors, mostly American poets such as William Carlos Williams. Ron worked as an editor throughout a majority of his career, and knows all about it editing and changing a piece of work. Ron Silliman has been accustomed to revisions of pieces throughout his entire life, but unfortunately his work has never been translated into a different language, at least not until now.