PATRICK DURGIN, MELANIE NOEL
& THE CALIFORNIA FILM 1985
by DON MEE CHOI

Saturday, May 18 2013
Doors open @ 7pm, reading starts @ 7:30pm

The Poetic Research Bureau @ Telic Arts
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA

Patrick Durgin wrote and published PQRS earlier this year and is also coauthor of The Route (Atelos, 2008, with Jen Hofer). He has published numerous chapbooks, including Imitation Poems (2006) and Color Music (2002). Durgin is also editor of Hannah Weiner’s Open House and The Early and Clairvoyant Journals of Hannah Weiner. He teaches critical theory, literature, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Melanie Noel is the author of The Monarchs (Stockport Flats, 2013). Her work has appeared in Weekday, LVNG, La Norda Especialo and THE ARCADIA PROJECT. She’s also written poems for short films and installations, and co-curated APOSTROPHE, a dance, music, and poetry series. She now curates Impala, a reading series that takes place in her grandmother’s car.

Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. She is also a translator of contemporary Korean writing including, most recently Kim Hyesoon’s Princess Abandoned (Tinfish, 2012) and All the Garbage of the World Unite! (Action Books, 2011), winner of the 2012 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.

Don Mee Choi writes:

The California Film 1985 (15 mins.)
In 1980, I was still living with my family in Hong Kong. In May of that year, my father filmed numerous anti-dictatorship demonstrations in Seoul, South Korea and the triumphant beginning of the pro-democratic uprising led by students and civilians in the city of Kwangju. Just before the Kwangju massacre in which about 2000 were killed by South Korean troops, all foreign news staff were given an order to leave the country. My father safely returned to Hong Kong. My brother was still in Seoul, caught up in the wave of nation-wide demonstrations. After what he had seen that year and the massacre that took place in Kwangju, my father thought that we could never return to South Korea, that the military rule would never end. We all had to go somewhere and find a place to live. My father’s job allowed him to relocate with my mother and younger brother to Frankfurt, Germany. My older brother was able to leave South Korea and landed in Australia. My sister stayed in Hong Kong to finish her studies, then left for Australia. I was actually the first one to depart from Hong Kong in order to find a “place”—a year after the Kwangju uprising. The place I landed was Los Angeles. At CalArts, I began working with super8 and 16mm films shortly after producing some series of sculptures/installations. I was most moved by Straub’s and Huillet’s film, History Lessons (1972). I was struck not only by the powerful dissonance of image and sound, but also how the film so effectively disrupted conventional cinematic expectations, especially setting—a sense of place. I wanted to show in my films how dissonant my new external surroundings were to my internal ones—the places I had left behind in South Korea and Hong Kong. For me, a place was and still is not seamless. I wanted to convey in my films a sense of disorientation, dislocation, and placelessness. The California Film 1985 was shot entirely hand held, and my artist friend, Claudia Ryan, kindly agreed to be in it. Melanie Noel, my poet friend, will be projecting the film with a hand-held projector onto various unconventional, transitory surfaces.

…my point is and is not that Elrick is just copying reality. Rather, what her work is pointing to is not so much in spoken discourse (whether through mimesis or simulation) but, what is not in spoken discourse, what we do not hear until Elrick put it into her book.

Read more here.

Read more about Propagation–and order a copy for yourself–right here.

Announcing the publication of PQRS, by Patrick Durgin.

PQRS is a poets theater script with initials for names and functions for characters. It is about linguistic contagion and statist collusion, the fate of labor and play as literary genre (i.e. “essay”), the utility of public art and site-specificity in the post-medium age, the plasticity of gender, the metaphysics of lyric address, and several other topics. It was written between 1998 and 2012, mostly toward the end of that period.

Patrick Durgin is coauthor of The Route (Atelos, 2008, with Jen Hofer) and has published numerous chapbooks, including Imitation Poems (2006) and Color Music (2002). Durgin is also  editor of Hannah Weiner’s Open House and The Early and Clairvoyant Journals of Hannah Weiner. He teaches critical theory, literature, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Patrick Durgin @ Pennsound and @ EPC

With a genuine sweep and suspense, PQRS up-ends and pats down received ideas of genre, putting its principal characters (the eponymous P, Q, R and my own favorite, S) through their paces on an imaginary stage in an imaginary play.  Designed not to be acted or produced, Durgin calls this work a “script,” which I like for its straightfoward modesty.  But as I see it, it’s first cousin to something like the 1930s “essay-novels” of Virginia Woolf, Orlando or The Pargiters—books written simultaneously in two veins, each illuminating the other in unexpected, and here thrilling, ways.  Like aging stars, P, Q, R, and S upstage each other, disconcert each other, all in the interest of presenting as much enlightenment as we can sit for, within the pages of a single book; so they form a serious quartet with comic overtones, like the lovers and mages of Mozart’s “Non ti fidar, O misera.”  Don’t trust him, O sad person!—Kevin Killian

The “performance” “script” Patrick Durgin imagines in PQRS is not so much dramaturgical as sweepingly demiurgical, in the sense that it fashions a world out of the chaos of a twenty-first-century poet’s broad field of experience and association (literary history, music and film, economic theory, sculpture, public art, performance art, and poetics, to name a few examples). This world is inhabitable, if not comfortable: it is a world that resists staging in any conventional sense, but whose very conceptual difficulty supplies a context for new models of dramatic form and provides a vehicle for the kinds of thinking and representing that happen when various avant-garde ideologies collide with the twin crises of postmodern irony and capitalist recuperation. The tidy serialism implied by the title is a feint that dissolves into a frenetic vista of spectacular anxieties and social realities. It would be banal to confine PQRS under the tired rubric of “cross-genre”; rather, it rehearses genre’s continuing usefulness as a category and finds it wanting.—K. Silem Mohammad

Reminiscent of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, albeit in an intensified and wildly fluid twenty-first century context, Patrick Durgin’s essay-as-poetics script releases a discursive energy typically suppressed in theater. This is a theater of compressed time, bursting within the seams of global capital’s themes. A spooky and illuminating work.—Carla Harryman

ISBN: 978-0-9846475-7-6 (2013) $12.95

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Read more here…

–at RAIN TAXI

Some Math here and here.

–at HTML GIANT

Left Having here and here.

Propagation’s minimalist scoring belies an obsession with the gestural repleteness of discourse, with what poet and linguist Henri Meschonnic called the embodied aptitude of language (“a poem is an activity, not a product”). One central activity of this poem is listening, to language public and private, living and mediated, and to texts we read silently or aloud to one another. A series, the poems in Propagation also test audible vectors by sifting and colliding, graphing and distilling. What emerges is both residue and metamorphosis: a materialist sensing of the complex ecosystems of language and experience.

Laura Elrick is the author of Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School, 2005) and sKincerity (Krupskaya, 2003). Her psychogeographically-inspired research and performance works include the oppositional cartography Blocks Away (2010), the video-poem Stalk (2008), and a sound work, 5 Audio Pieces for Doubled Voice (2005). Her work also appears in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, VIZ Inter-Arts: A Trans-Genre Anthology, and The Eco Language Reader. She currently teaches poetry and poetics at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Laura Elrick’s Propagation is incantatory, magical, mischievous, devilish. Its syntax is resistant, fluid, impeded; its lineation outwits givens, decommodifies ideas, modulates stances, transforms terms. The poems are moody—sullen, fanciful, sardonic, meditative, funny, mad. Propagation, in other words, invites multiple readings, but not only because one can voice its polyphonic perspective so variously; it does so, above all, because it is enchanting, wondrous. In the myth, Pandora’s box turned out to contain mostly sinister forces and the origins of human woe. Elrick’s Propagation acknowledges the presence of this sad panoply, but what emerges most forcefully from this book is the revolutionary power of hope, not as mere promise but as an articulate practice.—-Lyn Hejinian

Propagation imagines a poetics in corporeal and synaptic listenings, where we find ourselves wondering to what are we obedient? The syllable? The ear? At times in this book, I am still and bodily (an almost watching) but simultaneously I am struck by the movement between what is aural and what is a lurking narrative. And where the brilliance lies is that we begin to recognize our own patterns in Elrick’s. Within a poetics that interrogates (as sleep patterns) the tension of what we are meant to say and what our bodies permit. There is no feigned fluency here. But there is pleasure – in listening to Propagation – the language as cochlear strata opening towards a something, that while lacking in certitude, relishes in what is disfluent. You are here. Amassing something in the folds.—-Jordan Scott

In unkettleable, molecularized refrains, Laura Elrick builds immersive environments that pick up and reinflect the distributed attention of networked subjectivity in our contemporary phonotope. Read-listen as ambient strains turn focal through expert recursive manipulation of unauthored fragments. Here iteration of apparently simple functions produces complex behaviors: Propagation lets commonsing convene dissonance || “talking matters and silence silence matters” || catches disavowal in its very turns of veiling || “I would never never” || and yet sees “a fraction of love” as “a whole fraction.” The “earworms” of the resulting radio-Orphée present a disembodied corporeality of sound loaded with psychoacoustic resonance: “do you do you want seriously want” || yes-say-yes.—-Judith Goldman

ISBN: 978-0-9846475-8-3   $14.95.

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This is a pop-up book fair brought to you by those who put together the menacingly popular Chicago Book Expo. Like the Expo itself, Chicago’s finest independent publishers will be on hand selling their wares. Quimby’s Bookstore will also stock a table with a selection of books/zines penned by Chicagoans. The bar will be open and there will be live music throughout the day.

Choreographed by Cid Pearlman with an original score composed and performed by Joan Jeanrenaud, text by poet Denise Leto, and musical direction by Maya Barsacq, Your Body Is Not a Shark uses physical limitation and difference as a point of departure for examining the creative process. It is an inquiry into the subtlety of form – poetic, choreographic, musical – and into the ways in which form’s constraints inspire. “One of the goals of Shark is to redefine what the heroic or virtuosic body means,” adds Leto. “Physical difference or limitation can be generative. The question to ask then is, What are the possibilities for multiple forms of expression when the limit becomes the art?”

WHO:
Choreographer Cid Pearlman
Composer Joan Jeanrenaud
Poet Denise Leto
Music Director Maya Barsacq
Dancers Sarah Day, Damara Vita Ganley, Molly Katzman, David King, Nahshon Marden, and Sara Wilbourne.
Instrumentalists from CADENZA, a chamber orchestra in Santa Cruz

WHAT:
The world premiere of Your Body Is Not a Shark, a performance piece encompassing dance, live music, and sound collage.

WHEN:
January 11-13, 2013
Friday and Saturday @ 8pm
Sunday @ 3pm

WHERE:
ODC Theater
3153 17th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110

TICKETS:
$24/$18
Call 415-863-9834, Wed-Sat, 12-6pm. Or online visit: odctheater.org/buytickets.php.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
cidpearlman.org