reading kenneth goldsmith

I've been reading 'Uncreative Writing' for the past day or so. the most fascinating element I've come across is this notion of language permeating. Goldsmith talks about how everything we encounter digitally is language on a sub level... that code which makes your graphics run is language. there has been a terror in literature of the internet & what it means for language & the written word. Goldsmith posits that we must merely reevaluate our understanding of literature to fit in this new (digital) world.

This I have been thinking about a lot. I have been operating in my "creative life" (as pretentious as that sounds) under the etymological definition of the word 'poetry'... i.e. 'something fashioned or made'. that definition has no mention of language, or words, or line breaks, or form, or whatever else we have arbitrarily decided makes something a poem. & though I'm not particularly far along in Goldsmith's book I think it might be at the root of the idea I've been trying to hash out.

Take this for example:

I made this image using a process Goldsmith describes. I first opened a .jpg file in text edit. of course the file opened as a indecipherable series of symbols (language). I inserted randomly the text of a poem I had written. when I oped the file again in a picture viewer it had been completely changed. Goldsmith writes: "What we're experiencing for the first time is the ability of language to alter all media [...] Words are active & affective in concrete ways." 

I think that's beautiful. 

 

say a prayer tonight for those to whom justice has not been served.

flesh

"Cooked, the meat will blacken, grow dark in the night like a bruise."

-claire donato, burial

on writers block

my skin
sprawling—
expectant like cloudless 
terrain on a red
planet, alien & undulating
its circumspiral edges
raw like tin


-nr2013

playing with sounds

trying out audio...
all original sounds recorded & layered by moi.

When I write poems they rely heavily on the visual, I think of them more as tiny sculptures. Now in my experiments with audio I'm trying to figure out how sound can be involved. How sound works & how garage band works! Somehow, the auditory is more accessible to me right now.

church ave brooklyn, 2h15pm.

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

-Emily Dickinson.