Wild Flower (Lily), 1999. Lithograph and photolithograph, aluminum gold leaf, and collage. Printed and published by Tamarind Institute. via Whitney Museum.
Hung Liu, Wild Flower (Lily)
Author: dig
Reasons to stay
The Necessary Fluster
Kenneth Goldsmith’s concept of uncreative writing: Goldsmith—a true heir of Baudelaire’s dandyism—advocates for the wholesale borrowing or repurposing of language from any source rather than creating “new” text. It is a radical notion in a world saturated with cliches and nostalgic references. Goldsmith’s view is about making lateral moves rather than justifying what language is appropriate for poetry. It’s a vision of language that accepts “fluster.”
I also see Goldsmith’s ideas in direct conversation with visual art’s notion of the “found object.” An artist utilizing appropriation or a found object forces her audience to look anew—and critically—at the world. Artists and poets who do this go beyond style to pose conceptual questions: what does it mean, like Brooks or Baudelaire, to engage directly with the world surrounding you rather than looking toward the academy? How do you take advantage of the familiar while making it unfamiliar and surprising?
Naomi Beckwith, The Necessary Fluster, Poetry, June 2012
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
One Art, Elizabeth Bishop
AG2025_1133645a
An initial, fine-grained impulse is to claim an anagoge,
The pure image not enough in its ochres and rouge
[…]
We retreat from witness of its charnal blooms,
Our own premonitions of decay,
AG2023_1044486a or not of them
There were no photos of them, but they were there in the pictures of trees behind their houses, the fields where they worked, the river they fished, the church where they testified, the joints where they drank. (TM)
Pleasure augers survival. (RK)
AG2025_1167249a or the necessity of noncompliance with pressures
The Poetics of Disobedience, Alice Notley, 1998.
For a long time I’ve seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well.
[…]
I recently completed a very long poem called Disobedience but I didn’t realize that disobeying was what I was doing, what perhaps I’d always been doing until the beginning of the end of it, though the tone throughout was one of rejection of everything I was supposed to be or to affirm, all the poetries all the groups the clothes the gangs the governments the feelings and reasons.
082425
Burner Phone 101. (Rebecca Williams)
“At airports and border crossings, another key strategy is to minimize what is on your device in the first place. Removing social media apps, old texts, photos, and other sensitive content lowers the risk if your phone is searched or confiscated, since less will be available to access.”
A Garden of Impressions, Emanuele Coccia. via a Luiz Zerbini catalogue.
AG2025_1167426a+28a
When through the village lurking
Nought gives them check or fright,
No watch dog dares to bellow,
The Wolves, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, translated from the Russian by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi