Well, I'm here in the Wexler Studio and Davey is here. Hi Davey. Hey all. Lily. Hello. Anna. Hey. Ujwala is here. Hello, Ujwala. Hello. Good to see you. Nasser Hussain- Hi. -who has traveled here from Leeds via somewhere in Ontario, Windsor. Windsor. It's great to see you Nass. It's really great to see you. It's great to be here. We're excited and we're going to be talking mostly about a book, a new book published by Coach House Books, which is headquartered in Toronto, although Anna and Zack and I got to hang out with you in Montreal at the launch party, which celebrated this book among others. It's called Sky Wri Tei Ngs or Sky Writings. The constraint which we'll talk much more about is simply this, no word in the book is anything other than a three letter airport code. How do you write with that? So we've picked out three poems from among these many interesting, clever, funny, biting, constraint poems based on that constraint, picked three poems out. Three poems that will resonate as a response to maybe a critique of, maybe a nod toward, maybe an acknowledgment of poems that are familiar to people who care about the ModPo poems. One that's a response to Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein, another that is responsive to Christian Bok, his Eunoia, and the third, a response to Walt Whitman. So Nass, would you be willing to read the three poems and then we'll just talk. Certainly. I feel like I should take them in chronological order, of a bi-poet. So we'll start with Walter Whitman. This is a creative interpretation of Song of Myself for Walter Whitman. Me me me me me me me. Barbaric yawp. Me me me me me me me. Any snaps for that one? Thank you. Then we'll move into the high modernist frame with Tender Buttons for Gertrude. Roast-acow, mutton, bre-akfast, sug-ar, cranberries, milk, eggs, apples, tails, lunch, cup, rhubarb, single, fish, cake, custard, pot-ato, asp-ara-gus, but-ter, end of summ-er, sausag-es, cel-ery, veal, vege-table, cooking, chicken, pastry, cre-am, cuc-um-ber, din-ner, dimmed in, eat, sal-ad, sau-ces, sal-mon, ora-nge, coc-oa and clears soup and oranges and oatmeal. Salad dressings and artichoke. A center in a table. Finally, for Christian Bok, Eunoia. Unfett-ered the sentence says repr-ess frees each. The texts del-etes sel-ect-ed let-ter. So we see the revered eggs each eat rej-ect meat heard versa. The says tat the ters-at, even the son revers on Greg. He reb-els. He's at new pre-cedence. I want to collect first responses to the project and then we'll get into the poems. Invite each of you to say one thing and then Nass you can respond and then we'll start looking at the poem's. Davey, what was your first response to this constraint in the experiment. My first response was, sorry Al, two responses. One of which- You get two Davey because you have lots of license around here. Thank you. One was being curious about whether this constraint turns air transit officials into poets or vice versa, does it turn poets to air transit officials? The other was to- That's your first thought? Yes. That was pretty extraordinary. That was like my seventh thought. The other was to think about the weather, and to think about the weather because the IIT cards were developed in the 1930's for the National Weather Service. So I was curious to think about how talking about transit and about place and about travel is a procedure of talking about weather. We can talk more about that or not. I'm sure we'll talk about both those points. That's great. Lily. First response. Yeah my first response is how much of the original, I don't know, do you want to say original work but originally by the people for whom the poems are in like Christian Bok and Gertrude Stein. How much is. Not so much Whitman though. No, and Whitman also I think. Maybe a little less. Lot's of me me me me. Well, how much is present of the original work, how much you can hear more than see I think. It really brought out from Nass's reading. When you just look at this, you don't necessarily, even if you're familiar with this chapter in Eunoia, you might not see it immediately, but then to hear someone try to pronounce it, you can hear how similar it is to the original text. For this particular poem, I think my first thought was, especially for Eunoia, this was already a poem that came through so much restraint, and then that this was possible was, the whole book for me, that was my first thought that this is possible, and then here coming here and being like, "Oh, this is possible too." With the Whitman one, I was just like, "I had fun." I was like, "Oh, look what he did." Got you, Walt. Yeah. Got you, Walt. What are your reactions to the reactions? I didn't know about the weather thing. My very shallow dive into the history of the IETA. Actually, I think positioned it around the end of the Second World War, when a global sense of thinking came into play, and the need to codify the planet, in a way, became really important. So in that sense, a global climate thing is baked in there. Yeah, that's really interesting. The sonic value of the poems is quite a challenge. I mean, I cheated a bit with eunoia, or I'm forced to cheat, or I don't know if cheating is the right word, but I have to dive in and out; and what I like, what readers I think and I think what you're picking up on her, that sort of multiple reading strategies, where sometimes the word is what the word is, and sometimes you have to piece it together, and sometimes it's doing both at the same time. It's a challenge in performance, which I find really fun. It means it's going to be hard to read these poems the same way twice ever, which wasn't really unexpected. Read, as in perform? Yeah. To say that loud, to perform. The fact that I can't get into a read with them, as I read them, is really interesting to me. I didn't expect that as a results. It's a natural thing, at least for someone like me to see a poem referring to, or in honor of, or influenced by, or under the sign of another poet, without thinking of not in a [inaudible] and agonistic sense, but we're all poets, and we have different poetic stances sense. You have a very different poetic stance from that of Walt Whitman in Rose respects. So let's take that poem, for instance. I want to ask my colleagues here for responses to whether Nass meant it or not, it's a critique of Walt Whitman. What is that critique? Who wants to start? Lily, what's their critique? Well, I think, just to hear outside of home, if you would hear someone say the words me, me, me, me, you would think that it's a stereotypical thing someone would say after you make fun of someone, for making everything about them, by being like, with you it's always, "Me, me, me." So it feels like, you can take the tone from that comment, and maybe Nass can say if that's the critique he had meant to be putting on Whitman. So that's a good critique, egocentric to say the least, narcissistic. So that's one reading of me, me, me. It's me, me, me, but the second reading is the eager beaver "Me, me, me," which Walt definitely is also. Then finally the, "Me me me me me me me," Walt is always throat clearing. There's a lot of throat clearing. I thought about that, the throat clearing in preparation for the barbaric yawp. Anyway, good. Davey, I'll throw one out and you were supposed throw one out a possible critique, and you can respond, and Uchuyla as well. All of these poems take their subject matter, in some cases, other poets, and they turn them into journeys that are potentially treacherous, journeys that will be actually difficult to enact. In fact, the author Nasser Hussain, despite his UK and Canadian passports because of his name in 20, let's just say '11, '12, maybe 2018, maybe 2019 coming into the United States, would have a little trouble making the trips actually work. So there is that disparity. I don't want to just stipulate that we can talk about that later, but the point is that for Walt Whitman, there's no map. The reason is because Walt never goes anywhere. That's just a fabulous irony given Walt's claim to a kind of transatlantic and also international passage of India way of being everywhere always, and Nass maybe intentionally has him stay more or less still. What's the airport MEE, do we know? In New Caledonia. It's in New Caledonia. So Walt is just there. Yeah, what do you think of that point, Davey? But it also helps. Something that was super useful to me about the airport codes, is that they're taking poets who we might not read within a global frame, and certainly not within a frame of thinking about colonialism, and thinking about relations of power, and really demanding that we do that. That if we're going to take that Whitman's funny because we don't always take him seriously as someone who's interested in implicitness in really thinking about the blab of the pave is like the pave not being like a stage for human interaction not just the social like a real materials space like we don't. I don't know how much to take him as an urbanist. That's something that I like. He may be a fake urbanist. I think he might be a fake urbanist, and this is demanding that if he's interested in a kind of expansive colonial appropriation that we take him at his word, and think about what it would look like to locate him, to ground him in specific locations that are, I mean, these are municipal codes. They're part of state power, and there's something really lovely about making experimental poetry out of nonsense framing designed to facilitate systems of state power. There's also something really lovely about taking someone who has a kind of mix misuse of power look like generosity, which I feel like it happens in Whitman's work a lot, and hold him accountable for that, it's super cool. Nass, before we turn to Stein, I want to invite you to say something about Walt, your relationship to Walt. I mean I'm just going to say, again, I think and you can react to it. I think you're saying, "Walt, it's not so free and easy, everyone is constrained; here, I'm going to show you how writing about you can be constrained." Ha, ha, ha, or welcome to the club, or I don't know if you're helping him along. Do you want to say something about you and Walt? Yeah, I do. Do you have a relationship with Walt? I do. I think I do. He was formative in my, he's one of the first poets that I really started to understand what poems are for and what they can do. I had that kind of, this is going to sound terrible, and almost, yeah, that undergraduate naive kind of oh, this is what poetry is kind of moment because he can do that. He's incredibly powerful. The word is sophomoric. Sophomoric, I mean, I'm in the wrong. No, Bobby and I literally a sophomore when I discovered how great Whitman is. Yeah, and since those days, I think my relationship is shifted or changed a little bit into different kinds of awarenesses about privilege and power. That almost egotistical claim to a total identity. So he's complicated. He's still good. There's a baby in that bath water, I don't want to give him dispensive Whitman entirely, but I do feel like I'm sort of calling him out here a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. But there's love in it. It's not harsh. The love in it is the way in which you succeeded in making the Barbaric Yawp fresh. Bar-bar-ic Yawp is really a fresh take on the Barbaric Yawp. Yeah. Because it calcifies so quickly into just, yeah, everyone's doing their Barbaric Yawp and we don't really think about it. That's part of the bigger project of the text, in general, is to refresh, do familiarize, look again. Definitely. Make us pay attention. Pay attention. All right. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons. So Lily, we'll start with you. Sure. This is a rewrite, remake, rethinking of Tender Buttons. It's more aligned with Tender Buttons than as is aligned with Whitman, so it seems. Want to say something about any of that? So if we think about this would be like a butchering, paraphrase of one of many possible goals of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, would be to think about naming and referentiality on objects in a more open, expensive way, almost like she said to herself, "I want to define or talk about objects using as many words that don't directly name the thing as possible." Right. So then it's very funny to me then this is doing a similar talking around, but with a constraint and with ears. I feel like we're still trying to name objects, but there's something getting in the way, and it's cool how you can still feel that something is impeding language from making direct contact with the thing it's trying to name, but the thing that's getting in the way is all the things we've already talked about, like airport codes, capitalism, all the things that dictate what language makes up the airport codes. Looking back at Tender Buttons, from the point of view of a set quasi rigorous constraint procedural poem, which falls under the loose category of conceptualism as a process. Looking back at Tender Buttons and working with the Tender Buttons material to do that, do we discover a nascent or latent conceptualism in Tender Buttons? Is there a relationship? Can we move forward from the high modernism of Tender Buttons to the kind of conceptualism that Nasser Hussain is involved in? I would say yes, because if I were to read Tender Buttons as a conceptual project, I would be doing a thing that I think Stein is already doing, which is thinking about the materiality of the objects that are there in the gender politics of the domestic space, and trying to think about how do you think through the way that domesticity as a kind of feminized value is portrayed and is socialized? By means of really hanging out with the stuff and the language around this stuff, how do you break apart and spend time with and think through expectations of the domestic by getting hyper close to it and making it weird? I think that that's the heart of what conceptual poetry does is develop a procedure to be able to break apart a social system that's produced in and produces language. The crazy thing that's happening here is that there's rigorously globally located set of places in these airport codes, is the material being used to reinvigorate Stein's domestic. It's like Stein's domestic unpleasantness becomes a kind of global unpleasantness at the same time. Which, for me, is like helping to identify what's conceptual about her product. Jeez. Yes. I'm getting chills. Now that I feel the same way. I think that's exactly right. Wow. The way you went from the domestic concerns and the focus on the sign to Nasser's interest in global, it's just great. I guess you're going to respond happily to this. Well, yeah. You're picking up on the thing that I was really hoping that readers would find, which is an unceasing attention to the geography. That's kind of the thing that I wasn't sure if that was getting across, but you've given me faith. I think the maps are doing a lot of that work of just always trying to remind the reader, this is happening on a space, on a place, and the scale of that is global. Super cool. So thank you. Yeah, that's very close to the heart of this text. One of the things that a lot of people say in one of the sentences in one of my favorite essays, is that poetry is strewn around everywhere, it's just matter of noticing it and picking it up. A lot of time what that phrase implies or what I used to take it in as, was noticing a ladybird, noticing this, noticing something that is happening and creating images or senses and transmitting it into words. But also, both these project and the project that we've been looking at in [inaudible] with conceptual poetry and aleatory poetry was like, "Oh, it's not just about noticing the things that are happening, and the images, and the sensory details, but also there's so much more." So it was like yes, you're noticing things around you, but also that could be poetry but also ways of doing poetry. So that's what these projects [inaudible]. Nas, final thoughts? I love what you just said there. Above and beyond, just noticing the world or pretending that objects, or food, or realms, or politics, or other people are in the world, I'm striving to remember that language too is a thing in the world and can be noticed. Right now, that's the core of my practice, is to pay attention to language like it's a thing in the world, and to take that 70 is length, L equals [inaudible] kind of lesson, as literally as possible. It's yielding stuff. I'd like you to stay naive and have fun as much as possible as well, because that's just as important as anything. I have a final thought and then I want to thank everybody for this really great session. Final thought, well, I really enjoy the gamefication side of this, I enjoy what the constraint produces in terms of pleasure, I enjoy the discovery, I enjoy the acrobatics, I really like all of it. Enjoy is the word. We've just laughed and smiled, just good tonic thing for poetry to do. At the same time, I'm terribly moved by the work. Because just in terms of the four poems we've talked about today, two of them about Walt Whitman, one about Gertrude Stein, one about Christian Book. So here you are in the 21st century, well along in the 21st century. You come along and you have a certain amount of feelings of honor and indebtedness to your predecessors who've been trying to break ground, and in all ways those three poets have broken ground in their time, and you are setting your self a high barrier to cross over to get back to them. You are crawling on cut glass or climbing the highest border wall that has ever been built to get back over to these poets whom you honor because they helped make you free, they helped free your imagination. This constraint suggests a world of travel bans and impossible trips. Yeah. The limitation of freedom of motion, which has been promulgated as a right officially since World War II, some of the Roosevelt ideas, that we should be able to move freely between and among borders. On this very day, surely not to put too fine a point on it, but when I Googled Nasser Hussain, I should have Googled Nasser Hussain poet, because what I got was a whole lot of people, including a cricket player who's very free to move anywhere, but a whole lot of Nasser Hussain who would struggle to cross borders or be constrained by a certain set of assumptions about us and them. These homage poems are so beautiful because they basically say, despite all that, I am going to cross back over to my people. Your people include the poets that came before you. So it's a kind of a labor of love, and you built the constraint. See a lot of poets when they honor Walt, they just do the Walt thing without constraint. Because Walt wasn't constraints so just, right? A lot of people who honor Stein will do a Steinian thing. No, you said this is what I have to do in order to get back to Stein. It won't be legit if I don't actually do it with integrity, this thing that I am committed to at the same time as honoring them. I just think that's a beautiful thing, and it's an honorable thing. If you can see that in my work, I can't say another word. That's beautiful. I have chills. You are all such great readers. They are, aren't we? So are you. Nas, thank you for traveling and hanging out with us. It's been a great honor and pleasure. Davey as always, Lily, Anna [inaudible] hang out with us more, would you like to? If That could be, we'd really enjoy that. Thank you all.
