Beautiful Bartered Writing; Jim Leftwich and the Post-Neo Absurdist Network
Jim Leftwich, whose site textimagepoem is a volcano of collaborative creativity with word and visual form, kindly agreed to a written interview about his work, his co-players and their process.
post-neo absurdist solidarity show, roanoke, va – june 2008; photo by ralph eaton
Rob Wittig: Who are your main collaborators these days? How did you meet them? What are they like?
Jim Leftwich: in the last few months i’ve collaborated with john m. bennett (we’ve been collaborating for a dozen years or so and have made hundreds, maybe even in the thousands, of collaborative works), jukka-pekka kervinen (who i’ve been collaborating with for a little over 3 years – we have also made hundreds of collaborative works), john crouse (with whom i’ve been collaborating for 10 years or so – our long poem Acts just passed Act #5000), diana magallon (a frequent collaborator for the past few months), olchar lindsann, bela grimm and the whole post-neo absurdist network (collaborators for a couple of years now, with collaborative works numbering in the hundreds). i met john bennett through my first magazine, juxta.
john is a poet, editor and publisher, mail artist, and curator of the avant writing archive at ohio state university. i met jukka a few years ago after we had become acquainted with each others’ work at various online publications. he’s a poet, editor and publisher, composer and visual artist who lives in finland. i met john crouse through juxta. he is a poet and collage artist who lives in washington state.
diana magallon contacted me after i sent her a link to documentation of a series of local art exhibits and poetry performances i was involved with in february. she is a poet, designer, editor and publisher who lives in mexico. i met olchar lindsann (and through him the other post-neo absurdists) after john bennett showed me a video of one of his dada poetry performances. olchar is a poet – a sound poet extraordinaire -, theorist, multi-media artist, mail artist, editor and publisher. he lives in new jersey. i met bela grimm through olchar. she is a mail artist, experimental doll maker, and archivist. she lives in ohio.
RW: One of the most astonishing and delightful things about textimagepoem is the sheer volume of exchanges. Can you tell us about the rule(s) of the game(s) that are currently being played there with different collaborators? How long do the exchanges last? Are there publishing outlets beyond the blog itself?
Jim Leftwich: John Held Jr.: “People who think the avant-garde is dead just aren't looking hard enough, or in the right places. I consider mail art a direct descendent of Dada and Fluxus. Stuart Home has written a great book covering post war avant-garde art movements called The Assault on Culture: From Lettrisme to Class War. It covers Lettrisme, the Situationist International, Fluxus, Mail Art, and even has a chapter heading entitled, "Beyond Mail Art". Mail Art did exactly what the previous avant-garde talked about: it integrated art and life, made the terms artist and non-artist meaningless, and incorporated both social responsibility and poetical considerations. Mail Art says that art is anything and can occur anywhere. And so can the artists. There is no central nerve center. Every individual participant is a nerve attached to other nerves.”
Elias Canetti: “He who has learned enough has learned nothing.”
RW: Could you please tell us about your personal background, particularly about the visual and the verbal parts of your experience and how they lead to textimagepoem?
Jim Leftwich: no way to remember what is yourself. what the world was like, or what it is. i think i remember 1972, but i am thinking two thoughts at once, my second mind (to borrow a phrase from howlin wolf (i think i first heard him in 1972)) is deconstructing my first thought (third thought, perhaps, best thought).
in 1972 there was an interview in rolling stone magazine with bob dylan. dylan mentioned rimbaud. i asked my french teacher about rim bawd and she gave me her copy of illuminations (the new directions varese translation, with the cover by ray johnson). some 25 years later i would be introduced to johnson’s mail art network. i was editing a small press poetry magazine called juxta. one of the contributors, john m. bennett, sent me some information about the eternal network (robert filliou’s name for mail art’s map of correspondences). i started sending visual poems to a few mail artists. i contributed to some political calls circulated by clemente padin. i participated in pascal lenoir’s assembling publication, mani art.
at the outset mail art was primarily a means of circulating my visual poetry. i became involved with visual poetry after reading the CORE symposium of contemporary visual poetry, edited by john byrum and crag hill, in 1994. i started writing serious textual poetry in 1972 (earlier imitations of dylan, jethro tull, king crimson, soft machine and captain beefheart probably don’t count – probably don’t – i’m not sure – maybe they do count). i read verlaine eliot breton ponge ionesco and cummings. and camus. and kafka. and aldous huxley. this is selective memory, bordering on fictional memory. here’s a variant list: ponge mallarmé char beckett trakl mayakovsky. also, though probably a little later: dylan thomas, berryman, alan dugan, simic, merwin, james tate. no one i was supposed to read, then or now (which reminds me of an attitude charles bernstein once expressed: the only thing i’ve ever been authorized to do is eat shit).
in 1972 there was an article in time magazine about carlos castenada. the author mentioned the doors (i forgot to mention imitating jim morrison) of perception, by aldous huxley. my high school library had a lot of huxley’s books, novels and essays. i read all of them. i took notes, in two notebooks. one notebook was a list of names, other authors to read. the other notebook was a list of words and their definitions. i started reading the list of authors mentioned by huxley. i made new lists of authors to read. somehow i got the idea that i should go to college and study english literature. so i did. and i hated english literature. i still do. i learned next to nothing about english literature in college, but i did learn a bit of art history, and i was music director of the campus radio station for two years. i left after four years without a degree.
i had learned i didn’t want to be a professor-poet. i loved twentieth century visual art. i loved all kinds of music. i hated most of the poetry i’d read, and particularly hated the poetry I’d been ‘authorized’ to read in class.
i moved to san francisco, became very interested in the punk scene, and started hanging out with art students from sf state and the art institute. when i wanted poetry i would go to the basement of city lights bookstore and read, or stand in the aisles at cody’s in berkeley. my introduction to the language poets was at cody’s, when i stumbled across a book by ron silliman (silliman once rewrote rimbaud’s famous phrase, “derangement of the senses”, as “derange the sentences”). the language poets became a very generative influence when i was editing juxta (bernstein again: “i used to make sense, now i make poems”).
juxta was conceived as a 10-issue project by ken harris and myself in 1994. we published issue number 10 in 2000 and decided to launch a new publishing project, xtant, devoted primarily to visual poetry and mail art. ken left shortly thereafter and xtant was co-edited by tom taylor and myself, with scott macleod, andrew topel, michael peters and tim gaze acting as contributing editors. after four issues i realized i could no longer afford to publish print magazines, so i started textimagepoem, a blog zine, as a way of continuing the project initiated as xtant.
The Ohio State University portal to the textimagepoem Archive.
during the past 15 years i’ve mostly read the authors i’ve published, and their sources. several of them have profoundly influenced the direction(s) my own work has taken. here’s a short list with links to their work:
john m. bennett
tom taylor
scott macleod
jukka-pekka kervinen
jake berry
tim gaze
john crouse
olchar lindsann
Edmond Jabes : “What I try to do is to show that behind each word other words are hiding. And each time you change a word or make a word emerge from another word, you change the whole book. When I say there are many books in the book, it is because there are many words in the word.”
Moshe Idel: “This technique of breaking-down or atomizing the Name is the most distinctive characteristic of Abulafia’s technique; the Holy Name contains within itself ‘scientific’ readings of the structure of the world and its activities, thereby possessing both an ‘informative’ character and magical powers. It is reasonable to assume that both qualities are associated with the peculiar structure of the Name. However, in Abulafia’s view this structure must be destroyed in order to exploit the ‘prophetic’ potential of these Names and to create a series of new structures by means of letter-combinations. In the course of the changes taking place in the structure of the Name, the structure of human consciousness likewise changes. As Abulafia indicated in a number of places, the Divine Name is inscribed upon man’s soul, making it reasonable to assume that the process of letter-combinations worked upon the Name is understood as occurring simultaneously in the human soul.”
Patricia Cox Miller: “Marcus had taken the first verse of the Gospel of John seriously: ‘In the beginning was the word.’ God’s creation was linguistic, and the letters of the first potent word that he uttered contained all of the forms of creation, each form presided over by the name of a letter of the alphabet, which is in turn composed of letters, each of which has a name, and so on to infinity. Thus, alpha, the name of the letter a, is composed of the letters a, l, and so on, and these letters have names in their turn, so that, for example, l’s name, lambda, contains yet more letters, and more names. Creation, in other words, is eternal and ongoing: ‘the multitude of letters swells out into infinitude,’ and ; ‘letters are continually generating other letters.’ The alphabet speaks a divine language, and it does so in a radically generative, metaphoric way, each letter calling up, but never pinning down, the enigmatic nature of reality, the word of God.”
E. M. Cioran: “Poetry excludes calculation and premeditation: it is incompletion, forboding, abyss. Neither a singsong geometry, nor a succession of bloodless adjectives. We are too deeply wounded and too despondent, too weary and too barbarous in our weariness, to appreciate, yet, the craft.”
RW: Could you tell us some of the key concepts behind your various publishing projects?
Jim Leftwich:
- DIY & potlatch
- gather & print (or post), circulate & exchange
- a barter system (anti-commodity – ncv, no commercial value)
- an underground economy in the marketplace of ideas
RW: What is it like for you to participate in such high-volume, high-speed exchanges? What do you recommend about it as a creative process? Tips and techniques for such collaboration?
Jim Leftwich:
a) it’s tiring it’s frustrating it’s a fucking blast it’s tedious it’s obsessive compulsive disorderly it’s a serious long-term commitment it’s an education an inspiration it’s a motivational self-help symposium chicken soup for the weary muse it’s rattling some cages and shaking a stick at the dominant hornet’s nest…
b) i don’t recommend it at all. it’s not something one can choose. it’s something one finds oneself in after years of making (possibly) necessary but nonetheless suspect choices.
c) work for change (transform life, change the world). start with something you can noticeably affect, e.g. yourself. use language to conduct experiments in the laboratory of the self. perform experiments without hypotheses. document everything (serial histories of existential alterities). disseminate as benign contagions. recruit comrades.
Hugo Ball: “A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to language, to get rid of language itself. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.”
Al Ackerman: “The idea of working in a despised medium, one that's still emerging and taking shape. There's a lot of freedom to that. You're free both to screw around and to screw up. You're not constrained by any weighty body of preconceived expectation. The unexpected is still allowed to happen.”
RW: Do you think of the high-volume (as in sheer numbers of textimagepoems) as being a sketching process . . . a search for a few of them that rise above the others in quality . . . or is it about the whole series? the whole process of exchange? or all of the above?
Jim Leftwich: it’s about the whole series. it’s about process, working in series. it’s about documentation, a parallel history. it’s about feedback loops, generative and mutagenic exchanges of energy. it’s about pushing oneself to follow wherever the work may lead.
John Held Jr.: “The structure of the mail art show is one of the network's greatest triumphs. It provides an open forum for communication on a given subject. "No returns" just means it's a hassle and expensive to send work back to contributors. Just don't send something you have to have returned. The main thrust is sharing ideas and creating a community, not the creation of artworks for capitalist consumption. Complaints of quick-copy xerox prints started surfacing as least as early as 1972. Junk art. But there's no such thing. It's all information.”
RW: Who are the other main participants/publishers who interest you right now? The ones that are part of the same creative "field" or "landscape?
http://www.johnmbennett.net/
http://jukkapekkakervinen.info/
http://postneoabsurdism.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/belagrimm/
http://web.mac.com/ralpheaton/Ralph_Eaton_Projects/Welcome.html
http://neoisms.blogspot.com/
RW: What are your favorite cultural inputs these days: which music? films? books? websites?
books: Scott Macleod, Unholy Union; Olchar Lindsann, The Ecstatic Nerve; Stewart Home, The Assault On Culture; Peter Ganick, Cake & Seve.
film: Mauricio Kagel; Stan Brakhage; assorted videos.
music: id m theft able, The Mekons, Tony Oxley.
websites:
http://www.ubu.com/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.geocities.com/johnheldjr/
post-neo absurdist solidarity show, roanoke, va – june 2008; photo by ralph eaton
Rob Wittig: Who are your main collaborators these days? How did you meet them? What are they like?
Jim Leftwich: in the last few months i’ve collaborated with john m. bennett (we’ve been collaborating for a dozen years or so and have made hundreds, maybe even in the thousands, of collaborative works), jukka-pekka kervinen (who i’ve been collaborating with for a little over 3 years – we have also made hundreds of collaborative works), john crouse (with whom i’ve been collaborating for 10 years or so – our long poem Acts just passed Act #5000), diana magallon (a frequent collaborator for the past few months), olchar lindsann, bela grimm and the whole post-neo absurdist network (collaborators for a couple of years now, with collaborative works numbering in the hundreds). i met john bennett through my first magazine, juxta.
john is a poet, editor and publisher, mail artist, and curator of the avant writing archive at ohio state university. i met jukka a few years ago after we had become acquainted with each others’ work at various online publications. he’s a poet, editor and publisher, composer and visual artist who lives in finland. i met john crouse through juxta. he is a poet and collage artist who lives in washington state.
diana magallon contacted me after i sent her a link to documentation of a series of local art exhibits and poetry performances i was involved with in february. she is a poet, designer, editor and publisher who lives in mexico. i met olchar lindsann (and through him the other post-neo absurdists) after john bennett showed me a video of one of his dada poetry performances. olchar is a poet – a sound poet extraordinaire -, theorist, multi-media artist, mail artist, editor and publisher. he lives in new jersey. i met bela grimm through olchar. she is a mail artist, experimental doll maker, and archivist. she lives in ohio.
RW: One of the most astonishing and delightful things about textimagepoem is the sheer volume of exchanges. Can you tell us about the rule(s) of the game(s) that are currently being played there with different collaborators? How long do the exchanges last? Are there publishing outlets beyond the blog itself?
Jim Leftwich: John Held Jr.: “People who think the avant-garde is dead just aren't looking hard enough, or in the right places. I consider mail art a direct descendent of Dada and Fluxus. Stuart Home has written a great book covering post war avant-garde art movements called The Assault on Culture: From Lettrisme to Class War. It covers Lettrisme, the Situationist International, Fluxus, Mail Art, and even has a chapter heading entitled, "Beyond Mail Art". Mail Art did exactly what the previous avant-garde talked about: it integrated art and life, made the terms artist and non-artist meaningless, and incorporated both social responsibility and poetical considerations. Mail Art says that art is anything and can occur anywhere. And so can the artists. There is no central nerve center. Every individual participant is a nerve attached to other nerves.”
Elias Canetti: “He who has learned enough has learned nothing.”
RW: Could you please tell us about your personal background, particularly about the visual and the verbal parts of your experience and how they lead to textimagepoem?
Jim Leftwich: no way to remember what is yourself. what the world was like, or what it is. i think i remember 1972, but i am thinking two thoughts at once, my second mind (to borrow a phrase from howlin wolf (i think i first heard him in 1972)) is deconstructing my first thought (third thought, perhaps, best thought).
in 1972 there was an interview in rolling stone magazine with bob dylan. dylan mentioned rimbaud. i asked my french teacher about rim bawd and she gave me her copy of illuminations (the new directions varese translation, with the cover by ray johnson). some 25 years later i would be introduced to johnson’s mail art network. i was editing a small press poetry magazine called juxta. one of the contributors, john m. bennett, sent me some information about the eternal network (robert filliou’s name for mail art’s map of correspondences). i started sending visual poems to a few mail artists. i contributed to some political calls circulated by clemente padin. i participated in pascal lenoir’s assembling publication, mani art.
at the outset mail art was primarily a means of circulating my visual poetry. i became involved with visual poetry after reading the CORE symposium of contemporary visual poetry, edited by john byrum and crag hill, in 1994. i started writing serious textual poetry in 1972 (earlier imitations of dylan, jethro tull, king crimson, soft machine and captain beefheart probably don’t count – probably don’t – i’m not sure – maybe they do count). i read verlaine eliot breton ponge ionesco and cummings. and camus. and kafka. and aldous huxley. this is selective memory, bordering on fictional memory. here’s a variant list: ponge mallarmé char beckett trakl mayakovsky. also, though probably a little later: dylan thomas, berryman, alan dugan, simic, merwin, james tate. no one i was supposed to read, then or now (which reminds me of an attitude charles bernstein once expressed: the only thing i’ve ever been authorized to do is eat shit).
in 1972 there was an article in time magazine about carlos castenada. the author mentioned the doors (i forgot to mention imitating jim morrison) of perception, by aldous huxley. my high school library had a lot of huxley’s books, novels and essays. i read all of them. i took notes, in two notebooks. one notebook was a list of names, other authors to read. the other notebook was a list of words and their definitions. i started reading the list of authors mentioned by huxley. i made new lists of authors to read. somehow i got the idea that i should go to college and study english literature. so i did. and i hated english literature. i still do. i learned next to nothing about english literature in college, but i did learn a bit of art history, and i was music director of the campus radio station for two years. i left after four years without a degree.
i had learned i didn’t want to be a professor-poet. i loved twentieth century visual art. i loved all kinds of music. i hated most of the poetry i’d read, and particularly hated the poetry I’d been ‘authorized’ to read in class.
i moved to san francisco, became very interested in the punk scene, and started hanging out with art students from sf state and the art institute. when i wanted poetry i would go to the basement of city lights bookstore and read, or stand in the aisles at cody’s in berkeley. my introduction to the language poets was at cody’s, when i stumbled across a book by ron silliman (silliman once rewrote rimbaud’s famous phrase, “derangement of the senses”, as “derange the sentences”). the language poets became a very generative influence when i was editing juxta (bernstein again: “i used to make sense, now i make poems”).
juxta was conceived as a 10-issue project by ken harris and myself in 1994. we published issue number 10 in 2000 and decided to launch a new publishing project, xtant, devoted primarily to visual poetry and mail art. ken left shortly thereafter and xtant was co-edited by tom taylor and myself, with scott macleod, andrew topel, michael peters and tim gaze acting as contributing editors. after four issues i realized i could no longer afford to publish print magazines, so i started textimagepoem, a blog zine, as a way of continuing the project initiated as xtant.
The Ohio State University portal to the textimagepoem Archive.
during the past 15 years i’ve mostly read the authors i’ve published, and their sources. several of them have profoundly influenced the direction(s) my own work has taken. here’s a short list with links to their work:
john m. bennett
tom taylor
scott macleod
jukka-pekka kervinen
jake berry
tim gaze
john crouse
olchar lindsann
Edmond Jabes : “What I try to do is to show that behind each word other words are hiding. And each time you change a word or make a word emerge from another word, you change the whole book. When I say there are many books in the book, it is because there are many words in the word.”
Moshe Idel: “This technique of breaking-down or atomizing the Name is the most distinctive characteristic of Abulafia’s technique; the Holy Name contains within itself ‘scientific’ readings of the structure of the world and its activities, thereby possessing both an ‘informative’ character and magical powers. It is reasonable to assume that both qualities are associated with the peculiar structure of the Name. However, in Abulafia’s view this structure must be destroyed in order to exploit the ‘prophetic’ potential of these Names and to create a series of new structures by means of letter-combinations. In the course of the changes taking place in the structure of the Name, the structure of human consciousness likewise changes. As Abulafia indicated in a number of places, the Divine Name is inscribed upon man’s soul, making it reasonable to assume that the process of letter-combinations worked upon the Name is understood as occurring simultaneously in the human soul.”
Patricia Cox Miller: “Marcus had taken the first verse of the Gospel of John seriously: ‘In the beginning was the word.’ God’s creation was linguistic, and the letters of the first potent word that he uttered contained all of the forms of creation, each form presided over by the name of a letter of the alphabet, which is in turn composed of letters, each of which has a name, and so on to infinity. Thus, alpha, the name of the letter a, is composed of the letters a, l, and so on, and these letters have names in their turn, so that, for example, l’s name, lambda, contains yet more letters, and more names. Creation, in other words, is eternal and ongoing: ‘the multitude of letters swells out into infinitude,’ and ; ‘letters are continually generating other letters.’ The alphabet speaks a divine language, and it does so in a radically generative, metaphoric way, each letter calling up, but never pinning down, the enigmatic nature of reality, the word of God.”
E. M. Cioran: “Poetry excludes calculation and premeditation: it is incompletion, forboding, abyss. Neither a singsong geometry, nor a succession of bloodless adjectives. We are too deeply wounded and too despondent, too weary and too barbarous in our weariness, to appreciate, yet, the craft.”
RW: Could you tell us some of the key concepts behind your various publishing projects?
Jim Leftwich:
- DIY & potlatch
- gather & print (or post), circulate & exchange
- a barter system (anti-commodity – ncv, no commercial value)
- an underground economy in the marketplace of ideas
RW: What is it like for you to participate in such high-volume, high-speed exchanges? What do you recommend about it as a creative process? Tips and techniques for such collaboration?
Jim Leftwich:
a) it’s tiring it’s frustrating it’s a fucking blast it’s tedious it’s obsessive compulsive disorderly it’s a serious long-term commitment it’s an education an inspiration it’s a motivational self-help symposium chicken soup for the weary muse it’s rattling some cages and shaking a stick at the dominant hornet’s nest…
b) i don’t recommend it at all. it’s not something one can choose. it’s something one finds oneself in after years of making (possibly) necessary but nonetheless suspect choices.
c) work for change (transform life, change the world). start with something you can noticeably affect, e.g. yourself. use language to conduct experiments in the laboratory of the self. perform experiments without hypotheses. document everything (serial histories of existential alterities). disseminate as benign contagions. recruit comrades.
Hugo Ball: “A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to language, to get rid of language itself. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.”
Al Ackerman: “The idea of working in a despised medium, one that's still emerging and taking shape. There's a lot of freedom to that. You're free both to screw around and to screw up. You're not constrained by any weighty body of preconceived expectation. The unexpected is still allowed to happen.”
RW: Do you think of the high-volume (as in sheer numbers of textimagepoems) as being a sketching process . . . a search for a few of them that rise above the others in quality . . . or is it about the whole series? the whole process of exchange? or all of the above?
Jim Leftwich: it’s about the whole series. it’s about process, working in series. it’s about documentation, a parallel history. it’s about feedback loops, generative and mutagenic exchanges of energy. it’s about pushing oneself to follow wherever the work may lead.
John Held Jr.: “The structure of the mail art show is one of the network's greatest triumphs. It provides an open forum for communication on a given subject. "No returns" just means it's a hassle and expensive to send work back to contributors. Just don't send something you have to have returned. The main thrust is sharing ideas and creating a community, not the creation of artworks for capitalist consumption. Complaints of quick-copy xerox prints started surfacing as least as early as 1972. Junk art. But there's no such thing. It's all information.”
RW: Who are the other main participants/publishers who interest you right now? The ones that are part of the same creative "field" or "landscape?
http://www.johnmbennett.net/
http://jukkapekkakervinen.info/
http://postneoabsurdism.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/belagrimm/
http://web.mac.com/ralpheaton/Ralph_Eaton_Projects/Welcome.html
http://neoisms.blogspot.com/
RW: What are your favorite cultural inputs these days: which music? films? books? websites?
books: Scott Macleod, Unholy Union; Olchar Lindsann, The Ecstatic Nerve; Stewart Home, The Assault On Culture; Peter Ganick, Cake & Seve.
film: Mauricio Kagel; Stan Brakhage; assorted videos.
music: id m theft able, The Mekons, Tony Oxley.
websites:
http://www.ubu.com/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.geocities.com/johnheldjr/
Posted by Rob Wittig on August 29, 2008 9:28 AM
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