The so-called "misanthropic French tradition" then is perhaps too strong a formulation. I would rather talk of humanism than misanthropism. Perhaps we should rather go back as far as Montaigne, in a sort of French humanist tradition of "we're all mere absurd mortals" and "chaque homme porte la forme entière de la condition humaine".

This is not what Baudelaire ever says, or thinks. In the Baudelairian model, the flâneur is able to observe events and society precisely because, with his slow cool gait, he is outside of the actions of that society. In brief the flaneur is a direct but abstracted and thus non-implicated witness. Fénéon is not a witness, but rather a compiler. This is a very important change to the paradigm. It firstly de-romanticizes somewhat the events depicted - divorcing them from their powerful poet subject - and gives them thus their haunting, almost "dead" and unfeeling quality.

If the flâneur is the image of a nascent modernity, as has so often been said, the compiler must be the image of a different modernity altogether, closer to the benjaminian obsession with collection and collation than the power of a witnessing subject.

But then the real paradox of course to Works and Days is that, if the original Fénéon takes out the poetic subject as powerful witness to replace him with the collector and compiler, we have here a suite of faits divers which are entirely about poetic personas: about poets. A desubjectivizing mode combined with subjectivizing content? Perhaps this is one way of looking at this intriguing textual object.

I hope these initial thoughts are comprehensible, written after midnight on a snowy Paris night.
Nicholas

and since i meant to keep this to the maximum post length and spilled over a bit, i might as well finish my thought: what bolano's work says (to me) -- and it starts off being very funny with the lampooning of various avant-garde poetry groups in the savage detectives, but it's decidedly not funny by the time you get to nazi literature in the americas and 2666 -- is that aesthetics inform politics and vice versa. you can't separate them out. what populates bolano's texts? exiles. serial killers. intellectuals. artists. hacked-up bodies. and aesthetic choices that on the one hand seem utterly unimportant, and on the other ruin lives and destroy friendships. it's no accident that kent - a poet who has done a lot of work in latin american poetry - would be involved in a project (like FD) that seems to express a longing for that sort of vital discourse. as has been said above, i don't think it's a call to start writing overt political poetry. it's a call to acknowledge and confront how politicized poetry _already is_. what am i talking about? brooks mentioned andy warhol a couple dozen posts back, and how problematic his aesthetic choices have turned out to be. well, we now have an entire poetic movement emulating and incorporating those choices. i'm not going to say that every single writer and work produced thereby is inherently bad, or even compromised. but it's long past time that the american avant-garde looked itself in the mirror and asked if its strategies themselves have been compromised.

also, it's no secret that american poets operate in a passive-aggressive 'community' in which everyone seems to agree politically - it was hard to find poets who were 'for' the war, remember? - but in reality most are split into factions that have very little to actually say to one another, politically or aesthetically. the FD imagines an alternate universe, violent and episodic as a slapstick pantomime circa 1800 drury lane -- that brings the aggression to the surface...

David,

Your post makes me think: there seems to be a fundamental rift between what poets DO and what revolutionaries, or terrorists, or agents of the state DO (i.e., those actors who enact foundational socio-cultural/juridico-political change). That is, poets write and publish and gossip and slander and cause stirs etc., while those others engage in direct, immediately physical acts that alternately upset/maintain the status quo. The revolutionary stages a coup; the terrorist brings fire to his polemic; the state agent imprisons the dissident; the poet fires off a missive that may send ripples through the poetry community, but the community has become so marginal that the event doesn't even warrant a faits divers in the pages of any of our local newspapers. Perhaps this marginality is tied to a lack of physical action. The students in the streets of London, some of whom are poets, warrant a faits divers (more, in fact) precisely because their bodies seized the Conservative Party HQ. Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell and others warranted a faits divers precisely because they threw their bodies into the mix at the Pentagon. Dante took up his sword at Campaldino. Burroughs rolled drunks in NYC. Kent Johnson stood with the Sandinistas. Brooks faced down the Chicago PD reenacting the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. David Hadbawnik blackened an eye with a left hook during a scuffle in the hockey rink. It is in part, I would argue, the immediate contact with these dangers and violences that allow these writers to channel a sense of political urgency through their work (it's also what enables them to piss so many people off). It's for this reason that I find myself attracted to Fork-Face as the hero of this work. The homeless poet jumping from the shadows to attack M. Simic with splendid brutality. 54 biting wounds to remind the opposition that states are being altered in physical ways that leave a real and lasting legacy.

In haste . . .

poetry can change the way we think...

sorry this was to precde what just sent-
keep trying to write real responses but everything gets choked by the character count-
for me as for feneon no separtion between action/art/poetry-
i know its my extreme pehyscial pain causing me sorrow, trouble (broekn back) but often feel outsider to the "scene" here
is very difficult to coney; hopefully m visual and written works will-
just feel very saddnened

am writing an extensive response which I will post at my blog--in part
so people see what is going on there for years now-
also so i won't have to keep breaking up what i write due to character count
for me, as for feneon, no separation between poetry/art/activism since
1969 Paris anarchist cell blowing up american sites & empty police
vans to now--activism for Gaza, American Indian groups & daily work
here with addict/alcoholic/criminals like myself
a long time admirer/reviewer of kent & his work; this whole project &
responses deeply sadden me--the work of myself & others worldwide
continues outside, ignored, hidden in plain site/sight/cite while one
finds selfaggrandizement, self parody, ridicule masquerading as
subversive of the very things being mirrored--aco-avant insularity,
circularity-will write at length to explain meanwhile these may be of
interest

Just a random thought related to some reading I was doing last night. I was reading the exchange between Merwin and Auden regarding Merwin's decision to request that the Pulitzer Prize committee donate the prize money on his behalf to the Draft Resistance and to Alan Blanchard, a painter blinded by a police weapon. Auden wrote in claiming that what Merwin was doing was a publicity stunt the aim of which was self-aggrandizement, and that if he wanted to donate the money he could have done so privately. Auden also claimed that if Merwin believed what he said in his first letter ("I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence."), by this logic he should not publish poems in America. I found all this very interesting in light of the fact that Merwin has now "accepted public congratulation" as poet laureate. I don't think he would have accepted the post under Bush, but is there really any difference in the political situation under Obama? It also makes me think of the Poets Against the War anthology, which began in protest but now, it seems to me, has been sort of placed in the same remaindered realm of BAP. I wouldn't say that you can't write protest poetry anymore (I don't want to believe it if it's true), but I think that the strategies that the Yasusada project and the FC employ are ingenious ways to get around being called out by Auden (whether rightly or not) or marginalized as just another liberal knee-jerk reaction.

back to Pessoa's HETERONYMY

as i mention above, Fernando Pessoa created a number of authors who are reflections or refractions of himself - not pseudonymic "false names", but heteronymic "different names"

FP once said: "i created my coterie around me" - or was it "within me"?

this allowed him to write in any style, on any subject, whatever he felt like in the moment

along with the heteronyms, he also created the ORTHONYMS - authors named Fernando Pessoa, none of whom are really Pessoa-himself ("Pessoa-si-mesmo" is a very common critical term)

FP was very interested in technical virtuosity, which he certainly achieved

the orthonymic poetry (about 1000 pages of it) is stylistically varied: symbolism in the manner of Verlaine, a series of darkly mystical Rosicrucian sonnets, quasi-futurist, highly cinematic free verse full of jump cuts and superimpositions, etc.

as a result, it is impossible to identify the "real" Pessoa, which, it seems to me, was the whole point

maybe we can say that art, politics and science, are ways of cognizing the world, and that all these systems of cognition can exist together and inform each other, somehow and some way, in an artist's work?

Dear Micah:

I am writing to apologize to you and the group for the above behaviors which are a disservice to myself and to the group and discussion. I misread a number of posts very badly and and replied in an unthinking fashion, both very uncharacteristic of my usual work and methods. In particular I again want to apologize to Brooks--which I have done back channel--and to all for allowing my own personal problems to obscure my judgment, thinking and replies, for allowing emotions to obscure intellect to such an extreme degree. I have a badly broken back (already been broken 3 times before) and in the last month it took a drastic turn for the worse, a doctor who was to operate withdrew at the last moment, smashing hopes of a year, my medication was greatly increased, and al of this I allowed to overwhelm by emotions and thoughts, my replies to the group.

(2nd part of my reply)
My intention is to go back and read everything thoroughly and reply with useful & constructive commentary --I felt at first I was doing so, before another section of my back was broken two weeks ago-and I lost track of what I was trying to contribute in a positive manner. I plan to go back over everything, pick back up with what had begun with as well as think through and respond conscientiously and in any helpful way that I can, making sure not to misread and misunderstand things written by others.
I m not using my medical condition as an excuse; it's a simple statement of fact. Some days I can't even si tat the computer & on top of the ever worsening pain there is the adjusting to super octane medication to deal with.Between the extreme pain and extreme meds, it's all too easy for one's emotions and thoughts to become far more distorted than one has any idea is happening. I fell I've received a good wake up call from my own conscience and from others, and thanks for allowing me to know what has been happening.
Again, I apologize to everyone in the group and will start over and plan to contribute in as thoughtful and useful way as I can.
Thank you to Brooks and to you also and again, I humbly apologize to the group for causing things to happen which are against my own better sense of my self and my conscience.
all my very best for the Holidays-and-
--onwo/ards ever, david baptiste chirot

Hi, fellow harem members,

Wrong door? What do you mean there are no women here? Is it because I’m so frightfully late to the signage party? I’m sorry but please stop hiding the women. If feminism is a social category about which we can make passing gestures of concern, we’re ok guys, since it seems to me, that Chris is right and we and the W&D “aims … to encourage the reader to question everything we take for granted about literature, like authorship, authenticity, sincerity.” We’re “ok” because we’re aligned with the deconstructive work and effects of some feminisms and queer theories. However, if feminism depends on biography or identity as a category, then the ethical waters are boiling because we’re talking about difference with no women around.

I’ve loved most of the writing I’ve read: so lucid and informed and pointed. In an attempt to be of some use, I offer the following antinomies with hopes of a Walter Benjamin sort of dialectical progress:

action (deeds) words (thought)
engagement ambivalence
clarity (modern or a-g manifesto) ambiguity (postmodern irony)
Gossip Science
Witness Editor
Poet (maker, conspirator, tacit legislator) Agent (performer or actor or representative)
Female (biological) Female (social construction)
Female (victim of patriarchy) Male (proponent of patriarchy)
Direct action (café bomb) Indirect action (form consciousness)
Personal attack (ad hominem) Professional attack (rhetorical, dialogical, discursive, Victorian, well-heeled)
Satire Irony
“real” “fiction”
Heteronym Biographical fact (with a willing suspension of disbelief in a sterile or hermetic mimeses and the presence/absence of form)
Author Author function
Death of the author Life of the author
Ideological dupe Culture jammer
Anarchist (doing) Marxist (doing theory)
Authenticity Fraud
Skeptic (empathy) Cynic (apathy)

Above all else, or beneath all else for those underground, let’s not forget that contemporary global capital needs our critical and inventive interventions so that it can know itself and keep propagating versions of itself. Like the a-g needed its kitsch, the industrial military complex needs its revolutionary poets. I am participating because I am a skeptic, not a cynic.

Apologies if this is not a shared opinion, and of course we're not obliged to, but: how and why did discussion of Fénéon become a discussion of media blindness and the industrial military complex? I agree these are crucial issues, but the slippage in the dialectic here seems revelatory. More bluntly: I don't think Works and Days is about the military industrial complex. Putting to one side the fact that the MIC is a vital and necessary subject, I'm puzzled as to why discussion regarding a work which, to my eyes at least, primarily satirizes literary coteries and their quotidian aims and teleologies, is being thusframed.

Is anyone making the mistake of believing that a criticism of literary group social dynamics constitutes an act of generalized media and political dissidence? This is a question which seems important to me.

Fénéon is fascinating for what it is, not for the extrapolations we may attribute to it.

Yes there is the typical "Joshua blogging about pop music instead of war", which we've come to know from Kent of course in a specific satirical lineage, but I don't feel the macroscopic global perspective dominates the microscopic social coterie perspective here. Rather the other way around.

In summary, I'm not saying we're getting "off track", I'd just like to know if I'm on the same track as everyone else.

Also, I second the notion that the absence of women is, shall we say, problematic, even rather creepy. Who was invited? This really has got to be fixed.

Love to all from Avignon,

I don't think it is quite right to equate terrorism with revolution. Terrorism is powerless frustration lashing out at other locations of powerlessness. Terrorism strengthens counter-revolution. Terrorism kills babies because it can't do anything else. Terrorists call themselves revolutionaries. Revolutionaries are called terrorists by the global corporate machineries. The nomadic lines cut by terrorism allows the global corporate state to reterritorialize and gather more ground. The evidence is all around us. The state not only supports terrorism--it creates terrorism and funds terrorism and delivers its image. And its image equates the desire to feed the multitude with a threat to the right to live outside of the constant threat of annihilation. Neither terrorism nor revolution are romantic nor should they be made to sound that way. Both must be considered along the axis of compulsion, though perhaps on opposite ends. Terror is the global corporate state rearranging your face, rearranging you with its terrible spectacle, a phenomenon every bit as material and real as a wound to the body.

Gossip. Police report. Slapstick. Satire. The work of the Feneon Collective, of course, is all of these. I'd like to add another gnere: wedding announcement. So many of the entries reveal the strange marriages (or, at least, trysts, affairs) that have occurred in contemporary American poetry: Wiman and Mlinko; Zapruder and Gioia (perhaps); Jack Spicer and Poetry; Silliman and Project Runway; etc. Though there may be "no panopticonic gaze" in contemporary poetry, there certainly has been an effort to marry what once were disparate aspects of American poetry: hybrid poetry, which sought to unite the experimental avant-garde and a more traditional (and often formal) mainstream. This marriage was consummated in the publication of American Hybrid, edited by Swensen and St. John. Though the poetry gathered in this anthology is meant to be, according to its editors, a "thriving center of alterity," the supposed unity of the hybrid omits a great deal: the politically urgent and relevant, and the blatantly comic. The (swarming, fecund) work of the Feneon Collective posits another kind of "thriving center of alterity," one that attempts to decenter and destablize the institutionally-sanctioned hybrid, which is based upon, as Keith Tuma (quoting Nicolas Bourriaud) has recently pointed out in the Chicago Review, "an aesthetic 'courtesy' that 'consists of refusing to pass critical judgment for fear of ruffling the sensitivity of the other.'" The Feneon Collective points directly at this state of affairs: "Where does poetry stop and sociology begin (or vice versa)? With the figure on its cover of two silhouettes forming a vase (or vice versa), the anthology title American Hybrid has appeared."

Aden (in heaven): your Book of Faces research gives me this idea: that the Feneon Collective's entries are contemporary American poetry's status updates, with this caveat: whereas most status updates often are designed to put the updater in a positive light, or to conceal or cover-up, the Feneon Collective's updates are intended to reveal and uncover... Maybe: Twofacedbook. Or: Canyoufacethisbook. Or: Fauxcebook.

Admittedly it appears as if I am late for the ball. Late for the ball, and can't find my name tag, because in the haste I've forgotten my name.