Comments on: Guest Blogger is back – Rachel Levitsky, post no. 1

By: Furioso Vladislav

Furioso Vladislav — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:50:13 +0000

good article. I will add it as favorite! Cheers

By: Dana Greene

Dana Greene — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:55:21 +0000

Hello,

I am wondering Cara if we must be prisoners of the restraints (literal, conceptual, ideological) that bind us. There is liberation in my body. I’m grateful for its boundaries because it is when I am clear about where I start and stop that I then can come to connect to another.

When my boundaries are fuzzy I disappear and cannot join. How can/does an understanding/identification of the confinement fuel sovereignty? Can we use this confinement to break free?

AHHH, the social networks – are they arenas of disconnection or pools of communion? I am struck that the young people in the classrooms where I teach understand facespaces (as i call these electronic universes) as places of privacy & I see them a public isolation booths.

I have seen Simon Rachel.

Dana

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:02:52 +0000

Hi Cara,
Thanks for this interesting post response talk think…this idea of creating an inside is fascinating and something for sure. ‘The Poets’. Thinking about it for tomorrow’s post.
Have you ever seen the movie Simon, with Alan Arkin? Where he is trying to find the outside from within, by sensory deprivation, and becomes an ET and then the government (who has made him) chases him and he finds a whole bunch of other outside insides in the hinterlands he traverses, as he is fleeing his fate as an ET? It’s one of my favorite movies and no one has ever seen it. I feel so alone.
Rachel

By: cara benson

cara benson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:34:39 +0000

Great post, Rachel. Riffing “out loud” here…

Much conceptual work is indeed intended and executed by ego. The maker (packager?) is often aware that the work will not be consumed in the same manner as one might a mimetic, lyric, even collagist creation. The conceptualist, I think, is counting what is written about the work as a conceit of the work itself more so than other works and reviews. The conceptualist’s medium then becomes single subjectivity rhetoric. And for this, names will always be invoked.

(I am not arguing against conceptual work.)

Is this capitulation? Radical participation? Good questions!

W/out exercising too extreme a relativist pov, it depends, of course, on the situation, situated, situator, situatee. And the time of day…

To imperfectly and crassly generalize, (post-structuralist notions of the impossibility of being “outside”, aside), I think the poets who are putting work into the world desire (mediated) connection, regardless of the materials either generated or curated for consideration. I sense a hope of a banding together – generation of a critical mass – which to some may seem as creating an inside! Rather than, say, a line as division, I want concentricities. Constellations of overlapping concentric centers. Poets and pebbles tossed. (Is it ridiculous to call on Celan’s handshake here?)

What this has to do with confinement: we are prisoners of our own bodies, egos, deaths. Hence, the reach.

Oh, forgive me!