Summer, Rise

I just ran the final proof of Novaless through Word's auto- summarize feature, setting the parameters to 1 percent of the text. 160 pages reduced to 6 lines. This, then, is the machinable vision of a poetic text's integral elements, with no alterations:

time
black light
affective life . . . life
if dark » . . .
« if
life
if

Who said mindless mechanisms are deprived of poetic sensibility?

I was dumbstruck . . .

Poem Consisting Of Philosophy Dissertation Questions From The 2008 French Baccalauréat

*
does
art transform our
awareness of
the real ?
*
are there
other
ways to
establish
a truth than
by means of
demonstration ?
*
can
perception
be
learned ?
*
is
a scientific knowledge
of lived experience
possible ?
*
can
we
desire
without
suffering ?

CONCEPTUAL POET LIVES

Powers and Abilities

Armor

See also: Conceptual Poet’s Armor

Conceptual Poet possesses powered armor that gives him super-informational strength and procedural durability, along with an array of General Systems Anti-Mainstream Weaponry. The armor is invented and, with occasional short-term exceptions, worn by Conceptual Poet. (Other people who have assumed the Conceptual Poet identity for brief periods include long time life-partner Joseph Beuys, best friend Guy Debord, close associates Hugo Ball, John "Vast Fields Of Corn” Ashbery, Jørgen Nash and (briefly) Ron Silliman.

This weapons systems has evolved over the years, having been heavily modified after the early discovery of hidden alien designs in the basement of Jack Spicer. Following these advancements, Conceptual Poet’s standard offensive weapons have remained rather stable. They include the Reassembler Ray – which allows for quick Oulipean procedural collage even in the most extreme circumstance of Mainstream duress – and the standard-issue MEDGs (MacLowe Erasure Dispersal Grenades), which are fired from the palms of Conceptual Poet’s gauntlets.

Other weapons built into various incarnations of the armor include the Syntax Dissembling Beam-Projector in Conceptual Poet's chest. The beam is made up of pulse bolts of SIS (Synergistic Internet Sourcings) that pick up procedural energy (but not lyrical energy), so that they hit harder the farther the reader sits from his or her HPSM (Home Poetry Screening Module). Other capabilities of Conceptual Poet’s standard suit include: Ultra Rime-Riche Disrupter which, used in conjunction with the AAAD (Alliteration And Assonance Detector), allows Conceptual Poet to create and disrupt multiple IFs (Informational Fields) simultaneously, regardless of the quotient of Area Specific Anti-Lyrical Datum Hook-Up. He is also able, at propitious moments (such as during the recent Buffalo special-deployment) to engage a Holographic Search-Field Modulating Generator, which enables close to unlimited “I’m Feeling Lucky” poetic functionalities. Conceptual Poet is also equipped with 6 high-frequency Faux-Prosodic Metrical Decoy Devices (FPMDDs). These are often able to confuse Conceptual Poet’s most resourceful Mainstream enemies, leaving them open to later, standard attacks of MacLowe Erasure Dispersal Grenades.

In addition to the general-purpose model he wears, Conceptual Poet has developed several specialized suits for (respectively): Sonnet and Established-Form Deconstruction, Procedural Repetition, Unboring Boringness, Situationism, and a high-level DDD (Dada Distanciation Device). These suits may in turn be fitted with such extras as the 2008 synergistically modulated re-issue of Poetry Foundation Sweeping Pronouncement Blogging Capabilities.

The history of Conceptual Poet's armor is complex. Conceptual Poet developed a special electronics pack during the first L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E War (“Equals Equals 1”) which, when attached to armors that use Conceptual Poet technology, will burn out those components and render the suit useless. This pack is ineffective on later models, (however for more specific variants see Flarf Post-Irony Adapted Bioware Encasement and Soft Surrealist Multiple Imagistic Kevlar Array).

Powers

For a time, due to an artificial system installed after he suffered extensive damage to his original nervous system during the second L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E War ("Equals Equals 2"), Conceptual Poet had superhumanly acute powers of sensory perception, unemotional detachment from constructed notions of “the Reader”, world informational network-synergy (largely a product of the 2006 discovery of the Apps World Poetic Data Assimilator), as well as extraordinary awareness of the physical processes within his own body, as well as those within the Internets.

After being critically injured during a battle with the 4th generation Quietude-enhanced Glück clone, Conceptual Poet injected his nervous system with a modified Cartesian Self And Organic Pronoun Canceling Virus (known as the “Contemporanis” process) which not only saved his life, but gave him the ability to store the inner layers of the Conceptual Poet armor in the hollows of his Lyrical Central Core-Modulation Disruptor, (as well as control it through direct Romantic Emotion Inhibiting Impulses). Conceptual Poet can thus now control the layer of affective armor underneath his skin, and make it emerge from numerous exit points around his limbs as a gold-colored neural interface under-sheath. While in this form, Conceptual Poet has technopathic control of the armor and can suit up at any time (see previous reference concerning the “Buffalo” deployment).

Furthermore, the “Contemporanis” process has increased his body's recuperative and healing abilities. He is now also able to connect remotely to external communications systems such as satellites, cellular phones, computers and interactive workshops throughout the world. Because the armor's operating system is now directly connected to Conceptual Poet’s nervous system, its response time has been significantly improved. (Because of this amelioration, for example, Conceptual Poet is now able to produce in the environs of 23.2 to 23.7 million PATWs [Poems Against The War] each second).

New improvements are also scheduled: for instance, a newly integrated Critical Field Preparation Module is scheduled from Copper Canyon Biotech Industry's R & D Division, for the summer of 2009.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

Cubes On Sticks Save America

Oh by the way, I found this Nonconceptual poem for Kasey! I was so happy. Of course, I don't know if it's precisely Nonconceptual. I wasn't really thinking. Duh . . . But it contains such Nonconceptual markers as a man riding a subliminal black donkey through mid-ground shadows away from Washington. Now more than ever it is necessary that cubes held on sticks and balloons attached to strollers follow elephants to the saving of America. Only then may a suspiciously Stalin-esque Constructivist sun rise up over the White House, containing within it the smiling face of Kenneth Goldsmith, who, while recording a reading of Jack Spicer on a Dictaphone shaped like the Internet, announces that poems which do not use a paper cutter must be considered worthless.

Or something . . .

Finely Ordered Variety: In Infinite Admiration of George Eliot (No. 1)

Just arrived home, with peaceful time for reading Middlemarch with astonished eyes, on the train . . . The continuing and staggering brilliance of George Eliot will, I suspect, make the title of this post a regularly recurring installment over the coming months. It will give itself most likely to longer reflections than this, but for the moment, we can begin by way of definition:

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion – a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

– Middlemarch, Chapter 22

Of course, the "instantaneously" may make our post-romantic, durational noses screw up. But the continuous flux and (re)flow of perceptions into feeling, affections into knowledge, mixed all the while with an explicitly formalizing concern, all stands to make George Eliot closer to Louis Zukofsky than it is almost possible to believe.

Feeling a new organ of knowledge.

Yes.

Thoughts on Rouen, and an extraordinary conference, after initial sleep.

(By the way, I just realized that my using the phrase "It will give itself to" as if it were a normal English construction, apparently means my brain is still functioning in French).

The Construction Of The Subject

I'll be in the French city of Rouen for the remainder of this week, presenting a paper at the international colloquium "The Construction of the Subject". So, correspondence will be delayed.

I'm very excited about this conference, and hope it goes well. I'm really not sure how my paper will be received, as it errs on the side of the didactic. I'm talking about erasures of the subject in contemporary European poetry, and linking all that in to a critique of lyricism via what I see as its bases in Schelling and the utopianism of transcendental idealism in the Iena School. Maybe I'll annoy some lyricists . . .

Also, I wanted to say that The Continental Review is far from comatose! Our brief rest-period and hiatus is just continuing a touch longer than expected. We have 5 extraordinary videos though, ready to be aired, and if the redesign takes much longer I think I'll just begin posting again at the old page, which has served us so well.