By Islands, I mean paragraphs….

My first reaction to Carpenter was, “what is going on here? Will I capture a meaning,, make sense of this?” Not sure as to what she is doing to me, the computer person across from the screen, I begin to communicate a curiosity that is now common to me as a computer user. I find myself surfing through the waves to find the island and look for land and realized I was travelling in a metaphor…Moments of stories do not have to connect to be a part of the same body of water…hence, the land…

So I trust this as a game and go along. I open sights as the open into different inserted images but I feel intrigued by the technology and the simplicity of how they are presented. I also begin to doubt everything. “The measure is not to scale” she says at one point and it’s a lie because it would be to scale if it were in reality…it is not to scale because it is on an image on the computer.

The sea is nothing in sight but isles

I was about to switch frames when I realized that there were words being born on the top left of the screen. I watched for awhile then I took little lines like:

I’ll water works

I’ll water

I’ll wonder

I’ll wreck

And so on… and waited for more of these little personal sometimes, no logical phrases…and realized I was playing with her a hide and seek game

This is not just pleasure from words… this is a stylistic challenge to incorporate measures of time and distance in more ways then measuring time and rhyme…This is very new to me! I’m not sure how I relate…except I drag the little yellow body off it’s post and place it on a street on the map and we both get to see the neighborhood! It feeds my need to travel! It takes away the burden of the body as I replace myself with a yellow skeleton that can take me there…The body experience when in a room to listen to a poem or to be transcended to another emotional or spiritual place has become very practical through the use of digital poetry like this. (I also like fly on top of many cities when I take the bird view…).

We see the words on paper and do not hear the sound. Do we need the sound to appreciate the power of myth that words can hold? Cecilia Vicuna composes history though gap spaces, it seems. The songs she performs are more than voices or sounds. There seems to be a spiritual connection between the people and the place, similar to the performance where Vicuna comes from the crowd and connects to the audience with a yarn string.

Myth is language that cannot be spoken. A European epic was spoken but not be written:

The word

The myth

War

A thousand ships

Shift

Drift

embrace waters

 Salt and sun bleed on the land

έννοια

meaning

Language

Plain as blood 

Menstrualizing

Fertilize

From voice to text

Revisions

War zone!

Nothing but potential

A song is

What is a woman poet to do?

Sing!

Τραγούδι

Chant

Pray

Τελετή

Ακαδημία

Ceremony of the dead!

A poem enters language

A ship in the harbor

One war

A thousand ships!

Where does the audience want to be taken? No to the meaning of the poem…it’s nothing but potential! “Speaking instead of reciting without articulating the present is to perform aesthetic of ethical action.” The dramatic performance of sound and body in unseen language. Crossing language borders without paper and written words…

1. Is creativity a recorded activity according to Antin?
2. Can oral composition follow/break the rules of a current language?
3. How does Antin’s discovery while talking become a work of Art?
4. Why does Antin compare himself to the great story tellers of the past according to the definitions he provides here?

Response 1 :Antin’s “What am I doing here?”

Antin’s conditions himself as an avant garde creator of talking. Can poetry be measured in time of the past and the future? Does talk not hold a presence in the present because it changes meaning for the audience while it’s being performed? If telling of stories is based on myths and was orally heard, then the ancient part of the art that Jerome Rothenberg belongs to is almost necessary in creating and recreating the primitive cultures. A poem is not talk or is it? While Antin composes ideas as he is proposing his own questions he becomes independent of the rules of poetry per say, or is he? His presence in a specific place talking, is not a completely practice of poetry as the audience absorbs Antin’s ideas as personal. Is the personal interpretation the only truth?

The Aristotelian way of looking at poetry vs. the Platonic view of the poet as the liar and imitator of truth become essential in understanding Antin’s approach to himself as a poet. His reaction to bringing a recorder to this event and beginning to record his own dialogue and his own understanding of sharing thoughts. “Talking is not always spoken” is an idea that does not belong to a specific place. “What am I doing here?” has multiple indications of meaning. What is the poet doing in a specific place, but also what does the purpose of the action of doing be considered talking?

The reference to science as a “sacred art of terror” is significant in looking at the ways in which Antin compares his rule breaking and creative process to the brainwashing of scientific discourse. The “enforced consciousness” of science and “interrogation of memory” as vital to the poetic mythical consciousness. A myth allows a story to have possibilities. According to Antin, the poet is the “self as a no literate society” and later he refers to the self as the “preliterate society”. I think it is interesting that he separates himself from the Rothenberg by naming himself the future. It is indeed he, Antin who relates to feeling and memory before written language. Plato’s world of the poet, as well as Homer’s where the stories told were based on retelling of the same event without writing they always hold the possibility of change.