Quiz #5

1) Is the cultural space that forms the writing even as the writing ...attempts to probe its dimensions the space of a certain Flatland? No, it is the sound of a symphony being played on squirming live insect-instruments.
2) Can architectural acoustic theory...serve as an heuristic tool for imaging the institutional interpolations (not obvious ones like the Academy, but those at more inaudible frequencies) inhabiting the cultural structures of avant-garde poetry? If Yes, build a cardboard model of such a tool. If No, try to build one anyway. All prisons warp the spirit of those who are incarcerated there--most of all, those whose employment is keeping other people under guard. There is, of course, an underground economy to such places; & one can suppose, competing systems of exchange. A model of this might be envisioned as the three faceted solid (round, square, triangular) of psych-test fame.
3) The following question is two questions, really, so points are double (tripled if the two answers are seamlessly melded into one): a) What is a flutter echo? Provide one example from the current English Poet Laureate and another from one of Jack Spicer's translations of Federico Garcia Lorca. I don't get the joke. Are you going to laugh at me when i google for "English Poet Laureate" + "2004"...?b) Was Kurt Schwitter's Merzbau a visionary and mystical poetic text or a meaningless shrine to garbage, insanely imploding into an ever-more claustrophobic post modern space? Justify, being careful to note the possible irony in the question. Both. Irony is dead.
4) What is more relevant to avant-garde poetry's possible coextensiveness with architecture: The Brooklyn Bridge or the ruins of a university after a riot? Explain. The flutter echo. It goes & goes.

   Quiz #6

1) Is it possible that the recent desire amongst innovative writers to build analogic skywalks into a discipline of power and social utility such as architecture may be impelled from below by a hidden structure of ideological tensions and undergirdings that parasitizes and eats from within, thus shaping, as it consumes, the very social space of avant-garde aesthetic practice? Answer yes or no, and then rewrite this question into a syntax that is less onerous. We play Russian roulette with blanks. The danger of this is that we cannot blow our brains out.
2) As partly evidenced by the November, 2000 Language/Poetry/Performance Conference in New Dehli, contemporary innovative poets have become influenced by recent architectural theory's critique of Total Design, a concept that has two meanings: a) the implosive, in which design takes over all interior space (Sullivan, Wright, Taut, the Vienna Secession, etc.) and b) the explosive, where architecture is destined and authorized to move outward beyond discrete structure to encompass all scales (the Harvard School of Design via Gropius, the Englis Designs and Industries Association, etc.). The former resists (in petit-bourgeois/aristocratic fashion) industrialization and mass culture; the latter (in futuristic/avant fashion) seeks to become its very spirit. (snip)Write an answer of at least 300 words drawing parallels between the Bauhaus as described by Wigley and Language poetry, with particular attention to the latter's accelerating absorption by the academic institution. Be rigorous in your answer and avoid servile timidity. You're being paid by the word, aren't you? L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing is hated the way Bauhaus is hated. But people's trademarked procedures aren't even widely recognized within the community--so the analogy fails. Really, there are not many useful analogies to be drawn between different artforms, especially ones so diametrically socialized as poetry & architecture. Poets are more like the people who build things by their own reckoning & violate code--which the city then hastens to
bulldoze.
3) Is the Anglo-American Modernist long poem explosive or implosive in its architectures...? (snip) Long poems don't have architecture anymore. They only have the accidental inflections of doggedness. You could remove every other line & improve the vast majority of them.
4) The architects who talk about chaos, absence, fragmentation, and indeterminacy usually work hard to assure that you know that a design is theirs by using signature shapes and colors. (snip) Branding is only the surface indicator of our deep folly. We seek to become poem-making machines, when it is obvious all our
efforts should be made toward freeing ourselves of the desire to write.After doing so, briefly discuss the meaning of the Signature and its role as limen within Poetry's institutional architecture. The work of machines is all that's allowed in the standardized shop.