November 18, 2014

Jean Paul Lemieux
b. November 18, 1904

Nineteen Poems
Edited by Ken Irby
jacket2

Exile Scene
for Ed Dorn
Ken Irby

The space out of the river lands I saw
spread, go on to you
still now, I left before
they had gone there, I turned at Burley
along the river’s meadows out of sight of
the starch plants, I knew you lived
way past.

And look to now. This sight
in sight out a window at a snow
lighting on the yard and truck yard next door
goes on to you. What is any friend-
ship for
is given.

Worth or not worth it, hope
gives on this snow
somehow
falls to you
warmly. Open o open
up our moments

The highways another summer go over
the inches unfrozen under the wet snowed ground
fallen on now —
Massachusetts slums muddy and snow on gone
to Kansas grasses
plait, winds home to
like pigeons
to Idaho
I know is there only
you are.
Lacking out of
wrapped in
land wrapped in this snow.

— 19 Feb (1963, Cambridge, MA)

...(more)

La Conversation
Jean Paul Lemieux
1968

(....)

So to be reiterative and reductive: the langpo-tinctured discursive venture is not a poetics of pure indeterminacy, but of pure contingency, and in this sense, of failure. Failure to communicate, which is the fundamental condition of language itself, and the place where the categorical imperative—act as if communication is possible, and communication is possible—serves as maxim for most standard poetics and traditional criticism.

(....)

... there must be an excavation, necessarily wrenching, in addition to a radical archiving, necessarily annoying. In other words, it is not enough to walk down the Department hall, or cross a theoretical divide that is not a divide, at least not in practice. There is no art without theory, no theory without art, there is the art of theory, and it is just as impure as any theory of art. It is time to rescind all licenses and make things truly free. Which, though it sounds like a sweet liberatory call, something that ought to be issued by one with some modicum of utopianism, or at least the itch for something better than this, is more a statement of fact, designed to prod us along into the future anterior, that conditional to-be. In other words, a violent and manacled responsibility, even duty. To what? To insist that poetry is what poetry isn’t.

(....)

An a-poetics is not concerned with the lack of aesthetic or ethical good, as in insufficient quality/quantity, for that is institutional critique of the dialogic variety, one that hopes that widening the terms of the dialogue will produce more poetic goods—the subjective and objective imperatives will happily coincide. An a-poetics rather insists that, to use another numerical referent, the trinity is the new binary, and there is no dialogue, no call and response because the poem is no longer treated as a text to be read, however many ways and loose, but is cut loose altogether. The poem is simply a site of potential engagement like other works of art are simply sites for potential engagement, and there may be no “reading” just as there may be no “writing,” but a tripartite encounter with a textual surface. An encounter effected by what I have called a “sobject,” an entity that is neither subject nor object but anthropomorphic soup, spatio-temporally seasoned.

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Self-Portrait Assemblage
1916
Man Ray
d. November 18, 1976

(....)

5.2 Non-philosophy does not emphasize otherness or differences; it does not compound them through différance, and does not content itself with establishing play while conserving the deconstructionist's ex machina authority (which amounts to the same thing as enclosure). It does not add to nor subract from the immanent deconstruction of the thing (of texts); rather, it substitures unilateralism for difference (différance), the structure of the immanent existing-Stranger for differing, and it breaksthe enclosure, at least for the Real. If in the best of philosophical cases there is pure difference - a signifier in contrast to nothing, not even another signifier nor one that is absolutely removed from the chain, a "Greco-Judaic" signifier we could say - then there is a pure otherness that delimits, not in opposition to immanence (which has no limit), but a One-limitation that is opposed to the system as its possibilizing impossibility.

(....)

La Maison des Chapdelaine
Jean Paul Lemieux

With Senate Poised to Vote on Keystone XL, New Analysis Reveals Dangerous Toll of U.S. Pipelines
WASHINGTON - With the U.S. Senate poised to vote on the Keystone XL pipeline on Tuesday, a new analysis of federal records reveals the dangerous toll of pipelines in the United States. In just the past year and four months, there have been 372 oil and gas pipeline leaks, spills and other incidents, leading to 20 deaths, 117 injuries and more than $256 million in damages.

The new data adds to a June 1, 2013 independent analysis of federal records revealing that since 1986, oil and gas pipeline incidents have resulted in 532 deaths, more than 2,400 injuries and more than $7.5 billion in damages.

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Jean Paul Lemieux