Reconvening

Arbitrary as it may be, I pick up here after leaving the blogging world four years ago.  The last post on "Send My Roots Rain" was written when I was just back in Berkeley after my three years in Japan, dis-oriented by the experience of re-entry, unable to find work, and in general, set adrift in a sea with no shores in view.  I skip almost four years--one in Berkeley/San Francisco, three in Providence--to reach this post, utterly altered by circumstances, choices, peregrinations, and oblique inclinations toward earning (ha! that verb!) a Ph.D. in English at Brown University.  I have chosen to re-inscribe myself in the blogosphere for convenience's and exigency's sake.  Pen and paper have, for the most part, failed me the past three or four years.  Intensive academic labor has stultified my more "creative" impulses.  By some miracle of chance, I feel compelled to start again.  Follow intuitions to their productive or digressive ends by means yet to be formulated.  "Make it new" is certainly an old adage by now, so I will sway along, repeating myself at times, and over and over again finding unexpected ways to manifest particular encounters of myself and the world in words.  

So, to start with current events.  I attended the Columbia-Penn Poetics Initiative's "Rethinking Poetics" conference this past weekend in New York.  One particularly salient event, besides having Charles Bernstein fart next to me during one of the panels, was a short talk by Joshua Clover and an unexpected confrontational moment in the Q & A.  I wish my notes could do justice to Clover's provocations, which centered around the deceptiveness of a term like "hybridity"--which, as far as I understand Clover, masks certain traditionalist, or "mainstream," aesthetic ideologies (i.e. appropriate what you want from experimentalist poetics and "spit out the rest").  Clover suggestively asked the audience, "Where is our rethought antagonism?"  And while I can see Clover's stance from a philosophical point of view--"All that exists arises out of conflict" writes Heraclitus--I think that hybridity ultimately is an important and necessary term, as squishy and prone to idealist syntheses as it is.  Still, I wish I could recapture Clover's argument more faithfully.  I also realize that I am wandering into this argument after a long period of intellectual torpor.  Here is a recent post by Clover's interlocutor.