Maria Damon

Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism

Part I. The Lining of the Lymn: 1. The Calligraphy of Black Chant 2. Outlandish 3. A New York State of Mind Part II. Slipping into Darkness: 4. Out there a minute: the omniverse of jazz and text 5. Other planes of there.

Alan Sondheim’s Internet Diaspora

The much quoted “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” generally acknowledged to be Walter Benjamin’s final piece of writing, outlines a method and an ethos for the dialectical historian. This method, it must be recognized, is at the same time a description of the state of mind of and hortatory address to—small wonder—the refugee (that is, it is pre- and de-scriptive). In 1939 or 1940, Benjamin was writing as a moving target; his German citizenship annulled by the Third Reich, he had been living on the run in France. “Theses” was written between an internment and his death by suicide in a Spanish coastal town after escaping across the Pyrenees. In it, he urges that “Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” and, even as he himself entertained strong suicidal urges, describes the underdog, exilic survivor’s traits as “courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude,” that peculiar collective resiliency that supersedes questions of individual survival. Further more, his invocation of the “memory that flashes up in a moment of danger” as the paradigmatic object and method of study for the aspiring materialist historian corresponds also to the paradigmatic cognitive experience of the refugee living in a constant “state of emergency.” 2 The alertness, the charge of adrenaline flashing up in a moment of danger, the fragmentary nature of Benjamin’s essay itself as a series of aphorisms and S.O.S.’s all indicate the desperate conditions under which intellectual survival and creative expression is undertaken.

Poetries, Micropoetries, Micropoetics

Ephemera, doggerel, fragments, “weird English” (props to Evelyn Ch’ien), graffiti, community and individual survival—ecriture brute, folk letters, textile patterns evocative of “writing”; naive lettrism (as well as belletrisme and lettrisme brute); wise oraliture, gnomic thought-bytes and lyrical bullets, clairaudient visitations with a hermeneutic spin—traces of (in)decipherability; banality morphed into something more—

Post-Literary Poetry, Counterperformance, and Micropoetries

To teach is to create new interlocutors: within the academy at the graduate level, since at least in theory many of our students are training for an academic life; and outside the academy at the undergraduate level, since, at least in the public land-grant institution I’m in, our students are mainly bound for “secular” lives. If they can carry into those bare survivalist lives a kinetic memory of exultation occasioned by the poetic and by exercising their own apperceptive faculties at large, and if they can find resonant experiences in their intimate, public or professional lives, the revolution in poetic language can claim another victory by stealth, however subtle, diffuse, or invisible to the instrumentalist eye. Guy Debord’s dictum “We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects” provides an incisive mandate for the poetry/pedagogy enterprise.4