Tensions in this, Wheelhouse's issue 7, abound. From the concrete work of Jeff Crouch, Matina Stamatakis, and Joe Balaz, to the vanishing disjunctive lines of Andrew Lundwall's cycle, or, the apparent "inner speech" of Reb Livingston's, a poet's wish for, or acknowledgment of, ephemerality, even a Blanchotian zero property in the act of unwriting, is met with the reality that our language games crystallize and grow roots with exponential fervor the more digitized our gestures become. So too, the continual and important tensions between authorship and readership, product and process, ownership and appropriation--these play out in new and startling ways in the collaborative work of Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney via collaboration itself, but also via the polyvocality of Meghan McNealy's quiet raging and Steven Hendricks's recursivity in PSYCHOPOMP. Poetry, perhaps only autonomous or distinctive from other text arts in its closeness to pure musicality--whether pushing the bounds of traditional tonality or not--houses within it that tension between the visuality of language and its aural implications, the seen and the heard. Larissa Shmailo's and Carol Novack's work presses its ear to the ground, allows us (beyond taking pleasure in each work for itself), to ponder the axis of performativity around which the seen, the heard, and indeed the gestural, may or may not turn, may or may not contradict, erase, or diverge from. This can be said, of course, of all the poetic work here--whether "performed" in the literal (recorded) sense or not. This issue also reflects our sharp aesthetic-political bents, those indebted to New York LANGUAGE poets (all x generations), fluxus, and Situationism. Yet, as might horrify practitioners that made these movements go, and as certainly abhorrent to the left aesthetes of modernism--Adorno, say--the work herein rides the wave of increasing disinterest in medium specificity and autonomy. There is a liberating recklessness to the restlessness of western text-arts movements now, in the era of late feudalism, one that embraces not simply hybridism and mosaicism of medium, but seeks out new expressive modalities--where such a seeking is so pervasive, so frenetic, it has been remarked by more than one writer that what is taking place is a flight from the page. It is the trajectory, the to that is in constant question. For some, it is book arts and the letterpress. For others, performativity. For still others, myriad ways to rethink collage, rethink verse culture, and then figure out procedures to bring the two together, tenuously, such that the work appears as both new and not-new, all the while attempting to scratch an itch as impossible as any project where saying the unsayable or unwriting the written is on the docket.
There is, finally, the constant tension between all these tensions--the politics of language, perhaps even this preface's rehearsal of binaries. Regardless of the degree to which our scribbles are politically inert, our scribbles are variable and diverse public gestures, and as such, squirm from their early private lives into their later capital public lives. Here is where the discourse of poetics indulges itself. Here is where the anxiety of commodification emerges. But here, also, is where we do, by the simple and simply radical act of play, play radicals. This is not to suggest that when we make things, when we scribble, we always (or even once) do so with a particular political agenda in mind. We may, but we may not. Yet, in all of the works in this issue, one sees the radical act of play at every point, its process implication that of a cleaving of normative language structures, hence cultural modalities, assumptions, preconditions for a neo-liberal status quo that has become, especially lately, simply untenable. The work of Amy King is multivalent here: its arc stretches from the private to the public, and its publicity is in structure and terms, dialectically bound up with its own marginalization and resistance. King, Zolf, and the other contributors who Wheelhouse thanks for their deep generosity and sense of urgency, simultaneously witness and challenge the fragmented globalized landscape, yet resist forgoing or ignoring the necessity of play, of resistance in the form of putting down a poetic way of thinking, a cognito-creative "what if..." followed by "...this were to be put into the world..." that all of us, actively making art or not, perform, perhaps daily. We at Wheelhouse would like to remind you, ourselves, in this tiny nook of cybergraven ether, that our "what ifs" are often born of what the hells. And that, for us, is where text arts meets an ugly, beautiful, ugly world that we dare in our small, often uneard ways, to make and remake--constantly.
Wheelhouse wishes to thank the contributors past and present, our dedicated readers, Joy Leftow for editing our Facebook Group, Joe Balaz for designing the cover, Susan Schultz and Tinfish and Carol Novack and Mad Hatter's Review for their editorial/publishing advice, and our journal partners (see links page!) for spreading the word. Word.
Enjoy. Do not enjoy. Enjoy.
David Wolach, Editor
2/28/09
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