·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 21, 2009 (# 1)
Rachel Zolf, poet, reading at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco at CAA

Last night we in San Francisco had an invasion of two Canadian poets: Rachel Zolf (by way of New York), and Christian Bok. Unlike this past week’s meeting of President Obama and Canada’s Prime Minister - in which the advertised Obama intention was to give reassurances to our northern neighbor that a “Buy American” agenda will not destroy Canada’s economy - Bok and Zolf were enthusiastically received as poets with much strong work to offer the local poetry economy that is the audience of primarily poets in the Small Press Traffic audience. It was an intense evening that also partied late into the night at The Right Spot, the night club Bar at the corner of 17h & Folsom.

There is not time or space to blog on at length here. But. first off, Rachel Zolf’s work cuts right across the spectrum that constitutes coping with the internal contradictions of being Jewish and confronting Israel’s occupation, if not already the start of the decimation and/or removal of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. “De-Arabization” was her short hand for what has been initiated in Gaza. Or, to point in the opposite direction, in “a priori”, the opening poem, from a series conditional propositions she asks,
If Israel is not in Israel
As if not to dispose of the idea of Israel as a spiritual home & refuge, but to pose the idea that concept of Israel is not ‘geo-dependent’ but one with a fluid sense of location, and/or that its current geographic location is actually a counter-Israel.

The poem is from a beautifully produced new chapbook Shoot and Weep , (Nomados: Vancouver). Her language moves with the stinging velocity of a counter-Biblical, righteous sense of query, one that strips bare the ‘wire’ filled on-the-ground reality of asymmetrical moral and physical violence.

If the Sabbath is a form of constraint
If jihad is the first word we learn to spell
If Elie Wiesel is the Holocaust
If we must expropriate gently
If messianism licks at the edge of thought
If the truth does not lie in silence
If naf means self and brother
If the space between words can be bridged
If moderate physical pressure is acceptable…

Zolf’s language embraces, explores and is torn by the contradictions of the condition called Israel It’s brave and fearless work.
This work, among others in her reading, was part of other works that embed themselves in the ‘data’ condition of being global, corporate and modern. A person who has not yet chose an academic career, she has clearly worked as a writer in the ‘technical & training manual bowels’ of the corporate world. The poems navigate a space in which numbers co-opt words as transmitters of knowledge. It’s a space in which a human, bodily and psychological presence is not acknowledged. The poems wrestle, for example, with the numerical negations of sexuality, gender and difference. As so much begins to unravel - the demolition of the global Economy, including more and more Failed States - Zolf’s language - moving with the parodic speed of a computer computation - invokes the texture of an increasing world enfolding anxiety. In the manner of an Oppen vision, the poems read/perform as signals, the words and histories resisting and flashing on and off as from lights of shipwreck.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 21, 2009 (#2)
Christian Bok, poet, reading at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco at CAA

In an interesting way, without being openly political at all, Christian Bok’s sound poetry is also invested in the velocity of its body. With great dexterity, Bok’s voice takes and turns vowels and phrases into spatial launches that command the ear to listen and follow closely. Deeply practiced and mentored in European Futurist and Dadaist Sound poets, and, no doubt a child of Canada’s own great contributions to the tradition, i.e., The Four Horsemen Bok began his performance with on modernist poetry chestnuts (Rimbaud’s poem Voyelles) in its original French, then moved to his own ‘fay’ translation in which his voice, pushing and shoving against ‘the vowels’, re-energizes the original to make it fully alive to the present, while, at the same time, being counter-histrionic. He is, indeed, a quite astonishing, accomplished master of performance. In comparison to Rachel Zolof’s politically driven content - afterwords at the celebration in the Right Spot - some of us were trying to figure out whether or not Bok’s work had any political intent. Was it more similar to going to an opera where Bok, as a virtuouso, is giving the audience primarily an orchestra of sound? I don’t know if there is a ‘political’ answer to that question. Certainly, in a contemporary sense, his pieces, directly and indirectly, were loaded with a sense of post-modern cyber-tech and literary irony. He did, for example, perform a wonderful piece in which he took questions from Ron Silliman’s Sunset Debris and put them into a robot chat box. The Robot’s answer were chilling and maybe auguries of things to come in a robot laced economy - as well as a link back to Zolf’s use of numerical data feeds inner-mixed with the word equivalents provided by some huge Concordance that determines these things.
So, as much as it would be easy to consign Bok to an Art World audience, I do not think so. Similar to Zolf’s work, Bok’s performance is too edgy - with as much ear to the existing literature of poetry as it is to an interface with to a contemporary sense of things on the ground, in the air, etc. At least one hopes he’s is not gobbled up and spit out by the vultures who command the seductive powers to transform gifted poetry and performance careers into parody and consequent oblivion.

But best, party and all, of the evening, was the energy the readings got moving, and the way people were grappling with their import and implication.

Thank you, Canada.