Poetry Without Poetry

This project was an attempt to articulate a new social function for writing. The project was based in a general critique of cultural uses, both contemporary and historical, of writing, which lead to two premises. The first concerns moving beyond the subject/object distinction that structures the relationship between author and reader, author and work, and reader and work. This implies the second, which is the search for a new role for the writer. The project was, on a personal level, an attempt to shed some of my professional and education background. The new role was really the dissolution of a role and my absorption into a collective experience. .

If the writer's relation to "the public" is then a group or collective one, what is the nature of this relationship? In this project, all of our work as a collective, which ranged far beyond "writing" as such, but which was always documented as writing, began from affectivity, from what I like to call "being alongside." The positions that we took up within the group were those of equals, thus the nature of our relationship was one of trust, friendship, and openess (if openess is seen as including the right to affirm one's ideas and beliefs). Thus, the relationship took on the form of a "being alongside." (cant be underestimated) .

What was the methodology or working process of the group? Improvisation and auto-formation. After presenting the methods of writing that I had come to develop, the other members were free to take or leave them. These methods held the group's interest for only several weeks and after that we left them behind in a search for "our own manners of working." The manner we discovered was highly improvisational and required a consistent negotiation between all the members of the group as to what we would discuss and how we would document our actions. As such, all members become responsible for the group's activity and direction.

What then becomes of writing? The writing that was produce has nothing to do with traditional models of aesthetic valuation. In this project, writing merges with a general notion of culture realized on a group level. The vision of culture advanced by the project is then highly idiosyncratic: millions of small groups producing archives of written documents generated by collectively realized needs and ideas. Writing becomes radically site- and moment-specific, and simultaneously it has no and every value. We believe it can be read by outsiders, but we hope that reading it signifies a engagement with the work on a cultural level--that reading it requires a degree of familiarity with the concepts of the project--thus, in terms of a larger audience the project's goal is to affect cultural and not aesthetic changes.

Is this a political project? Only if thought of as politics without the political. As you may have realized by now, the project has many descriptions, many points of entry, many possible outcomes and directions. That is to say, that this was not a project about writing or about creating a new type of writing. It was the creation of a unique social formation between 6 people. The premise of the project is that one way to document the manifold and multiple inter-personal processes and moment of knowledge creation that occurred within this formation was through a written record. In other words, the project as many descriptions as approaches to it from established areas of discourse (stressing social formation leads to one description, knowledge creation to another, affectivity to yet another). In this introduction, we've favored a discussion starting from personal history