Carol Mirakove
Carol Mirakove is the author of WALL (ixnay, 1999) and a founding
member of the Subpress Collective, as well as an editor of its journal,
Bivouac. Fresh from the sizzling poetry world of Washington DC,
she has transplanted herself to Los Angeles, in a move completely resonant
with her patented brand of disjunctions that just almost make sense. Mirakove
is interviewed online in the current issue of r e a d m e (find it at
http://www.jps.net/nada/cmirakove.htm). When Mirakove puts her mind to
it, she can deliver the harsh stinging jeremiads of 1950s Howl Ginsberg,
yet in other moods she’s soft, evasive and quizzical as Billie Holiday.
By anyone’s standards she’s a remarkable reader and performer,
as we’ll see on this gala evening.
September 29, 2000
She is the author of temporary tattoos (BabySelf Press, 2002)
and WALL (ixnay press, 1999), and is featured with Laura Elrick
and Heather Fuller in the current issue of QUID. She is a founding member
of the subpress collective, with whom she published Fractured Humorous
by Edwin Torres.
Carol Mirakove was a part of our New Expiriments series on March 15, 2003
.She
writes: What does information mean, anyway? We’ll look at what it
meant to Marshall McLuhan, circa 1967, and what it meant to Adilkno, circa
1998. But this is for sure: As the Internet becomes increasingly integral
to our daily realities, we encounter overwhelming access to -- and unsolicited
feeds of -- information in mass quantities. In contemporary poetry, I
see patterns of information engagement through the ostensible use of source
texts, and through a heightened consciousness of our pervasive and invasive
popular cultures (news media, advertising, art), particularly as they
affect our social and political relationships. As agents of information
in a hyper-commercialized economy, I find two chronic anxieties: (1) Is
genuine intimacy possible?, and (2) How might we serve as accurate witnesses
for people who are subject to gross injustice? I will address the presence
of these concerns in texts authored by Jackson Mac Low, Amiri Baraka,
Joan Retallack, Harryette Mullen, Carolyn Forche, Leslie Scalapino, Sianne
Ngai, Rod Smith, Heather Fuller, Elizabeth Treadwell, and Gary Sullivan;
I invite the audience to offer others. Additionally, I will touch on patterns
of information use as they are variously paralleled in the work of contemporary
musicians, such as Australian turntablists The Avalanches, Dutch indie
pop group Solex, Canadian rock composers Godspeed You Black Emperor!,
and USAmerican audio activists Ultra-red."
