Assembly Poetics

Blog as critical share space, as third (fourth?) generation hypertext in which a new collective and collaborative critical writing emerges between and among individual and group blogs. Not sure we're there yet, or maybe we are and the evidence is just hard to read, to see and recognize, accustomed as we (I) may be to more discernable creeds, more limited, refined, condensed, concentric, bordered attempts. The link is still an emergent form, at least, and hasn't yet met its potential.

As critical (mass) share space: a mix-match aesthetic of parts assembly/disassembly, and on a daily basis, but thru and amidst the rant and rumble (mumble jumble) of the mundane. As yet hard to extract the critical strands, but maybe that's the point: What? Pure Critical Polylogue? Not on this generation's watch, where crimes perpetrated in the name of a clearly labeled mandate/poetix are still smarting, time yet unserved.

Let's say, critical share in the same space as the ugly, the inane and innocuous, the embarrassing, the personal/auto/bio, the tid-bit trumping, the confessional and constitutional. Yet, still, the attendant risks of that kind of immersion -- getting lost, bogged down, pulled under. I guess I'd rather see a combinatory space where strains and strands if not overtly woven thru (correlative risk of constraint, leaden seriousness, weight gain) are at least occasionally teased like the loose threads on grandma's throw pillows. In Kasey's crush essentials, for example, or Tabios's and Yep/ez's evaluative excursions, Young's reading reports and (maybe) the field reports here, Meetze's gentle confrontations and brutalist apologies, Piombino's tireless attention to his own and other's projects, Evans's factory output, Stefans's circulars and little reviews, the list goes on and can't be exhausted these several outposts of critical/theoretical attention swapped/refreshed daily if not hourly.

And there's the rub, the static, the glare: Inexhaustible, the new online critical share space is open 24/7, serving up a "convenience" poetics without the brand junk. An ephemeral(old, tired word)ness to it, sure, but also nervous, hyperactive, few if any time-outs, breaks, ups for air. A stock--or better flea--market for hungry, ambitious shoppers on the look out for the next big pragmatic poetic price break(through). If not market, then arena, court, field, where the (border) action is hot and everyone's out to breach the other's corporate boundaries, secrets (all in fun, all for the right cause).

This ever-changing face of the critical interface, this tweening of message and medium. The link, to repeat, reemerges as the point of condensation, implosion (from suck to equanimity). The blog chain as "critical circuit," not surfing one's favorites but daily assembling and reassembling a text-based digital-telecommune, scene, circle of confidants, conspirators. A textbook or real-time (on the fly) reader or primer, a school or a correspondence course, a regimen and diet, workout, tai chi, yoga, a stretch (expansion to include) all the way to a recoil (pull back to the local, offline requirements, commitments, works, responsibilities).

But in that regular assembly work the hit or miss of process as pedagogy as poetics. Strands in intervals, phrases (linking as syntax, pursuant) annexed to personalized/customized poetic spaces. The work of getting (oneself) organized.