Mathew Timmons, The New Poetics (Trenchart: the Maneuvers)
, Les Figues Press, 2010."Poetry. A cross-referenced encyclopedia of all things New, Mathew Timmons's THE NEW POETICS challenges the prevailing obsession with the emergent and the reinvented by remaking The New itself in the image of the banal. Employing techniques of collage and appropriation, Timmons explores the endless repetition and recapitulation inherent in a language constructed from signs, signifiers, memes, short-hands, ready-made phrases and the vast wash of pop-culture paraphernalia. Written with poetics as both subject and approach, but in rambling prose paragraphs and breathless, run-on sentences, THE NEW POETICS simultaneously critiques and reenacts the search for the ever-desirable and ever-elusive New in the rubble of convention.
“Consisting of cross-referenced, encyclopedia-style entries on everything new—The New Alexandrine, the New Egret, the New Emotion, the New Look, and the New New Deal, for instance—The New Poetics updates Pound’s imperative to “make it new” to address the contemporary commodification of newness itself. In making newness old, The New Poetics begins to chart a way to think futurity differently. And as a work of poetics, Timmons’s book both operates through and points up a contradiction inherent to flarf and conceptual writing: the valorization of non-newness as simultaneous valorization of the (new) gesture away from the new. These poems are great at the individual level, and you should read this book for that reason. But also, you should read this book because doing so will upset a slew of old poetics questions you thought you had worked out.” — Marie Buck
“I’m often asked “what’s new in poetry?” — and now there’s an easy answer. From the man who first demonstrated that powerful dramatic poetry could be written in the new blank verse comes Mathew Timmons’ The New Poetics. In the hands of the Language Poets, the New Prose Poem insisted on its scriptural illegibility rather than a speech-based comprehensibility. In Timmons’ hands, however, everything is legible, which makes it simultaneously reiterated and fresh. The news, that is, as Pound would have it, that stays news.” — Craig Dworkin
“The New Poetics helped deepen my thoughts about the paradoxical relations between temporality and culture-making. It is paradoxical and committed in a most excellent way.” — Rodrigo Toscano
"What is The New Poetics? How did the project come about, and how does it fit into Les Figues current series?
- I began writing The New Poetics in the summer of 2006. At the time it seemed like I was often talking about the new narrative and the new sentence with various writing friends, Harold Abramowitz being one person in particular. It was a very warm summer in L.A., which tends to push me towards insomnia, and that summer I was in the bad habit of driving around downtown Los Angeles in the middle of the night, between say 3 and 5 AM, roughly. I wasn’t sleeping all that much and would come home from driving around and work on various projects in the early hours of the morning. At some point I thought I’d google “The New Narrative” and see what the internet could tell me about the subject. I liked the odd repetition and rephrasing of what came up, so I took the first three pages of google results, put them in a Word document and started moving things around until I liked what I saw on the page. I did the same thing with “The New Sentence” and afterwards I felt like I had actually learned something about both The New Sentence and The New Narrative that normal research wouldn’t offer. Then I started keeping a list of News, things that would come up in conversation or I would overhear, The New Something-or-Other phrases in people’s work. For example, “The New Debility” is dedicated to Will Alexander, because in his play Conduction in the Catacombs—which I worked on for Betalevel here in Los Angeles, ATA in San Francisco, and 21 Grand in Oakland a few years ago—one of the characters uses the phrase “The New Debility.” In the case of “The New Motherfuckers,” I was at Amoeba Music in Hollywood and on one of the end-caps there was a CD by the band The New Motherfuckers. I listened to it and really liked it, so I wrote “The New Motherfuckers” for them, and most of the material is actually about them, which means they had great google presence back in 2006 when I was working on the book.
I sense a sort of poking fun at schools and movements in The New Poetics. Can you comment on that?
- It’s true, I’m not so much into writing schools and movements, or I have a healthy skepticism for them. Kurt Schwitters, one of my favorite artists and writers, created his own movement, Merz, after he wasn’t accepted by the Berlin Dadaists. Schwitters was closer to the Zurich Dadaists and dabbled a little with the surrealists. He wasn’t easy to pin down. I myself don’t like to be easy to pin down, and I don’t need to follow the marching orders of the movement at whatever moment some movement wants to get on the move. I also find that movements and schools should be left to the 20th century avant-garde. Movements and schools require a solid identification and tend towards an Us vs. Them mentality. I’d prefer to recognize mutual affinities between artists and writers around me. I’d prefer not to be limited by what may or may not fit into a perceived or constructed regimen of any school or movement. Yet I love manifestos, the typical founding documents of any movement. I love the didactic voice of a manifesto, always ridiculously self-assured. In my aesthetic statement for Les Figues TrenchArt: Maneuvers Series, which I very appropriately titled, “The Old Poetics,” I bloviated on and on for about 5,000 words about the old poetics. It read like a manifesto for the old poetics, while I am of course, obviously all about the new.
What’s happened with the PARROT series and Insert Press since we last talked?
- PARROT 4, 5 & 6 came out: But on Geometric by Joseph Mosconi, Loquela by Allyssa Wolf and Viva Miscegenation by Brian Kim Stefans. We sold out of the first three issues during that time and we ran into a bit of a printing snag that caused a few months delay. I’m happy to say that the printing snag has been dealt with and PARROT 7 On the Substance of Disorder by Will Alexander will be out for the new year and we should get back to getting them out in quick succession again after that. In the meantime we published a booklet in collaboration with MATERIAL about artists’ communities, The Futility of Making Salad. The publication includes texts from Harold Abramowitz, Stan Apps, Marcus Civin, Ginny Cook, Dorit Cypis, Robin Dicker, Bradney Evans, Nicholas Grider, Dan Hockenson, Peter Kirby, Elana Mann, Melanie Nakaue, Julie Orser, Adam Overton, Putting On, Declan Rooney, Kim Schoen, Charlotte Smith, Jesper List Thompsen, Mathew Timmons, and Jason Underhill.
Looking ahead to 2011 we’ll be continuing with the PARROT series and working on two books, Bruna Mori’s Poetry for Corporations and The Ups & Downs exhibitions catalog as well as issuing the last two volumes of Vanessa Place’s trilogy, Tragodía through our print-on-demand wing, Blanc Press." - Interview by David Shook
Excerpts
I’ve slowly been working on The New Theme and I think I’ve made some good progress today. Take a look and tell me what you think. Things might look different, but we made sure the new interface is The New Look for The New Vibes! The New Vibes! are quietly releasing an updated look and feel this evening. Read about the release as you find out more about The New Look. We want to be easy to use for everyone. You may notice that a few things have moved around. For instance: The New Edition has arrived, and it looks different.
The New Love
According to Žižek, hate is The New Love; and Jesus said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers, they have not The New Love!” If you’ve ever read about The New Love, you’ve probably encountered a well organized, good read, and The New Chapters on ethics and jealousy are great. The New Love and Sex covers an enlarged view of The New Work(s) being accomplished by The New Love. The New Love holds the secret to sustainable intimate relationships founded upon The New Love and Sex.
Introducing The New Love.
Polyamory: The New Love without limits. The Sacred Space Institute is a place for The New Love, with tantra, polyamory, The New Love without limits, viacreme, workshops, love, sexual healing, orgasms, sex and the spirit. In The New Love study, researchers compared two sets of images, one taken when the participants were looking at a photo of a friend, and the other when The New Love was on a boat with movie stars, TV personalities, celebs, and more. Introducing, The New Love: At some point it will become necessary to introduce your man (forgive the gender). The New Love of my life. Isn’t she glorious? She arrived around noon today. I carefully disrobed her and then felt a bit guilty.
Hate Is The New Love, The New Love and Sex excerpted from The New Love and Sex. The New Love triangle—the laptop slides into bed, in love... The New Love and Sex. Lust is The New Love when you’re 29 years old, female, living in Long Island, New York, United States. Sticks & stones may break my bones but whips & chains Xite me. The New Love without Limits: Polyamory.
At some point it will become necessary to introduce your man (forgive the gender bias, but hey! I’m a girl!). People who like The New Me also like The New Love of my life. Say Hello to The New Love in my life. Her name is Patina. I got one of those dual core processors, so I’m curious how that’ll work out. Also, I got a TV tuner. Meet The New Year’s Resolution on The New Love: we’ll find The whole New Generation of songs about love. Each song, hand selected for its heartfelt expression. Hate Is the New Love. An ideologue is a person who believes very strongly in particular principles and tries to follow them carefully.
The New Love Poem
The majority of critics and readers alike give themselves up to the enjoyment of The New Love Poem with a sigh of relief, accepting it as a gift from God, but Jack & Jill have mixed feelings about The New Love Poem. The New Love Poems selected from the anthology are, mostly, love letters from a husband to his wife. All rights reserved. Reprinting, reproducing, or translating The New Love Poem has shown to be a regular problem that influences The New Love Poem.
The New Serenade, The New Love Poem, The New Rejection Letter, The New Form—enjoy them all today and afterwards, read more poems.
I should have put The New Love Poem first. I meant to. You will find The New Love and you will be joyful. The New Love Poem is known for its honesty. The New Love Poem says I don’t love you, but you can still be happy in your life.
Disclaimer: The New Love Poem and quote belong to their respective authors. If you want to use The New Love Poem and quote you should shop for The New Love Poem at our safe, secure, discreet, buy now, save money on every The New Love Poem purchase and get free shipping, we have The New Love Poem at this site, we have, have, have it, The New Love Poem.
The New Love Poem remembers the old love poem, but The New Love Poem is known for its honesty. The New Love Poem says I don’t love you. The New Love
Poem remembers the old love poem in which a body is directly linked to the site of The New Love Poem.
One advantage at the centre of The New Love Poem is its ability to inspire a particular behavior in members of the listening and/or other audience members which is that after hearing or reading The New Love Poem, most people want to lick each other.
#2 Globally brand New Mexico as The New Media State. #3 Promote New Media business products and services to the local, regional, national, and international levels. #1 If an offer/answer/transaction succeeds, then The New Media State becomes active. I have never heard about a “proposed” media state.
"The New Craft" by Mathew Timmons
Mathew Timmons, Credit, Blanc Press, 2009."CREDIT is an 800 page, large format, full color, hardbound book, released by Blanc Press in Los Angeles–the longest, most expensive book publishable through the online service, lulu.com. Divided into two sections, Part A: Credit–26 parts (a-z) and Part 2: Debit–10 parts (1-10), CREDIT is a highly revealing and emotional work chronicling a personal tale of credit.
In late spring 2007 as an irrational exuberance and promise of financial fortune hung in the air, mailboxes were filled with generous and gracefully worded offers of credit. Just over two years later, in midsummer 2009, the shape of the financial environment changed radically and mailboxes still filled up with statements of credit. Something had to change, offer turned to obligation.
Retailing for $199.99, CREDIT is a book the author himself lacks the cash or credit to buy.
Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT has been roundly endorsed by a number of artists, writers, editors and critics, including: Harold Abramowitz, Stan Apps, Marcus Civin, Brian Joseph Davis, Ryan Daley, Craig Dworkin, Brad Fliss, Lawrence Giffin, James Hoff, Maximus Kim, Matthew Klane, Janne Larsen, Matthias Merkel Hess, William Moor, Joseph Mosconi, Holly Myers, Sawako Nakayasu, Sianne Ngai, Ariel Pink, Vanessa Place, Dan Richert, Ronald Quinn Rudlong Jr., Ara Shirinyan, Danny Snelson, Erika Staiti, Brian Kim Stefans, Robert Summers, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener and Steven Zultanski:
Let’s face it, only those who see the invisible can do the impossible. However, miraculously, and right on cue, just short of a decade into the 21st century, Mathew Timmons has given us a momentous, lucid, and gripping book that makes visible what used to be, exclusively, invisible, the wide terrain of credit. Buy “ CREDIT,” tell your friends to buy it, and take its lessons to heart: Credit is expensive!… Credit is not cheap… Credit is hard, not easy, to get… —Harold Abramowitz
If you want to pay a penny for a thought Mathew Timmons has 19,999 of them, but like Master Card suggests, Timmons keeps it simple. CREDIT is a work ripped from both the headlines and the mailbox. —Brian Joseph Davis
I will send a very special, one-of-a-kind, only-available-via-purchase-and-full-completion and proof-of-reading-of-this-book, to all who purchase and read this book. Offer not valid in Kentucky.— Sawako Nakayasu
CREDIT by Mathew Timmons captures the entire postmodern economy under one cover. Like an avalanche of fine print, CREDIT reveals absolutely everything required to be disclosed by law. Timmons aestheticizes the angst of indebtedness into a colorful durational novel, complete with a lifetime supply of rate, fee, and grace period information, plus all the “__ _ !lI” •••••••• •••••••• & •• ‘.”~.’lf ’ CIa … “ of modern life. This is a book “that do_es lL all for you” and best of all “_.s:ard ~ith _no annu~lJee.”—Stan Apps
Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT: Approved.—Sianne Ngai
The output is a sprawling, modular form-letter with all the personal/financial affirmation cut down through razorbladed erasure-transcoding. CREDIT’s procedure traces an unfollowable map from the macrodistortion of mass-market advertising onslaught to a subjective microdistortion of noise stream granulation and reassembly. CREDIT is problematic in terms of numbers, transaction, hardware and software. The text’s operation is ravenously lossy, feeding on filtering byproducts and mistranslation; emphasis on information loss/breakage makes the text self-genotoxic and it sprouts mutant poetry from attractive shapes and corners. The text can be rotated. CREDIT is unreadable and CREDIT is a vibrant autobiography and CREDIT is a rainbow dream. —Dan Richert
What kind of Art would Human this kind of Receipt?
What kind of Receipt would Art this kind of Human?
What kind of Human would Receipt this kind of Art?
What kind of Art would Receipt this kind of Human?
What kind of Receipt would Human this kind of Art?
Fuckers. —Rodrigo Toscano
Quite possibly the oldest system of exchange, credit is almost inseparable from wealth. Credit is the laxative to the stubborn bulk of capital. Similarly, how easy can form be separated from content? Or is content itself a kind of para-form? Paraformaldehyde, even? Disinfectant indicating content’s historicity in its obliteration? Content is form not yet recognized as such. Content is form on credit. And it is to Timmons’ credit that he seems to be particularly susceptible to this confusion, bombarded as he seems to be with offers. And though credit and wealth may be interchangeable to the point of identity, still Timmons is all the more duped for believing so.—Lawrence Giffin
Not since “The Tzanck Check” has a work so conscioned the infra-thin of capitalism—a tour de fort-da. —Vanessa Place
This work could have easily been called “Labor”—like “Credit,” one of the least understood, least visible of our foundational abstractions. (“Milk” might be the other.) Mathew Timmons has managed to squeeze a Dummy’s Guide of both into a mere 800 pages. Sure, this is art in the age of digital reproduction, but you’re not getting anywhere near this thing. —Brian Kim Stefans
It seems only natural that with this book I re-appropriate a blurb about another book (Fiona Banner’s The Nam):
“It has been described as unreadable.” —James Hoff
Congratulations! You’ve been preselected to apply for a copy of the new book by Mathew Timmons at a low introductory rate of just 199.99 and no annual fee ever. Documenting the social and economic space defined by the writing that falls between bulk mailing and fine print (full color and some of it very fine indeed), CREDIT appropriates direct mail credit card solicitations and advertisements in order to explore the nature of disclosure in a series of plays between display and censorship, see-thru windows and security envelopes, financial promise and legal threat—or simply, in Guy Debord’s terms, between monologue and true communication.
Testing the limits of publishing—CREDIT is the largest and most expensive book publishable via Lulu—Timmons’ book is well beyond most readers’ means. But remember, you could always charge it and hope to juggle some good balance transfers down the road…. Respond Immediately and Request Your Copy Today. —Craig Dworkin
Rarely has the mind-numbing banality of consumer capitalism’s fine-print underbelly been employed to such elegant effect. Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT is a timely epic in this crumbling age of debt. —Holly Myers
You know Timmons is just saying what Patti Smith said thirty years ago, although he’s saying it even more: “And when we dream it, when we dream it, when we dream it, / Lets dream it, we’ll dream it for free, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, free.” —Matias Viegener
"Credit is a conceptual work. It is a book, but, as the name implies, it is also an abstraction, something more promised than produced. Credit is Mathew Timmons’ 800-page curation of his financial situation circa 2007 to 2009, when credit flowed, and then, naturally and inevitably, ebbed. Credit is thus necessarily dialectical as the tide, and is thus divided into two sections, “Credit” and “Debit.” For the “Credit” section, Timmons reproduced twenty-six credit card offers extended to him over the course of about three weeks, in the order of their offering. All names and addresses were redacted. For the “Debit” section, Timmons reproduced all dunning letters he received in a separate two week period. All the information except names and addresses were redacted. All redacted information appears in two appendices, enabling full reparation. Credit was originally conceived as a postering project. But Timmons had no money. As many good Americans before (and alongside) him, Timmons responded to his lack of negotiable funds by spending on the come, designing a big and expensive book-idea, one tailor-made to the limits of page and price permitted by print on demand. For although the publisher of Credit is Timmons’ own Blanc Press, it is physically produced by the popular print on demand site, Lulu.com, and can be had for $199. And so the means of Credit’s production directly comport with the basic capitalist tenet of supply and demand. Put another way, Credit, like the offer thereof, only exists once you accept its offer.
But there’s really no point to reading, or owning, Credit, except the purely consumptive point of reading or owning Credit. It is worth noting in this regard that according to Timmons, three copies have sold to date. Therefore, Credit, unlike most books, remains valuable only to the degree it remains unread and unowned. Its worth decreases with the number of copies sold, and, by the same token, its means of production, generally considered the most democratic model of publication/distribution, is a way of maintaining the book’s status as rarified commodity. There’s no print run of a thousand, bleating softly in their boxes, there’s not even a hundred cellophaned copies waiting patiently to be passed on to those with time and money on their hands.
To manufacture Credit, Timmons scanned the documents, redacting them the old-fashioned way via black marker. Mistakes in the OCR are left intact. This is a sloppy conceptualism, one content to remain, in some senses half-baked. Not conceptually, but materially. Less pristine fetish object, more object of conspicuous consumption, and one that is manifestly about the pure fetishization of conspicuous consumption. And so Credit is a conceptual success by virtue of its excess.
Conceptual writing has been defined by Kenneth Goldsmith as writing in which “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” Craig Dworkin wrote that the test of this writing is “no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.” To these definitions, Robert Fitterman and I have added that conceptualism is a response to textual excess, and that conceptual writing is necessarily allegorical writing. In a 2004 essay, Hal Foster described archival (visual) art works as allegorical in both the sense of being melancholic and incomplete, and in the “strict” literary sense of “featur[ing] a subject astray in an ‘underworld’ of enigmatic signs that test her.” Timmons, whose book is arguably more art object than text object, is also overtly caught up in a play of excessive signs: he is credit worthy and a credit risk. His credit limit merits extension. He is over his credit limit. He has good credit. He does not want to hurt his credit. What is his credit history? What will his credit look like later? The allegory here is present-tensed and bloated and gleefully incomplete. Unlike Benjamin’s allegory of ruin, there is no ancestral epistemological whole to miss or mist over. Unlike Foster’s interpretation of archival art, there’s no sadness in the slinging of sign, for signs, as we all know, exist only to be slung. The allegory in conceptualism takes as given that signs sign, but cannot sign off. Not fully, anyway. Here, the question of signing becomes moreover acute as it is the act of signing that signals acceptance of an offer of credit, and creates the status of debtor. The signature, according to Agamben, is that which effects what it expresses. The signature serves as voucher for the sign: it (ac)credits the sign with signification. And this is how ontologies are made.
For just as a voucher is an act of credit, so is vouching. Timmons collected thirty blurbs for the book, including blurbs from Craig Dworkin, Rodrigo Toscano, and me. I did not read the book, look at a manuscript or pdf, or have any textual interaction beyond Timmons explaining the project in an email solicitation. It was the concept of Credit that I blurbed, just as it was the idea of Vanessa Place that was wanted for the blurb. My surplus value attested to the surplus value promised by the project. Similarly, most of the blurbs, mine included, suffered from their own lexical excess in the form of puns, digressions, over-use of exclamation points, plagiarisms, and other linguistic wallowings. This was in part due to playing with the idea of the project, and in part inspired by the excess latent in the topic. The credit given Credit was given in the sense of an inscription, like a film credit, like signing-off while signing-on. We did not credit Credit, but credited its credit. So that all parts of the apparatus of this book project allegorize the project of the book: blurbs are not blurbs, but are as integral to the book’s existence as its spine. More so, for the book exists more as a thing talked about than as a thing in-itself.
I have written before about the radical mimesis in much conceptual work, and this is almost that. Timmons pulls the punch a bit via his redactions, which were a by-product of the postering notion. An attempt at public privacy. As is, the erasures can be read (as Timmons would have you read them) as hiding the salient “juicy bits”: relative to the plus side of the ledger, the numbers are sexy, i.e., points of concentrated interest. How much is someone potentially worth? As interest-generator, that is. More interesting to me is that what Timmons suggests through his redactions is the manifestation of lack. Not in the more obvious way of individuation being less salient to corporate finance than numbers or of individuation being more interesting to fiscal failure than numbers, or even the surface discourse here about the public versus the private, and how our private parts have become financial, i.e., that the black bar no longer hides the phallus in an pornography but is the phallus in an economy. But in the way that the fact of a redaction suggests a hidden knowledge that may be recouped—which Timmons overtly concedes, having provided this knowledge in the appendices. This puts Credit as a piece framed in the Lacanian discourse of the hysteric: the subject, its truth forever hidden from itself, suppresses the fact of its desire as it asks the master, “what do you want from me?” But in this, the hysteric reveals the master’s lack of knowledge, for the shifting answers of the master betray the fact that the master does not know: more credit, less credit, payment, payment deferred. The dialectical movement of the book is in this way complete. It has to be, for capitalism itself is famously built on a dialectic. But the difference is the gap, the missing bits and the too-many pieces. For dialectics have become fundamentally undialectical: there is no synthesis per se, no Kantian reason d’être nor Heideggerian über-ergo but rather a freezing of the dialectical movement itself. This is the shipwreck of Mallarmé, a shipwreck necessarily bottled on the page. Stuck in the suck of its ebbs and flows.
I have gone through these interpretive machinations in part to explain Credit, in part because I suspect the reading of this kind of work differs from the reading of most poetry. I’ve not quoted from the book because there’s no line I’m interested in, no text I care to contextualize. Or rather, it’s all contextualization, and nothing but. In conversation, Timmons has described the language in Credit as “fascinating,” and it may well be. The point is, I don’t care. I don’t care about the particulars of the language used in offers made by banks too big to fail or how deep my neighbor sits in the hole. As fond as I might be of Mathew Timmons, or as much as I might relish his suffering, he is no more the subject of credit than he is its author. Certain kinds of conceptual works exist in a perceptual bubble. You can’t engage with them, not directly, for any attempt to engage directly sucks you onto the abyss of textual excess. (The abyss, as I’ve also said before, is now a mountain. Benjamin and Nietzsche stared into the chasm and decried the lack. We, punier still, look up at piles of the stuff.) What they do is instigate by their instantiation, not by the content of their content. Unlike most writing, they are lesser containers of any particular epiphany or exegesis. In this sense, Credit occupies the position of a conceptual art object, existing as a point of origin rather than terminus. And while many may argue that the best writing does just that, this is not the best writing. This is the fact of something that has been stated. As in a credit statement. As in a statement of arrears. It does not matter what the content of these statements are because they are essentially and merely speech acts, so to speak. They trigger status and attendant discourse. Some of these kinds of work, while seeming narcissistic (such as Goldsmith’s Soliloquy) or banal (such as Robert Fitterman’s Sprawl) or the sort of art mocked in post-war New Yorker cartoons as the kind my kid could make, serve and defeat the primarily altruistic purpose of creating more texts, such as this one. For that matter, Timmons has not seen a color copy of his book. He doesn’t know what it looks like. But he does know what it does." - Vanessa Place
Mathew Timmons, Lip Service, Slack Buddha Press, 2009.
Mathew Timmons, Sound Noise, Little Red Leaves, 2010.
Mathew's blog
and a new one, General Projects
