Working with Urs Jaeggi 1

       by John

I have worked with Urs Jaeggi on a variety of text(ual)-visual-poetry collaborations since the mid 90s when I first met him in Fremantle, Western Australia, while attending a PEN conference. When I moved to Cambridge with family, I got to see Urs every now and again as I often travelled to Germany. He and I read together in Berlin and Hamburg and created via fax machine a book of poem-visual-textualisations entitled D & G that has since been lost. There were a number of paper versions of D & G circulating around the turn of the century, but none of them seems to have survived. A section of the book was published in Chain magazine in the late 90s, and is included below. As said in the note that follows the pages, the work came out of an intense 'conversation' across and around and under and over and through the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

Since D & G, Urs and I have collaborated on a number of other works via email, with fractions and fragments being published here and there over the years (e.g. in Vlak magazine). Most recently, we have been working on 'drawings and poems', whereby I respond to series of drawings sent as attachments by Urs. This is the reverse of a process we employed in around 2006/7/8 when I sent Urs my Divine Comedy 'distractions' and he 'illustrated' and sent back. Those drawings never found their way into the English-language editions of the work (WW Norton and UQP), but a few did find their way into the selection done by the Italian publisher Raffaelli Editore with translations in Italian by Maria Cristina Biggio in 2013. I have scanned some pages and will include below.

What I have presented here are some snippets from our recent work together, and I intend to add to this over future blog postings. Collaboration has been a vital part of my creative working life, and is really what I am most interested in, and most value. As well as working with Urs for over twenty years, I have also had the good fortune to work creatively with Louis Armand, Pam Brown, Niall Lucy, Dorothy Hewett, Mona Ryder, Karl Wiebke, Thurston Moore, Kwame Dawes, Tracy Ryan, Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Susan Schultz, Frieda Hughes, James Quinton, Wendy Jenkins, Barry Phipps, Paul Kane, Alan Jenkins, John D'Alton, Gordon Kerry, Forrest Gander, and others, and I feel privileged in these interactions.

I begin with a letter and poem written quite a few years ago now in celebration of Urs's 80th birthday, and included in a primarily German-language volume celebrating the brilliance of this Swiss-born sociologist, cultural and social activist, novelist, poet, visual artist, sculptor, and much more. 

                                                                            *

Happy birthday, Urs. I thank you for your friendship and for sharing your work with me over the years. Working with you on various collaborations, including D & G and most recently the Tractortatus texts, has been an ongoing revelation about the possibilities of art and language. You are the embodiment of the Renaissance artist and thinker — all is in your ken — but in a truly contemporary way.

Here is a poem based on a few factors: visiting your apartment in Berlin in the mid-90s; the painting used as the cover image for Salt magazine number 8 (1996); and very distantly, your wonderful poem-text ‘Miles’, published in the same issue of Salt.

I often think of our performances together in Berlin and Hamburg. You are the liberator of the word!

Pause

            for Urs Jaeggi’s 80^th Birthday

In the room the room

you offered the staying

place the rocking-horse

room where night-fright

made no horror and no

shadows just the zoo-light

carried in from wanderings

about the wall machine

down ergo silence of cabinet

of sketches expressing

shudders and stillness

an ergonomics of presence

where comfort allies

with friendship and intensity

with sincerity and circles

wavering circles and souls

stepping down and out

through window and image-bank

in book-frame and covering

voices with plausible trance

or entrance — thankyou

for the cover the glint

and gleaning of salt

and movie-time rescue

like risk like announcement

overtalking to echo

through theatre and audience,

failsafe nor forget-me-not rhizomes

tunnelling streetworks

cloistered or blossoming in window

of multilingual fruitfulness,

no imprisonment in artifice

or maybe freedom in artifice

but not ‘officialese’ (you made

your escape! you sculpted

plastic form office throne

choke of narrative, storyline

fame left on the altar),

degrees of ranks blown

in by Peter the Great

and no notice taken

or left freehold resurrection

poem of provinces — dead

souls — no, no estates

made from transfer or silence:

third persons telling their tales,

folk tales and heritages,

red and blue witches,

sagas   epics   prophecies

I heard Khlebnikov asleep

reciting asleep I was awake

asleep near the rocking-horse

childhood recognition of apocrypha

I was part of we all were you’d think

or you were too and I detailed

the twists and scrunches

of paper that made up

your eternal poem your

challenge to rock the horse

to rock the boat

to rock the monastery

of learning and blight,

chronicle   recital   ode

paint hunger form

catacoustics

of inner-city apartment

as generous as caverns

and sky, ‘(dritte Lektion)’

in the mineshafts of wonder,

investigation, breakthroughs,

sticking-your-neck-out

loyalty of palette is body

of palette is opening colour

outside its spectrum

without the inducements

of colour, refraction, spectra,

prism analogies, dispersion,

diffractions the clamour

for laws we never want,

we pass without pause:

sharing is silence and noise

and the joy of knowing.

Bonding and making,

rooms to fill and empty,

all made in the shades

of living contrapposto.

            with very best wishes,

            from John Kinsella

And some drawings and poems (i.e. Urs Jaeggi's drawings followed by my poem-responses):

 and

Confrontation (after Urs Jaeggi’s IMG-888a4.jpg)

When the boomers

confront each other

on the second tier

below the house,

we described it as a dance. None of us have danced recently,

nor attended a dance, or thought much about dance,

but it’s inherent, isn’t it? We pluck memories

like fur from the coats

of rivals we don’t have, or don’t want. We are not

violent. But the old boomer — scarred, dominant —

hangs on to his mob for another season —

three rivals, almost but not quite

as large, wrestling for supremacy.

All lived to tell tails

they balanced on, ‘boxing’

and tipping opponents

until first and second round losers demurred

to watch from down low

the final tilt, the pas de deux

that defines the sociology

of the present, and what will be

for a time, a cycle.

And from earlier in the latest collaborative cycle:

 

Intentions

I intend to travel beyond the spectrum.
I intend to recast lines and mergings.
I intend to open the doors and windows when it's storming.
I intend to let language escape into geography.
I intend to let geography escape into language.
I intend to wake the sleeping.
I intend to wind the chronometer backwards.
I intend to stir the wind against gravity.
I intend to colour all reproductive parts of the flower.

 

Closing Bell

Paso doble shock to casternet
Psyche's blastdoors, to confront
a mirrorcall, a despicable wall
of Self stretched to profit ideology.

We see into your pas de deux,
your rough riding aubades
to make a myth fit phrenology.
We sense a universal and tranquil pool

beyond your aqueous humour,
beyond the closing bell.

 

Kiss

Repossessions of peace
counts empire-standard,
clauses claws & shadows
philology of body type
facing departures.
Nip the randomness.
Take the chance.
Reading & expression =
stones hauled so far
upright.

Ruins

Struggling over the ruins
as a black rain swirled,
they wiped their eyes
to better see the spirits
rising from spent palaces,
granaries, and tombs.

Greetings from Mexico Received

'Froto mis párpados:
el cielo anda en la tierra'

    Octavia Paz, 'Madrugada Al Raso'

My brother-in-law
travels frequently to Mexico.
He sees the dawn over mountains,
he sees fresh light silhouetting
timeless ghosts in the streets, the trees.
He sees far beyond any wall,
and on The Day of the Dead
he sends us greetings
and we share, too.

 And now some pages from the Italian edition/selection of my Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography... Urs did numerous drawings but only three could be used in this edition — one for each canticle:

And finally, here is the short section from the lost D & G (if anyone out there has a copy of the full manuscript, please let me know!), as published in Chain 5: Different Languages (eds. Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr, Summer 1998). As I mention in the epilogue/afterword, we envisaged it as a kind of radical eclogue, with English, French, German and Latin stretched and fed into the collapsing pastoral (fax) machine:

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So, that's a sampler... more to follow in future posts. Thanks for twenty-one years of sharing, Urs.