2012 DISINHIBITIONS: BRIAN ANG

My favorite thing of 2012 was an increasingly critical reflection of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon’s experience as I gained distance from its explosion by its inertia, and the empowerment from being conscious of many people working toward emancipation, providing optimism toward future explosions.

Enriching to my reflection was publishing my favorite advancing politicized poetries in my magazine ARMED CELL, issues 2 and 3, with concentrations in the San Francisco Bay Area (Aaron Begg, Tom Comitta, Lyn Hejinian, Nicholas Komodore, David Lau, Maya Weeks), Vancouver (Stephen Collis, Jeff Derksen, Cecily Nicholson), and New York City (Laura Elrick, Josef Kaplan, Eric Linsker, Steven Zultanski). A reflection on its origin and continuation is forthcoming in Cordite Poetry Review, and ARMED CELL 4 will be first distributed at a reading by me, Joshua Clover, and Lyn Hejinian at Studio One Art Center in Oakland, February 1.

My primary theorizing produced by the Occupy phenomenon’s experience was elaborating a resistance to the ideologically oppressive aspects of the concept of community, seized in provisional fragments published in The Claudius App and Rethinking Marxism during Occupy’s hottest phases in early 2012, worked out publically at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s “Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing” conference and a talk at St. Mark’s Poetry Project during Occupy’s inertia in middle 2012, and is heretofore most fully realized in “Resistance to Community Poetics,” forthcoming in a collection produced from the UC Santa Cruz conference in 2013. Crucial favorite things for this theorizing were considerations of Josef Kaplan and Stephen Collis’ poetries that I published in ARMED CELL.

Dialectically conditioning with these activities was writing my current poem, The Totality Cantos: An Investigation of Epistemological Totality. I designed a structural approach for extended creativity enabling the assimilation of any subject I’m interested in toward the politicization of knowledge’s totality and transgression of community’s subjugation. As of 2012’s end, 50 of 100 cantos are complete. Crucial favorite things for its methodological refinement were the music of Anthony Braxton, which I lectured on at the Berkeley Art Museum in March, and a no holds barred hangout with Bruce Andrews over martinis at his apartment when I was in the city for my Poetry Project talk.