Divestiture-A

by Bruce Andrews

The to be a catalog, or a cataloguer. Such examples can be multiplied. I only collect money, America is more astonishing. Husk. Cataloging phrasal fragments and reconfiguring verbal shells, Divestiture—A continues Andrews' method of anasemantic editorial composition begun in the a montage of heterogeneous constellations of words culled from vast collections of textual material jotted down over time. We see only the feet of the dancers, the de-socializing of language, never their whole bodies. As editing is the reading the multimplication of material in Divestiture—A yields a thresholding surplus, a hyper-trophy of its post-personalizing thrill bursting from an energizing strangeness of interferences, interruptions, and diastrophic collisions. Now, even the lacunae are eloquent—plausible verbal models are quite easy to formulate. The unlikely pairing of radically disjunctive contexts and syntactically coherent prose (preminiscent of spambot computational processing) is formed precisely in the affirmation of rupture & divestiture. To understand too much is to the containers are distorters inevitably. The horizon-value of Divestiture—A emphasizes a political economy of full textual Andrews cedes the original contexts of the collected material and relinquishes authorial control over illusory semantic value—in its the ecstatic pleasures of egalitarian exchange and productive reader-editor dialogue. The sounds are not enough—'no address,' 'in distress.' Language speaks for itself. … I hate dealing with messages that may not have been intentionally transmitted delicacies of randomness.

56 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Bruce Andrews is an experimental poet, performance artist, literary theorist & recently retired (after 38 years) left-wing professor of political science. As Musical Director for Sally Silvers & Dancers, he has created sound designs and, in performance, live mixes of music & text for over two decades of performances.Most recent of a dozen or so big books is last year’s "You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!", followed by a chapbook, "Yessified (Sally’s Edit)" celebrating the Andrews Symposium and its expanded archive, online at www.fordhamenglish.com/bruce-andrews, with links to interviews, performance texts, poetry, collaborations, and critical essays on his work. Another online archive (and interactive project) materialized on April 1, 2014 as a curated 25 hour ‘twitter sculpture’ [Twitter.com @BruceAndrews25h], a 300 poem sequence.