Wrong is Right

Gang,
Now that we are entering the second month of our three month stint here, it's nice to be getting to know each other. It's sort of like that moment in therapy when you begin to question the therapist about the dynamic happening in the room rather than the events in your life: always a prerequisite to good therapy. So, with that in mind, please allow me to introduce myself. In my next post, I'll respond to your many posts.
My infatuation with all things avant happened in high school when I first heard Thelonious Monk. I couldn't believe that someone was actually intentionally hitting all the "wrong" notes -- and how good they sounded. Bang! It made perfect sense to me: wrong was right. I never turned back. From Monk it was a small step to Ornette; from Ornette it was a small step to Webern; from Webern it was a small step to Boulez, Stockhausen; ultimately landing myself at the feet of John Cage, who created a glorious practice out of wrongness: every sound that couldn't be considered music was music. To this day, my poetics are Cageian-fueled.
So it was with music, it was with literature. Monk to Stein; Stein to Pound; Pound to Joyce; Joyce to Concretism; Concretism to Language Writing; Language Poetry to Conceptual Writing, which is where I live now. A history of "wrongness." I found it -- and still find it -- beautiful and inspiring.

I went to art school: RISD, graduated with a degree in sculpture in '84. Moved back to NYC and had a great gallery career until the mid-90s, when writing took over. I never intended to be a poet, never studied poetry, actually did lousy on my English SAT's. I have only a B.F.A.; when I graduated art school, the only reason to get an advanced degree was if you wanted to teach -- and at the time, that was something I never wanted to do. Artists, IMHO, never need advanced degrees (or degrees at all), which is why the MFA phenomenon stuns me. An MFA in poetry? How silly! Nonetheless, I find myself teaching poetry at an ivy league school. It's a long story. Go figure...
I left the art world in the mid-90s to write; I had been doing text-based works that really wanted to be books. I was finally forced to reckon this when I filled a gallery with so much text that gallery goers turned heel and quickly walked out, daunted by what they perceived to be the gargantuan task of having to read a book's worth of text on the walls. They were right -- the gallery was the wrong place to put reading-intensive works. My last gallery show eventually became a 500-page book, Soliloquy, which was an unedited record of every word I spoke for a week, from the moment I woke up until the moment on a Monday morning 'till the moment I went to bed Sunday night.
Leaving the art world was a great risk. It was very glamorous -- as the art world tends to be -- and I was making a phenomenal living at it. But the work forced my hand.
One summer I met, purely by accident, the publisher of the small press The Figures, Geoffrey Young, who introduced me to Language writing. This was about '92 and I had never heard of them. Picking up Ron Silliman's "Tjanting," published by The Figures in 1978, I found the missing contemporary link to Stein, Monk, Cage, etc.
Back in NYC, I began hanging on the Ear Inn scene and found, to my surprise, a group of writers willing to take my "text art" seriously as "poetry." Although what I do is a far cry from Language writing, I am deeply indebted to that group for their encouragement. Since then I've published 9 books of poetry, teach at UPenn, founded and run UbuWeb and have been a DJ on WFMU in NYC for the past 12 years: all are different facets of the same project.