Supple Science: A Robert Kocik Primer

By Robert Kocik

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Edited by Michael Cross and Thom Donovan. "Vibratory phonemes use hummings and croakings and sibilants and yawnings and roarings to encourage and generate tissue formation and organ sanctity and thereby forestall life's being whisked away. How do phonemes manage to do this?"Madeline Gins "Kocik's vision is shaped by contemporary radical practices that, against the increasing privatization and individualization of everyday life, aim to create new forms of social cooperation and solidarity, whether by means of urban gardens, or time banks, or local currencies, as alternatives to the ongoing enclosure of all forms of social and natural wealth."Silvia Federici "As Kocik activates it, prosody is fundamentally performative-it makes things happen, it createsand like all art worthy of the name, it implies 'any act capable of causing heritable changes.' The imperative, then, is to heal ourselves by healing the languageand language's extensions in social spacethru the activation of all its prosodic potential, which is also the body's potential, its capacity to find the sounds, the tones, the forms that are awaiting it."Rob Halpern "(Kocik's) work is metamorphic compassion; its diorama focuses on the small and finds the most beauty in the creativity of small things; it fires back at art talk and the cognoscenti who do and would encrypt the songs of life; his work says you and I are here; it does not nickel and dime the poor or workers with shovels; it is a hallucinatory poetry on the matters at h? it challenges common conceptions of behavior and dialogue; it proceeds in fragments of a pre-Poundian logic ('The skull does not hold all the human intelligence') toward a coming democracy of communally-linked citizens. It offers critical models of enthusiasm and rapture to heal today's human commons trending toward ruins."Andrew Levy "Kocik wishes to break down the divide between activism and poetry. Specifically, his work explores the relationship between formal innovation and social transformation. In his life, Kocik is a caregiver. Like the therapeut or caregiver in the Asklepion, the ancient temple which is a primary source for his Prosody Building, he attends and serves. A major way in which he serves is by identifying 'missing civic services' and by addressing lack of access to services and to spaces. His work in building and design and his participation in a forum on the ways experimental poets might dialogue with disability culture have led him to engage the social model of disability and attendant questions of access and environment."Eleni Stecopoulos

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0983504547
• ISBN13: 9780983504542
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: On Contemporary Practice
• Length: 458 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.0" x 9.9"