Barometric Pressures: Cubicleland -- Laura Winton

Barometric Pressures: Cubicleland -- Laura Winton: Download Laura Winton's Chapbook Here Laura Winton  is a poet, writer, and performance artist currently based in Minneapolis...

Dentists I Have Known (and maybe inspired?)

I love my dentist. My mother was terrified of dentists and she usually had to be dragged to the dentist in pain and be knocked out in order to survive the trip. I love all dentists because, for the most part, a dentist can't kill you accidentally. They have to try. As far as doctors go, I tell people four words: Andy Warhol. Routine appendectomy.

My current dentist reminds me of George Takei, for his sense of humor as well as his looks. George Takei's witty posts on Facebook are now legendary and my dentist keeps me laughing as well. Even when I am sitting in the chair with him working on my teeth.

I recently gave him and his assistant a bunch of my postcards with my artwork, photography, and my poetry on them. While I was waiting for the novocaine to kick in, he started looking at my Surrealistic drawings trying to find recognizable shapes and faces in them, and reading my poetry, Then he started "riffing" himself, coming up with dental-inspired lines I could use in my poetry. This is exactly what Helena Lewis describes in the book Dada Turns Red, which I often reference, and what I am trying to do with my poetry every single day of my life.

The Surrealists, she writes, held the "belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in their unconscious" (173). I don't want anyone to see that writing is something mysterious that only some people have a talent for. I think that my dentist is very creative, whether he has been encouraged to express that or not.

I have also regaled him with stories of previous dentists, including a discount dentist that I went to in the Quad Cities about 25 years ago. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and sang very loudly to his muzak. "I just called/to say/I love YOOOUUU." When he came at me to pull my back tooth with a giant pair of what looked to be pliers, I remember thinking, "Is that axle grease on those pliers?" He also -- and as Dave Barry would say, we are not making this up -- he put his foot on the chair for leverage to yank out my tooth. Later, the chair became my face as I told the story. That part I made up.

Needless to say, it was a while before I ever went back to the dentist. But that could also be because you almost never used to get dental insurance unless you had a pretty good job, which I rarely did. At least not the kind of job that provided me with ANY kind of insurance at all.

I still think insurance is a poor reason to work a job that you don't really want to work. I will carry that to my grave with me, bad teeth and all.

I had another dentist, which I haven't talked about with my current dentist (let's call him Dr. Sulu, after George Takei's character on Star Trek), but whom I think about every time I sit in THE CHAIR (again, with props to my mom). This dentist was chosen because his office was not even a block from my apartment in Minneapolis. He was 70 if he was a day. And although it might be perfectly innocent dentist banter, he would often talk about my tongue. "You have a good strong tongue there," and "tongue wants to see what is going on." It was creepy. And frankly, none of my other dentists have ever talked that way.

After that, I would just go to the free clinic to get my teeth pulled. (Until the dreaded Obamacare, which fascistically provided me with both medical and dental insurance. How dare he!)

I had another dentist in Minneapolis who was really nice to me, didn't rag me about the condition of my teeth, and fixed them up before I left town, although there are visible seems where the fillings are. Dr. Sulu will need to repair those, hopefully.

Dr. Sulu has been quite interested in what I do, the readings that I go to in Chicago, the open mic that I hold at the laundromat, about my thesis topic, etc. I hope that in some small way I have inspired him, made him smile, with both my stories/tales and with my poetry and art work, just as he has contributed to my life by giving me back my smile.

(Come on, you saw that ending coming, didn't you!?)

New Dada-inspired poetry

Here are some new poems I have been working on recently.

Glossolalic Angel Dada won the Midwest Writing Center's Iron Poem contest.

These poems are all saved as graphics due to their enjambment. I didn't want them to lose their spacing.

Hope you like them. Leave me a message and tell me what you think.

Merge

So I am looking at some of my older poetry that I didn't really think was very good. And now I just don't know what to think one way or another.

Tell me what you think of this one.


Merge


I fall in love with every poet I meet.
I don't know how to say no
when your words know me that way.
I am set in motion
by the strong legs your verses give me,
on the feet of your iambs and trochees,
like a music box ballerina wound up,
involuntary,
moving with no intent of my own.

I do not know how to speak to you
in your own language. I am
a novice--I still pronounce all my syllables.
But I listen, as if I could absorb
each beat, each word
--shed this body of matter and
become a note, a timbre in your voice,
enter into your song --
as if knowing the made me someone other
than who I was born as if
through your words
we could become one new
person in our two separate bodies.

Mallarme I?

In the end, much of the avant-garde comes back to Mallarme. Every book I read, whether by Breton in the 1920s or from a contemporary writer like Barrett Watten, James Harding, or Anna Lovatt, they all mention Mallarme. “Crisis in Poetry,” starts off by saying that as a reader, Mallarme had “the feeling of having read it all twenty years ago”1 I think of Eugene Ionesco who said in an interview that he started writing plays because he found the theatre to be so stale. He started writing plays that he himself would want to see.

"I still could not see quite how to get rid of that positive feeling of malaise produce by my awareness of the “impurity” of acted drama. I was by no means an agreeable theatregoer, but on the contrary, sulky, grumbling, always discontented. Was this due to some deficiency in myself alone? Or was it something lacking in the theatre?"

In a similar way, Mallarme speaks of poetry that is “extinct, or rather worn threadbare by repetition”3 because it is not of its time, tries too hard to imitate 17th century French poetry. I, too, started writing avant-garde poetry because it all had that “been there, done that, feeling.” Dada and Surrealism were like a breath of fresh air to my 21 year-old mind and have captivated me every since. Since I can't really get out of meaning though, try as I may, I keep collections of words and images that I occasionally go through. I pull out phrases that feel like they go together. In this way, I avoid writing about one specific thing, because when I try to write about something in particular, the poems suck. They are terrible, as are most poems that try to be about something4. Rather than trying to write about things, I try to write avant-gardely. Because the avant-garde in poetry, theatre, and art makes me happy. I like art that I don't understand, that I don't get on a conscious level, that I either have to work for or just let my mind go and appreciate the disparate images.

This often gets me in trouble with academic writing, because I have a high threshold for writing that I don't understand. I don't get hung up on meaning.

Thought Language Language Thought Thought Thought Language Language Thought Writing

Week 11 - Language and Writing


It is impossible, or nearly impossible, for me at least, to talk about writing without talking about language. The two for me go hand-in-hand. I think of language as the atoms of writing.


After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice? I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people.


To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.


To. . . . . remake . . . . . language. . . . . to . . . . find. . . . . .new
. .. .creative . . . . .imagistic . . . . .practices . . . . . of language
. . . . is to make . . . . . .resistance . . . possible . . . . . . to move us
. . . . . . toward our vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . to have visions
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . never . . . before . . . . possible


I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways prescribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge.  So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own?  As Sol Lewitt says, “rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts.” The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we've always thought.  I'm not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms. 

Resistance Poetry Wall - 100,000 Poets for Change

100,000 Poets for Change, which sponsors an annual international day of poetry the last Saturday in September has opened up a Poetry Resistance Wall on their blog. Please go there and check out the poetry and post some of your own.

Here are some pictures from the Quad Cities' 100,000 Poets for Change events in 2014 and 2016.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Avant Garde (a draft)

There is some confusion about where to place Hopkins and some people have a desire to place Hopkins within the avant-garde due to his playfulness and experimentation with language. Christopher Wilson writes that Hopkins doesn’t have “a comfortable place in literary history” (137) due to his idosyncracies and “unusual style” (137) placing him both before and after his time, a kind of harbinger and throwback, but other crtcis “are quite certain that Hopkins belonds to the Victorian age, even though they find his literary style difficult to trace” (137). Tom Zaniello describes Hopkins as “a Victorian poet but also a forerunner of modernist poetics”(4) Meredith Martin, likewise, writes “construed by critics as “always obscure” and “on the whole disappointing; . . . too often needlessly obscure, harsh, and perverse” (qtd. in Roberts 89, 111), the first edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems, published in 1918, baffled more readers than it converted.”

In fact, in a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins wrote of his own work:
“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more baanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, a design, pattern, or what I am in this habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped” (qtd in Milroy 6)

Thus, Hopkins knew that his work was odd, that it was influenced by the science of the day, and that he was out of time. His desire was not necessarily to move poetry forward to a new place for a new time, but to be part of the tradition of poetry that had come before him. In this way, as a poet he has much more of the English attitude than the French.

William Donald Harvey’s dissertation at the University of Toronto, written in 1999, discusses Appolinaire, Mallarme, and Hopkins. But two of those writers came out of the French tradition rather than Victorian England and while Hopkins spoke French, he also associated “Parnaissanism” to describe competent but uninspired poetry. He identified this trend particularly with the work of Alfred Tennyson, citing the poem "Enoch Arden" as an example[citation needed].[1] Thus there is little evidence to suggest that Hopkins was influences by any kind of proto-avant-garde activity in France, despite the fact that Hopkins; own life was wthin 20 years of the beginning of avant-garde activity in France. The Chat Noir the bohemian parisien cabaret, started in 1881. Stephen Mallarme, who was considered a precursor to the avant garde, was writing in France from until his own death in 1898. Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889, so it is entirely conceivable that he was aware of these goings on. Whether or not he found them significant or paid them any mind is another question. A very cursory glance shows that in the 19th century France was still dealing with the after-effects of revolution, internal strife, and certainly anti-clericalism, which would continue to dominate into the early 20th century of the avant-garde as well.

In fact, The pull between tradition and advance, which would be part of Hopkins’ struggle, that would mark him as somewhat different than avant-gardists, especially of the French, as they rushed forward to embrace the new and impending technology, as evidenced from the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists, who embraced newness. Hopkins found himself caught, trapped, by Victorianism, which in poetry, resulted in trying to deal with, manage, the increasing onslaught of industrialization and in many cases, to retreat back into nature.

Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

This is a little something I am working on that will be part of a big something--ie, a 20-25 page paper--on GMH and the avant garde. This is just a modest beginning. Hope you like it.

Modernist writings in English, particularly those of the avant-garde have two particular threads to them: interiority and language, threads that frequently come together in work. Andre Breton wrote in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see Surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.” While they all come at the subject with different perspectives and approaches, it is safe to say that 1ll poets are concerned with language, just as all poets are concerned with imagery and even with the question “what is the good life?” All avant-gardes begin somewhere. Breton traces Surrealism back to fairy tales and even back to the cave paintings of ancient times. Moreover, we can look to the generation that came immediately before Surrealism and contemporary avant gardes, to see their more recent influences. One such influence is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Many theorists agree that Hopkins' own use of language and his theories of language put him ahead of his time while his nature imagery and his own deism make him very much a product of Victorian England. It seems not too coincidental that Hopkins didn't not have a complete collection of his own poetry published in his lifetime, but rather his collection of poetry was not published until 1918, a time when Surrealism in France was taking over the stage from Dada, with both movements having a desire to use language to spur different types and ways of thinking, to scramble the ordinary ways of thinking that lead to ruts and worse, for the Russian Futurists, familiarity. Even now, Hopkins and his use of language remains an engima to many literary critics who seek a box to place him in, as either a religious poet, a Victorian poet, or even an abstruse poet. Hopkins defied all of the expectations of his day with his writings and his theories of the inscape and the instress as well as with the religious themes of his work, which were not nearly as orthodox as a Catholic writer of the 21st century. In fact, there are movements within the contemporary Catholic Church to bring Hopkins' view more in line with the orthodoxy of the faith than there was in Hopkins' own day.

In a 2003 article entitled “Poetry: A Prognosis,” critic Dick Davis cites the poets Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins as difficult-to-read eccentrics who are responsible for the problems faced by contemporary poetry. He describes Hopkins as an “odd-ball poet whose work is hard to paraphrase and to scan” (28). Davis states that the notion of a poem that can't be paraphrased would have been completely alien to anyone before 1800 (29). Apparently Hamlet's soliloquies could have been neatly summed up, with no attention to language or detail. Davis blames poets like Hopkins for causing poetry to lose its vernacular audience (30). Those darned odd-ball poets. If only they would write more accessible poetry, rather than being concerned with language and the stuff of poetry. I perceive this, ironically, as a peculiarly modernist critique of poetry. Is it that modern poetry, let's say starting from the mid- to late-19th century is more obscure and more difficult to understand? Or maybe readers and audiences of poetry are more sophisticated, having come to expect more from poetry? Did the rise of the novel kill interest in poetry? Or did it free poetry to be able to be more focused on language and form and less focused on communicating a point to people? What about film, radio, television, popular music? There seem to be many more options available than just poetry that would cause people to turn away from it than just blaming a few poets for being odd-ball and making poetry “too difficult.”


TBC . . .

Iron Pen Poetry Submission

For what it's worth, this was my poetry submission to the Midwest Writing Center's Iron Pen Contest this past month.


Universe

She played with trucks and dolls dressing
them in khaki and in pink interchangeable because
the world was “mine” to define and she the
center of al solar systems, blind, everything
made for her desires and when she grew
older and played with books and
paper-flimsy ideas the universe and
its many suns did not change she moved
around other planets that orbited each
other and in riddles laughed and pictures they spoke that
no one could enter but time and tide as it is said, took
their lives over to
kids and lovers payments they owed to live in
cars and houses the small offices brown and cubed but she
stayed the same her orbit around her own small suns growing smaller
no one else left to riddle and battle the dark holes filling the spaces left
when she was utterly
alone only her paper flimsy books to protect her
from the swirling world opened their pictures and her riddles to
her they were there when all of the other planets had grown distant
and uninhabited to her explorations unable to hear or respond
to her transmissions.

They hung in there, even when she was broke, alone, and sorry.

Chapbook of my poetry and prose and a quick update

It has been a very eventful summer, full of illness and accidents, new jobs, and even a move. I am now in Davenport, Iowa about to teach speech at a community college.

Not the most flattering picture I have ever taken, but I am pretty happy to have a community college teaching ID!!



My other big news that I wanted to share with you is that my first chapbook of poetry and prose that is not self-published has just come out. It is called Cubicleland and is being published online from Kind of a Hurricane Press. Click here to see it!

That's all for now! Soon I hope to be writing again, but for now, I am just working on getting my classes in order.

Review of Mina Loy on Goodreads

The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy by Mina Loy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Mina Loy was an early feminist and an avant-garde poet and writer. This book features Loy's amazing poetry as well as her manifestos on futurism and feminism. My favorite poem is Songs to Johannes. It is basically just an edifying book for any woman working in the avant-garde who has been led to believe that the avant-garde had been a largely male domain until the 1960s. As more and more collections of poetry and biographies emerge on Loy, Baronness Elsa, and a host of other women, our contributions to the avant-garde and to poetry and art in general are being acknowledged and our stories told.



View all my reviews

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry (Part II)

It has to be said, lest it sound like I am proscribing something equally restrictive and repressive . . . I am not arguing against any type of poetry per se. I do not want to create a monolith of styles, themes, as restrictive as a Marxist-Leninist insistence on social realism. I do oppose the stilted reification that much slam work has fallen into, both stylistically and thematically. There is a certain sound that poetry slam audiences and judges have come to expect, a rhythm to the words that isn’t necessarily organic to the poem and therefore it becomes a contest of style rather than of performance, of doing justice to the words.

Also, it is a time worn cliché now that a slam poem needs to be about either the poet herself (her deep feelings, a break-up that he just went through, a situation that the poet is confronting) or about a social condition (a homeless mother and child, a junkie, someone that the poet knew of and/or read about), or both (about the poet’s identity as a woman, as a Puerto Rican, an Asian, a gay man or a lesbian, a Latina lesbian, etc. etc.). When I competed in poetry slams, it was always what I call my “bitch feminist” poems that won rounds, not my more interesting and complex poems that I had worked on to perform well as well as to craft in the first place.

In 1986, I was at a writer’s conference in Illinois and I heard several poets, including Carlos Cumplian, talking about these poetry contests in which people showed up in costume and performed poetry and I realized about 10 years ago that what he was talking about where the early days of poetry slam. This is a far cry from the sense of “authenticity” and the singular voice of the poet with the poem itself that I have heard poetry slam participants talk about today. In the initial days of the slam, as described by poets working in Chicago in 1986, it was merely about providing a sense of excitement to the audience and performing the poem as best as you could.

At around the same time, I heard other poetry slams in the Quad Cities, about 3 hours from Chicago on the Iowa/Illinois border. There, slam was already becoming entrenched as a style, with the poets reading their poems very fast, almost like a race to poetry. Yet there were no set themes to the poems. It had not yet merged with rap music to develop the style and had not yet merged with identity politics, which had not really become widespread, moving out of the academy, until the early 1990s when activists and artists around the country started to pick up on that aspect.

I do want to honor and acknowledge the word of identity formation, community building, and progressive values that many forms of poetry can participate in. I do want to acknowledge the role that poetry slams have played in building an audience for poetry. From their inception, they sought to bring the excitement of sport to poetry, a spirit of fun and of not taking oneself as a “Poet” so seriously. All of these things are good things. But poetry slam has been around officially for a quarter of a century and is now an institution.

I want to ask, then what? NOW what? Where do we go? After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice? And how can poetry slam fit into this without providing a known form, which is antithetical to the imagination that it should be releasing?

If the term avant garde, where avant garde falls into elitism, is in its very accepted (if perhaps unofficial, naturalized) definition that the avant garde is ahead of, “anticipates” and in many ways, is therefore, more advanced and “better” than mainstream art, culture, society and art, culture, and society need only to “catch up,” then of course, in the catching up, the mainstream has then co-opted the avant garde, misusing it for commerce or entertainment, for style, failing to recognize the true substance, the original intent (as contemporary Surrealists are and were famously wont to lament).

I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people. And this means that the avant-garde will always be the avant-garde, will always be changing. Even as we feel that we “know” surrealism, that is because surrealism has been associated with a style, which can be painted, written, and then put away in a box, rather than being a “technique” for opening the imagination, which it can do over and over again, without repeating itself, for each iteration of the surrealist techniques for getting to the imagination will yield different results, different images, different juxtapositions, especially with literature, which was a field that Andre Breton, the so-called “pope” of Surrealism, contended.

Education is the watchword and it has a very important role to play, but as an instrument of “instruction” and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall pretty to. Religious missionaries often (almost always) accompanied or came fast upon the heels of conquerors to ensure that hears and spirits were converted while trying to enforce a new culture and a new rule upon the conquered. Poets must see themselves as missionaries of the imagination, not as propagandists.

To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.

To then take this and bring it to the people is what poetry slam can do -- to take literature off the page and bring it to those who would not normally pick up a book of poetry, for example, or to bring that alive with performance, to reach a larger audience that is hungry for something real, something surreal, something unknown. This is the lure of science fiction and it could also be the lure to poetry. Not to write science fiction into poetry, but to perform possibilities never before imagined. Some people who know me think that I am especially hard on poetry slam and perhaps I am, but only because I think there are so many more possibilities that poetry slam can bring to the world, rather than giving it simply a different type of institutionalized, reified poetry.

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry (Part I)

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry

In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.

Shoshona Feldman (1975)

“The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.” (In Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, p. 8)

Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman’s idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a “feminine writing” and “women’s language.” (By the way, I highly recomment Cixous. I have not delved much into Irigaray, but to me her work seems very much grounded in some rather complicated Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. Cixous is lively and quite readable.) Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter’s position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based “prisonhouse of language” (props to Jameson) but the very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak. The issue is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition (from the moment the declaration is made, “It’s a girl” Butler tells us, a whole universe of implications is set in motion.). Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.

To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies (look at the glorification of the police not only through shows like Cops, but through shows like CSI that glamorize police work, or the nuclear-family centered values of most sitcoms, etc.). In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else’s vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?

Resistance is possible through the remaking of language, of finding new, creative, imaginative linguistic practices to sustain us, to help us move toward our visions, to help us have visions we never even thought possible. I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways proscribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol Lewitt says, rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts. The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we’ve always thought. I’m not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.

(To be continued . . . .)

The Function of Poetry as Painting et al

We now take a break from my accursed novel to bring you the following reflection upon poetry:



Once upon a time poetry was pretty much the only literary medium. All theatre was written in poetic forms, there were no novels or journalism, etc. There was only poetry. In those days, it was important for you poetry to say things, to speak truth, whether literally or poetically through image. Over the centuries, new forms have opened up--prose in the form of fiction and non-fiction, creative non-fiction, and drama. So with all forms and genres, we have to continually ask ourselves, what is the function of the genre we are writing in at this time.

I believe that poetry, more than any other written form, has the power to open up the imagination to altogether new realities that we could not have otherwise imagined and in my mind, the best way to do so is by experimenting with language, scrambling reason and reading, and yes, to be a literary form of visual art.

Bryon Gysin has said that poetry is 50 years behind painting. Poetry can and should embrace the image in all forms by being abstract in meaning and form as well as by presenting us with literal and literary pictures of things.

I tell the students in my poetry class that things like metaphor and simile exist to explain what we do not know in terms of what we do know. With medical students, I use the metaphorical example of "the human body is like a machine . . ." because that is a simile that they have heard so much they don't even think of it as a poetic sentence. All of those things that are not tangible -- love, freedom, justice -- must be represented in terms of something that we do know and can visualize.

In the same way, we can strive towards things -- emotions, conditions (like freedom), even social structures -- without having them all thought out, but by describing them to people in terms both strange and knowable, that will make readers want them too. Poetry, rather than being proscriptive, can encourage people to desire something and then think for themselves about what that might look like.

Two new cut up poems

The following two poems were written after I went to see John M. Bennett give a reading in Minneapolis this afternoon. For years I had tried to write in Spanish and in English, especially back when my Spanish was a little bit fresher, but it always came out too forced. When I heard John read this afternoon, for some reason it occurred to me to use Spanish and French language source texts for my cut up poems, so here are a couple. I was really impressed at the way they came out more or less grammatically accurate with what was going on in the English part of the poems!

Enjoy.



Transperences (Fr)


Too bright. Outspoken. A community
of women. En realidad, el director.
Political despair, 13 spins, the massacre
donde los hombres, musical and
programming the relation between
the appearance of des orages se
troublent the rose garden. Strike
of people on dit in bookstores, shooting
the innovative: a window, a phone, a
wheelchair, doorway of humanity.



Imperative


Early and often did the lord,
Greatly relieved to hear,
Bound to end by shaking hands,
Durant toute la semaine, after
Several thousand years of oppression,
Declare I am becoming.

En cualquier parte parezca que dominating
Even in the long shot,
Civilian casualties are inevitable.
So it began.

On est arrive, carrying the cross
Himself, the posturing that sometimes fulfills the
Conditions, willing to face himself. Me parece
Que the ideal ripens within our spirit
In the bathtub.

The lines were clearly drawn.

Stealing Souls

I would really rather when you take pictures that you not look directly into the camera.
I can feel you stealing my soul.
I mean
I can feel you staring at me
And I am naked in front of you
I like to sit naked at the computer.
In front of the window.
But that’s different. The neighbors are not looking right at me.
And if they are, serves them right.
Close your blinds, mind your own business.
Mrs. Kravitz.
This is not supposed to be a poem.
It’s supposed to be clipped dialogue
I almost typed lipped
Clipped lipped.
Conversation.
Streamofconsciousnessonlymywordsonlyruntogethersometimesandi’vebeentypingforsomanyyearsit’sreallyhardformenottohitthespacebarbutthis
Isn’t my stream of consciousness anyway.
This is.
This is my consciousness.
Sentence after sentence. Each sentence a paragraph of its own.
Independent thoughts like a ladder dependent on what came before.
You know, steps.
Where were we?
Rapunzel, the steps to my window!
Rapunzel! Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.
Through your pictures.
Stop stealing my soul and climb down here instead and look me in the face.
Stop gazing at me through your camera. Every photo is a webcam until itself.
And the men and women merely players.
It’s silly but I have a page full of pictures all staring at me and none of them ever says anything or answers.
I feel judged.
Their Mona Lisas are equally enigmatic.
You seem to be smiling . . .
But.
I feel you stealing my soul.

Draft of a poem for my mother on her deathbed.

This is a poem that I found on my computer. It was written during the last days of her life, 2 1/2 years ago, while she was unable to communicate with us--at least in the way we were used to communicating with her. It's not finished. It's just a little something I dashed off.



Strange to think of you now

lying between present and past tense

between now and then, not knowing where you are

not alive and not dead, not being able to talk to you

body pumped full of morphine and

unconscious nurses full of

caring and

bad advice telling

my poor father not to talk to you

Don’t be silly telling me

I can’t talk to you I can’t help you

pass through the door I can’t say

goodbye to you and I see grandma

and your grandma and you when you were 30 and me

when I was eight a living photograph now

opening their arms to you I see you standing with them

without me and I see you in so many memories

laughing sardonically and appreciatively

sharing the joke inside.

The only way to laugh.

Life, Only Better

This was something I found in a journal that I had written a few years ago and found recently. This will be my last post for a while. I would love to know what you think.



Life, Only Better
(Tentative title for now)

Sometimes I need to just look out the window and think.

Sometimes I need to write something down and not develop it with examples, anecdotes, lists in 3s, with a thesis and a conclusion.

The thing about writers is that they can’t just have a thought. Everything has to become something. Thought is pressure to write. Not writing is guilt. Blasphemy. Squandered. What if the words (The Word) never comes back? What if in the course of remembering and recording you lose the beautiful phrase? Does the composer lose the melody sitting at the piano thye way I drop words at the keyboard? Is it not enough to have one thought? one beautiful moment? Must every note lead to a symphony, an opus? Each word the voice of a single angel raised to a cacophony?

“The problem with being a genius is that you spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing.” --Gertrude Stein

A year ago I was looking for you.

I don’t want to write a whole book about you. My life is not a book. Too disjointed and unruly and the ending is unclear and I never seem to figure out the plot.

My mind is not a book.

No one lives in a book. Books are not “life only better”. Only anal retentives think that.

I want to write and live movie trailers, with all the good stuff pulled into split-second cutaways, glimpses of the beautiful, explosions, and a great soundtrack.

And here you are.

I was wandering the streets in the snow wondering your name.

Every day I wait for you to leave.

I wanted you to make me feel better. To love you . . . was going to make me better.

Curving back on itself . . . what is the term? Concave? Elliptical? In the story it always curves back on itself, ties everything together even when it looked like nothing fit.

Novels imply there’s a grand design to life, a plan, a plot, a logic, an author.

A reason.

I am more random than that.

Switching from story to living (life) changes the words the cadence the way you live them the experience of your palate. Do you write to live on your mind or do you write to say things outloud?

Do you want to be read or to be heard? Do you write to say everything at once, or do you write to focus?

I thought of you as a reader.

The cafe is an oasis from life. Here is the desert island you are stranded on with only 3 possessions, only the items in your purse . . . a desert island with music and tv and sofas and lattes. But only a bit of yourself.

People resent artists for wanting what they themselves are not allowed to have either.

I envy the mad addicts, so lost in themselves that they have no room for the details of daily life, have faith that their muse will provide and someone will look out for them. I with no siblings, no dowry, no spouse, must fend for myself, straddling, required to feed myself, keep a roof over my own head in a world that is increasingly harsh, that gives no quarter to those who are different, those who desire anything more than the creature comforts craved by those who resent me. My wants are not so different--a roof over my head, money for going out, a doctor when I am sick, the occasional trip to see friends or family, to be be inspired by a new city. But the audacity of expecting such things in return for my mere art, my innermost, without sanction for my labor, a CEO to sign my check, an incorporation to keep the books . . .

Nothing in my home is fixed until it affects someone else.

When the war comes I will be free of responsibility, when the creditor/landlord/collector finally has other concerns.

Is there an understanding that never fades? Even Dresden was rebuilt. The shadows of Nagasaki are monuments now. Art. Memory. Museum. All knowledge becomes memory eventually.

How will I become a stranger for 40 days?

On Tuesdays the Somalian women go to English class. They get on the bus bringing with them the smell of Sandalwood.

On Tuesday I get on the bus with my hair wild, disoriented after a night of poetry and war reports.

You make me want to write
you make me want to write
you down.

I could never write on the bus. Not because of motion sickness, but because I cannot stop looking out the window, watching moments pass and time pass in marvels. Once I was [there] and now I am [here], minutes across a city, hours across a state/country/continent.

It’s sad when you can’t [don’t][don’t want to] love someone anymore. When you feel sorry to remember. Now that the daydream is over, this is not your story anymore. It’s just something I’ve written
remembered
lived

and I watch for you at the window mechanically, without desire
Miss you with annoyance

One year later, like always, I sit in the cafe watching for you outside the window. I have your phone number committed to memory [permission to speak] have seen your house walked your dog hugged your lover. I try to remember your mysteries. What it was to want you.

Anticipation.

Familiar.
Like always I watch for you.
I forget what it was to be strange
etranger
(e)strange(d)

What is the shelf-life of grief?
Anniversaries give us permission.

You are a conversation with myself.

I wrote you a letter by committee.

Is God a narcissist? to require us to love him?

Maybe god’s infinity comes from us. If god is love, and that love is unrequited, does god become finite, diminish? in existentialism, maybe god is not really dead, just burning himself up like the sun. Love is finite only when nothing comes back to you in return. It makes you stingy.

Unrequited love’s a bore--Jack Kerouac

At one I time I wanted to give you things. Take you places. Show you.

At one time.

Which is to say, not anymore.

Academics against editing

I have lost my ability to edit. I might be like the pupil in Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson, the one who can only add and not subtract. The student who can add things to infinity but cannot subtract 4 from 7.

What does it mean to add everything the comes into your awareness, your field of vision, to a book, a performance, a poem? Especially with a poem. To set your guidelines and then only add. It does seem to be only poetry where I have lost my ability. Then again, there IS the dissertation . . .

Cheryl told me the story of a professor at Augustana whose dissertation was over 1000 pages. What if, instead of trying to edit it down, you added every element that was relevant (as if you were a poet and could rhyme element and relevant). Not that you wouldn’t be “rigorous” in choosing your arguments, but that you would throw every argument into the stew and then argue for or against one, ticking off everything possible until you got down to the core of your argument, and so then your argument that could have been expressed in a sentence or a page or one small chapter becomes a behemoth, a life’s work, of over 1000, 10000, 10000000000 pages until you lost track of the zeroes? What if you just accumulated all of the scholarship. Isn’t that what we talked about in graduate school, reading Derrida, who is only read by graduate students, half of whom (or more) don’t like or understand him? Isn’t that what Derrida was talking about in Archive Fever? The desire to archive, to accumulate, to collect knowledge? Collecting knowledge like it was garden gnomes or stamps or world coins, attempting to have every single one that is still known to human kind. What if my dissertation were like a huge giant stamp collection of every idea that was relevant to my topic? That would be a life’s work, crossing out things as they no longer become relevant, keeping a library, an archive, or all the things that have been discovered and disproven over the years.

This is what it means to be an academic that cannot edit. That leaves you with only poetry.