Theories of Tubes

Electrons skirt funnels

     erect infinitudes loath to bend

Funnels sip electrons

     shave ten-to-the-tenth-to-the-tenth bits

     unlightened lasers stab network

Funnels sign funnels

     convections of limp subtext

     evaporates holographic cowls

     aurorae shear stiff tubes

     distended flux links close cousins 

Electron scans electron

     two wave forms mimetic beyond Planck and perfection

     non-local non-relative and non-deterministic

     below basement and vacuum and biosphere of ducts

     superimposed funnels spin plasm

     and surge    

Two paragraphs from my novel The Real Raquel

Maybe Raquel and I share more than looks, I thought, and when the chorus finally hit in all its authoritative glory, my nervousness turned into something more like adrenaline, and I was able to fall flawlessly into a circular formation with the dancers, whisper-singing little snatches of Raquel’s defiant manifesto to each one of them as they cycled around me. “I’m the Real Raquel. Oh, I’m the Real Raquel,” I declared to the dancer with blonde highlights before turning to a slim male dancer with messy blue hair —“I’m not a chameleon, but if I was, I’d never tell…” The noise of the crowd spiked at this line, which didn’t surprise me. I lipped it with particular conviction because it sums up Raquel better than any other lyric in her catalogue: she’s as real as they come, exuding the kind of authenticity and feistiness that focus group-tested pop stars can never hope to achieve, but at the same time she maintains a certain element of mystery, a thoroughly sexy and effortless elusiveness, giving you the sense that there’s always a piece of the puzzle missing, always something to study and be fascinated by.

I don’t want to downplay the discipline and years of practice needed to pull off a good performance but I think I passed a crucial test when I first grabbed the mic and dared to whisper-sing words that were rightfully Raquel’s. I say this because as the song went into the second verse and Raquel, her voice losing some of its bravado and displaying more tenderness and vulnerability, sang, “Baby I won’t compromise myself,” the oppressive weight of my nerves lifted entirely. I felt a kind of synergy between my body and the lyrics booming out over the field and when Raquel sang, “If you don’t love me I’ll find somebody else. Somebody who wants to know the truth,” I gracefully lunged forward as if asserting the truth of my own existence through physical movement. This is the real Raquel, I was saying to the audience. You can take it or leave it but it is a truth I will express unapologetically. Then I fell back into formation and looked sideways at some of the dancers. They were somewhat disoriented by the small liberty I had taken but this didn’t bother me. In fact, it was downright satisfying that I had went off script, especially considering the audience’s reaction. They gave me their loudest round of applause yet and this confirmed to me that while Raquel’s mystique lures people in, it’s her honesty that makes them stay.

journal entry/ poemy-thing

Looking through my notebook in search of the (multiple) bodily ramblings, I found this note I had forgotten about. Relevant re: burning, sacrifice, identity,


"As fodder for..." I can't write anymore because I can't bring myself to burn anything.
I'm holding all objects and materials and knowledge close and whole.
What should be burned and how? Or when does the effigy leave the vile thing intact?
A sacrifice to it rather than a sacrifice of it.
(as in VP)
the 'I' is key?
whiteness as fodder for poetry?

Free Range

Hi folks, below is the first poem I wrote when I moved to Boulder. It's mostly a ripoff (albeit a very indirect one) of a Kim Hyesoon poem called "Song of Skin," which I wrote about in a review of Kim for Jacket2 a few years back.

Free Range

Associated Press: From what we can see, she mostly just walks around putting her tits in everything knots of trees chinks in the cabinet I mean everything everywhere you can find a hole I meant hollows I suppose not knots point is she just sticks them in and we have to watch her feet roll up like toothpaste tubes with each ounce of milk she volunteers to the woodwork which isn’t to say we aren’t all benefiting from the nutrition but the shame of it months pass now she’s syphoned out to her solar plexus and bending down to suckle misaligned baseboards and the occasional mouse hole but we’ve learned to live with her whorish indiscretion besides she’s taken the liberty of stringing Christmas lights along the walls you’d never expect the whole room needed a twinkling anklet down there but really the effect is just stunning

A fourteen-line poem on the female body

1. It has to begin somewhere

2. she harass with enjoyment

3. tired of the topic before I

4. start. Cause if she's not raped

5. she's the criminal killing the

6. thing. So rape her to

7. save her from herself. O

8. lovely

9. flakey, she'll be data or she'll be tagged

10. so she made herself a border and hung there

11. pregnant or bleeding or pregnant and bleeding

12 been full a long time with

13 time and grey clouds streaming in

14. We're not always dead

Kristeva

Thoughts?  Is this valuable to anyone?  A bit helpful for me to watch this before revisiting the reading.

I'm also just nerding out on Kristeva on YouTube.

This one's called "On Julia Kristeva's Couch" and it's wonderful.

Another take on the absent author - or the question of "personality" and/or identity and writing - this by the absolutely great Italian novelist who goes by Elena Ferrante. Ferret

If you have not yet read the Neopolitan novels, do.

Week 7: Kristeva, Loy, and Stein

Here are some questions for our reading this week. Since we won’t be submitting reading responses, I gave myself permission to toss on a few more questions than we generally do. I also tried to gesture to some additional material that might enrich or clarify the readings. See you all in class!


Kristeva

1) Explain the difference between the semiotic and the symbolic. How does chora fit into this arrangement?

2) Kristeva borrows her term chora from Plato, who, despite attempting to describe chora as non-material, used the metaphor of nurse, womb, or receptacle when explaining it. Kristeva takes the gendered associations of this term and runs with it. In what other ways are Kristeva’s descriptions of language gendered? What are the implied sexual politics of her linguistic and poetic assertions?

3) Kristeva’s writing is heavily inflected by a Lacanian narrative of linguistic development, and as such she describes many parts of language that are deeply intertwined with childhood psychological development (including the Freudian “family romance”). To what extent is Kristeva explaining elements of language that exist beyond our control, versus elements of language we can and should manipulate and mobilize as poets and writers?

4) How do sacrifice and art relate differently to jouissance (see “Poetry That Is Not a Form of Murder”)? How does this compare to your own views on art? On violence?


Loy

5) What inadequacies does Loy see in her contemporaneous feminist movement? Who is responsible for addressing those inadequacies, and how?

6) Though Loy is a poet, and wrote on poetic practice itself, “Feminist Manifesto” is one of the texts in our class that focuses less explicitly on literature and more on cultural norms. What do you see as the literary implications of some of Loy’s assertions?

7) Loy emphasizes the representational limitations of, and restrictions placed upon, female bodies. What is the line between metaphor and the material in Loy’s descriptions of these bodies? How does this compare to the way female bodies are valued today? What challenges (or opportunities) does this create for poets and writers who have female bodies and/or identify as women?

[Extra: What are the implications of Loy’s essay for other areas of identity politics, including race and class?]

[Even more extra: Loy was famously connected with Italian Futurist movement (before it tied itself to fascism, but long after its misogyny was apparent). Compare her social politics in “Feminist Manifesto” to the artistic concerns she raises in this passage from her text “Aphorisms on Futurism”: “TODAY is the crisis in consciousness. / CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that moulds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it. / CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.”]


Stein

8) After shifting from a general discussion of the properties of parts of speech and punctuation to an anecdote about The Making Of Americans, Stein writes the following:

Nouns are the name of anything and anything is named, that is what Adam and Eve did and if you like it is what anybody does, but do they go on just using the name until perhaps they do not know what the name is or if they do know what the name is they do not care about what the name is. This may happen of course it may. And what has poetry got to do with this and what has prose and if everything like a noun which is a name of anything is to be avoided what takes place.

What are the stakes of Stein’s argument about the act of naming and its effect on language? How does Stein approach the question (here and elsewhere) of what poetry can do about this, and what poetry itself is?

9) How does Stein position her essay historically? What effect, if any, does this have on her argument?

10) What is the role of the poet in Stein’s essay? How does it compare to other texts we’ve read so far?

On the question of empathy and the moral complexities of the idea read this:
Empathy

Also I'll be very interested to hear your responses to Kunin's essay which is clearly in the Kantian line, but perhaps not as strictly Kantian as it's been read? So interesting to me to think about how we consider the "aesthetic" in relation to all our other categories -

KG and VP and ConPo, Oh my!

This past week has been a crazy one from my social media angle--there've been more words spent talking about Vanessa Place's work (http://nonsite.org/article/would-vanessa-place-be-a-better-poet-if-she-had-better-opinions) , Kenneth Goldsmith (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/something-borrowed-wilkinson) , as well as a bunch of responses on facebook & twitter & elsewhere (the essay that Cathy Park Hong penned in response to the dude who wrote the KG piece for the New Yorker is DEFINITELY worth a read--she literally announces a new poetic era, that of "the poetry of social engagement," which is super cool).

For anybody who's interested in engaging in discussion, I'd be curious to see what your takes are on the aesthetic claims made in the New Yorker piece and in Kunin's essay.

If my social media window is any barometer, my hunch is that the essay on Place will provide more room for heated debate for the purposes of our class. The KG article...I mean come on, it's vile. But of course if you disagree with me and want to say "Hey actually this guy says some pretty spot on things about, I don't know, lyric v. conceptual," I'd be happy to start a discussion there.

But yeah, with respect to the VP article: my read is that Kunin admits that hey, maybe VP is a bad poet and we should critique her on "aesthetic" terms, and that calling her a racist is like, a bad move. But my issue with this is that is, well, there's no such thing as the purely aesthetic argument that this guy wants to have. And by framing the critique as he does, Kunin effectively comes to the defense of VP, because he says No no, don't call her a racist, she's actually antiracist in attitude so your critiques of racism are invalid, just call her a bad poet, that's way nicer and plays nice with my conception of poetry as such. So yes, my assertion: Kunin sneakily defends VP by ostensibly entertaining the notion that she is a mere "bad poet"--he is not on board with my critique that VP's work merely reifies the white supremacy of American poetry and is therefore, you know, bad, and by calling VP merely a "bad poet" he is able to erase the critique of racism advanced by scores of poets and critics of color. 

My assertion: calling a work of art racist is also an aesthetic critique, because aesthetics as we're talking about it are always and already a product of racial violence.

Here's a handful of what I find to be some particularly problematic assertions--we can talk about the entire essay, but I'd be interested in discussing (in light of our readings, I'm thinkin Kant especially but can go any which way) claims such as:

"In my view, accusing Place of racism is intellectually irresponsible. The idea behind this accusation seems to be that any writing that uses racist language or imagery is itself racist, and, if the writer is white, white supremacist. By that logic, any representation of racism would be racist. The study of racism would become impossible. At best, the study of racism could proceed only by further inflicting or exploiting the pain of what it studies."

"Aesthetic judgment involves making discriminations between values within works of art. Some representations are more enjoyable than others. Many readers have enjoyed Citizen, where Rankine meditates on varieties of racism in American history. Many readers have been pained by Tweeting Gone with the Wind. Readers are responding to the strategies that Rankine and Place use for representing racism, but both poets are representing racism, which means that they are aestheticizing racism, turning it into an object for readers to enjoy."

"I want to stress this point. Any antiracist art worthy of the name needs strategies for the depiction of racist language and images. This is different from the problem of having the right attitude. It’s a problem for an artist who already has an antiracist attitude. That is to say, it’s an aesthetic problem. The failure to find an effective strategy is an aesthetic failure."

and:

"This year we have seen waves of denunciations of the racism of a writer whose ideas about race are pretty much identical to those of the writers who are denouncing her. What, then, motivates the charge of racism? I have three thoughts about that.

1) This controversy occurs during a time of increased public awareness of the systematic racism and violence of U.S. law enforcement, and consequent organization of antiracist protests online and in city streets. Place’s accusers associate her with a racist system, and see themselves extending the protest movement to the domain of literary politics.

2) Place’s accusers either don’t understand power, don’t like power, or are pretending not to like power. Based on my observations, I’m going with the third option.

Ostensibly Place’s accusers speak on behalf of the powerless, and are powerless themselves. Meanwhile they associate Place with the power structure of white supremacy and with the elite institutions (AWP, the University of Colorado, the University of California, and the Whitney Museum) that sponsor her appearances. From a position of seeming powerlessness, Place’s accusers leveraged the cancelation of most of her appearances in May, June, and July. I call that power. In fact, I call it an abuse of power.

Some of my readers, thoroughly committed to the idea that power runs in straight lines from subject positions, will be skeptical of the claim that Place’s accusers have some power. Try putting it this way. By using the little bit of rhetorical power that they have, they are showing what they would do if they had other kinds of power. It isn’t pretty. One thing they would do, clearly, would be to stop her from presenting her work in public ever again.

This is not a winning strategy. Even in the short term, Place’s accusers have miscalculated: By attacking her personal liberty, they have given additional power to her writing, which, taken on its own merits, would seem very weak indeed. Ultimately, such abuses of power do nothing to help the cause of antiracism. They also do no good for poetry. As a poet, I find that significant too.

3) Place’s accusers prefer to call her a racist rather than a bad writer because they are afraid of making aesthetic judgments. This fear, which may be the most pernicious legacy of conceptual writing, ultimately bespeaks a lack of poetic ambition."

Thoughts?

In case some didn't see this - a great little piece by Cathy Park Hong in which she declares a new era of activist poetry lead by poets of color! Cathy will be reading at CU as part of the feminism poetry philosophy conference I'm putting together in March. I only wish they hadn't used Kenny Goldsmith's image for this article: Activist poetry

Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra-Eliot reference

I recently finished this book called the Geek Sublime which deals with the aesthetics related to coding and sanskrit poetics. The author finds some parallels between the languages of coding and sanskrit along with conversations around aesthetics as they relate to political environments.

It is an amazing book and I highly recommend it.

Here is an excerpt where the author mentions Eliot who references studying sanskrit. It relates to Abinavagupta's concept of rasa-dhvani (I believe an 11th century text that dives into aesthetics and suggestion of emotive experiences).

This first quote, the author shows similarities between what Abinavagupta says (shown earlier in the book) and what Eliot says:

"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding...a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."

Eliot studied sanskrit and Indian philosophy for a time and said this about it (emphasis mine):

"Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after- and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schooolboys-lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And then I came to the conclusion...that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do."

Just thought I'd share. Feel free to comment!