A poem I just wrote less than a minute ago, and which took less than 7 minutes to "compose":
A kind of brail, a
Kind one, malady
Its uncanny manifestation,
Elation, sorest
Estivation, tip and
Stipulation
At the center of
A volume whose
Spine is
Thirteen inches wide,
A constant
Compress, wavering
Compass
Keeps sparks on course.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Every now and then I read a line of thought stating humans can become animal, or the dynamics of humans on their way to the animal: J Skinner and Delueze come to mind. I don't really get this---ok, yah, I do, but it seems a tad wonky: humans are animals! True, humans have a grossly asymetrical relation to other organisms, but we certainly are in the animal matrix! There may be a need to, rhetorically, become one, because many---most---may not agree with me that pigs and bonobos and parakeets are kin, but I'd "argue" that this becoming animal rhetoric is really just a way of tuning in to elided reality rather than actually altering it in the truthytruthtruthiest sense. Then again, I guess if one believes that they are permanently estranged from aardvarks and stoplight parrot-fish, then the becoming animal trope cld be just the logic needed.
Note: I am not even sure fish count as animals were I talking to a biologist; the above is me doing some sketchy musing, not world-class, utterly accurate articulation.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Sunday, August 28, 2011
from Unto
Here, in the alembic corpse, where the cortex
Seethes, I lie and loll and metamorphose
Myself into the most supple
Pleating; and then frogs mistake me for lily pads
Which makes perfect sense:
I must, like flowers upon ponds, appear floating
And don’t you just
Love how self-aggrandizing I am----isn’t such
A stance so seductive; yes, yes, I assume
You feel the
Pull of
My words, my oozing
Reality; or is that expression on your face a formality
Meant to quell
And sends deeper unto hell by accident, by
Volition I can’t
Fathom than to call
Insane: the membrane which has failed
To understand its filtering function, has failed
To be what it is and thus can’t
Even qualify as counterfeit of some other
Dynamic but merely stands wrong, stands
Ripe to collapse into wracks,
Regrets, a slow unsteady anguish, a chafing, a chastening,
Channel and
Overflow, official and interstitial, intuition and
Architrave chiseled
Out by a patient ballsy thief sporting tits
So let’s spell out tittsy not ballsy, and anyways you
Don’t give a tosh and that’s fine
Because I have forged you for my own entertainment; I have forged
You that you may dress
In vintage Versace and ballet
Flats, trill and
Trounce upon
My witticisms which have
Grown weary
Of themselves and anything other than stilettos after five pm
If you are, as
You are, a siren whose caramel curls
Activate the activity known as seeing to some other realm of action, to the
Sublime or at-least subtlest sophistry
Like, like, like, like
Simulacrum won’t suffice nor will seraphim, philandering, patching
Up immortal portals which, well, I’m un
Able to deem relevant now or ever, but never
Is never the point.
[big Ellipsis]
I remind myself I am supposed to be haunted as I stalk through this green.
My hair swings like a hammer, but instead of sprains there are silky strays.
I do not condition my hair, nor do I believe silk to be my hair’s innate state.
Through letters the limiting course is eclipsed, then clipped and dipped in enamel.
The I extrapolates unto a totality, unto a titrate and its profile.
She wanted, desperately, to believe fear other than instinctual.
On four legs, it rose, and the rose reared up too.
Seethes, I lie and loll and metamorphose
Myself into the most supple
Pleating; and then frogs mistake me for lily pads
Which makes perfect sense:
I must, like flowers upon ponds, appear floating
And don’t you just
Love how self-aggrandizing I am----isn’t such
A stance so seductive; yes, yes, I assume
You feel the
Pull of
My words, my oozing
Reality; or is that expression on your face a formality
Meant to quell
And sends deeper unto hell by accident, by
Volition I can’t
Fathom than to call
Insane: the membrane which has failed
To understand its filtering function, has failed
To be what it is and thus can’t
Even qualify as counterfeit of some other
Dynamic but merely stands wrong, stands
Ripe to collapse into wracks,
Regrets, a slow unsteady anguish, a chafing, a chastening,
Channel and
Overflow, official and interstitial, intuition and
Architrave chiseled
Out by a patient ballsy thief sporting tits
So let’s spell out tittsy not ballsy, and anyways you
Don’t give a tosh and that’s fine
Because I have forged you for my own entertainment; I have forged
You that you may dress
In vintage Versace and ballet
Flats, trill and
Trounce upon
My witticisms which have
Grown weary
Of themselves and anything other than stilettos after five pm
If you are, as
You are, a siren whose caramel curls
Activate the activity known as seeing to some other realm of action, to the
Sublime or at-least subtlest sophistry
Like, like, like, like
Simulacrum won’t suffice nor will seraphim, philandering, patching
Up immortal portals which, well, I’m un
Able to deem relevant now or ever, but never
Is never the point.
[big Ellipsis]
I remind myself I am supposed to be haunted as I stalk through this green.
My hair swings like a hammer, but instead of sprains there are silky strays.
I do not condition my hair, nor do I believe silk to be my hair’s innate state.
Through letters the limiting course is eclipsed, then clipped and dipped in enamel.
The I extrapolates unto a totality, unto a titrate and its profile.
She wanted, desperately, to believe fear other than instinctual.
On four legs, it rose, and the rose reared up too.
Monday, August 22, 2011
From Roxane Gay's essay on The Help
I very much admire the passages below; they so wonderfully don't hide inconvenient feelings, and it's so lovely to read feelings which are both tough and utterly generous:
"I think of myself as progressive and open-minded but I have biases and in reading and watching The Help, I have become painfully aware of just how biased I can be. My real problem is that The Help is written by a white woman. The screenplay is written by a white man. The movie is directed by that same white man. I know it’s wrong but in my heart, I think, “How dare they?”
Writing across race (or gender, sexuality, and disability) is complicated. Sometimes, it is downright messy. There is ample evidence that it is quite difficult to get difference right, to avoid cultural appropriation, reinscribing stereotypes, revising or minimizing history, or demeaning and trivializing difference or otherness. As writers we are always asking ourselves, “How do I get it right?” That question becomes even more critical when we try to get race right, when we try to find authentic ways of imagining and re-imagining the lives of people with different cultural backgrounds and experiences. Writing difference requires a delicate balance and I don’t know how we strike that balance.
I write across race, gender, and sexuality all the time. I would never want to be told I can’t write a story where the protagonist is a white man or a Latina lesbian or anyone who doesn’t resemble me. The joy of fiction is that in the right hands, anything is possible. I firmly believe our responsibility as writers is to challenge ourselves to write beyond what we know as much as possible. When it comes to white writers working through racial difference, though, I am conflicted, and, I am learning, far less tolerant than I should be. If I take nothing else from the book and movie in question, I know I have work to do. For that reason alone, I don’t regret engaging with these texts.
I don’t expect writers to always get difference right but I do expect writers to make a credible effort. The Help demonstrates that some writers shouldn’t try to write across race and difference. Kathryn Stockett tries to write black women but she doesn’t try hard enough. Her depictions of race are almost fetishistic unless they are downright insulting. At one point in the book, Aibileen compares her skin color to that of a cockroach, you know, the most hated insect you can think of. Aibileen says, staring at a cockroach, “He big, inch, inch an a half. He black. Blacker than me.” That’s simply bad writing but it’s an even worse way of writing difference. If white writers can’t do better than to compare a cockroach to black skin, perhaps they should leave the writing of difference in more capable hands. In The Help, Stockett doesn’t write black women. She caricatures black women, finding pieces of truth and genuine experience and distorting them to repulsive effect. She makes a very strong case for writers strictly writing what they know, not what they think they know or know nothing about."
The only quip I have is with the last sentence, which seems to counter-act the more difficult and interesting vision for art expressed in earlier moments. This could be me being merely personal: I almost never know what I'm writing----be it about me, or gay "brethren" or Lesbian sisters or women or geography.
"I think of myself as progressive and open-minded but I have biases and in reading and watching The Help, I have become painfully aware of just how biased I can be. My real problem is that The Help is written by a white woman. The screenplay is written by a white man. The movie is directed by that same white man. I know it’s wrong but in my heart, I think, “How dare they?”
Writing across race (or gender, sexuality, and disability) is complicated. Sometimes, it is downright messy. There is ample evidence that it is quite difficult to get difference right, to avoid cultural appropriation, reinscribing stereotypes, revising or minimizing history, or demeaning and trivializing difference or otherness. As writers we are always asking ourselves, “How do I get it right?” That question becomes even more critical when we try to get race right, when we try to find authentic ways of imagining and re-imagining the lives of people with different cultural backgrounds and experiences. Writing difference requires a delicate balance and I don’t know how we strike that balance.
I write across race, gender, and sexuality all the time. I would never want to be told I can’t write a story where the protagonist is a white man or a Latina lesbian or anyone who doesn’t resemble me. The joy of fiction is that in the right hands, anything is possible. I firmly believe our responsibility as writers is to challenge ourselves to write beyond what we know as much as possible. When it comes to white writers working through racial difference, though, I am conflicted, and, I am learning, far less tolerant than I should be. If I take nothing else from the book and movie in question, I know I have work to do. For that reason alone, I don’t regret engaging with these texts.
I don’t expect writers to always get difference right but I do expect writers to make a credible effort. The Help demonstrates that some writers shouldn’t try to write across race and difference. Kathryn Stockett tries to write black women but she doesn’t try hard enough. Her depictions of race are almost fetishistic unless they are downright insulting. At one point in the book, Aibileen compares her skin color to that of a cockroach, you know, the most hated insect you can think of. Aibileen says, staring at a cockroach, “He big, inch, inch an a half. He black. Blacker than me.” That’s simply bad writing but it’s an even worse way of writing difference. If white writers can’t do better than to compare a cockroach to black skin, perhaps they should leave the writing of difference in more capable hands. In The Help, Stockett doesn’t write black women. She caricatures black women, finding pieces of truth and genuine experience and distorting them to repulsive effect. She makes a very strong case for writers strictly writing what they know, not what they think they know or know nothing about."
The only quip I have is with the last sentence, which seems to counter-act the more difficult and interesting vision for art expressed in earlier moments. This could be me being merely personal: I almost never know what I'm writing----be it about me, or gay "brethren" or Lesbian sisters or women or geography.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
It is irritating to have poems accepted and then have the journal decide to shutdown and one is not notified till wayyyy late.
Too, will I ever get a response regarding my submission to a forthcoming POMO Pastoral anthology?
I wld love to be an editor but know I don't have the needed skills to cut it as one; or one who is not maddeningly disorganized.
Journals which never respond are frustrating--especially when one writes them more than once asking what's up?
That said, I admire editors: it's just some have their shit together and others seem rather bumbling.
Too, will I ever get a response regarding my submission to a forthcoming POMO Pastoral anthology?
I wld love to be an editor but know I don't have the needed skills to cut it as one; or one who is not maddeningly disorganized.
Journals which never respond are frustrating--especially when one writes them more than once asking what's up?
That said, I admire editors: it's just some have their shit together and others seem rather bumbling.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Urgh--I just wrote a terrific post and lost it; urgh.
Wee recap: how write--sing!--woman (eeky singular, I agree) without singing heterosexism. Can one? No, not one; can we; will that we always be a wee one?
Homo-hetero divide as (and in terms of need for critical recognition, more) important as male-female divide.
I, personally, think of heterosexual women as totally like men (and vice-versa) because of the heterosexual common denominator.
The male female divide is a great way to divert attention from the hetero-homo one, and to downplay feminism's frequent complictity in heterosexual hegemony. It is also a great fit with capitalism, and may be more geniunly the naturalization of marketing/Maddison avenue as much as anything else.
For straight I propose strayt! A touch didactic, a touch homosexist?: yes, that cld very well be, and the being not very well.
Straight is not neutral, it is judgmental; it is insidious because it masquerades as neutral; it is used by feminists all the time (should I give a list of examples or wld that look like cruel intention?) and I assume this is habitual/non-critical language use; and that, dear world, strikes me as utterly unfeminist.
I wonder if literary feminism--that articulated by poetry and fiction writers and hybrid aesthetics etc--is likelier to use straight than heterosexual. I'm not positive but I have a hard time imagining M Nussbaum not using heterosexual.
Wee recap: how write--sing!--woman (eeky singular, I agree) without singing heterosexism. Can one? No, not one; can we; will that we always be a wee one?
Homo-hetero divide as (and in terms of need for critical recognition, more) important as male-female divide.
I, personally, think of heterosexual women as totally like men (and vice-versa) because of the heterosexual common denominator.
The male female divide is a great way to divert attention from the hetero-homo one, and to downplay feminism's frequent complictity in heterosexual hegemony. It is also a great fit with capitalism, and may be more geniunly the naturalization of marketing/Maddison avenue as much as anything else.
For straight I propose strayt! A touch didactic, a touch homosexist?: yes, that cld very well be, and the being not very well.
Straight is not neutral, it is judgmental; it is insidious because it masquerades as neutral; it is used by feminists all the time (should I give a list of examples or wld that look like cruel intention?) and I assume this is habitual/non-critical language use; and that, dear world, strikes me as utterly unfeminist.
I wonder if literary feminism--that articulated by poetry and fiction writers and hybrid aesthetics etc--is likelier to use straight than heterosexual. I'm not positive but I have a hard time imagining M Nussbaum not using heterosexual.
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