All but the last are being read toward the current manuscript. I’d like to say more, but I don’t know enough to speak intelligibly about my own project yet. Zizek, on the other hand, is in preparation for this semester’s syllabus. The aim of the syllabus, with any luck, is to draw (sometimes indirect or slant) connections between media, globalization, the Vietnam War (Memorial), literature from and about Asian / the Asian diaspora, and current American politics, particularly the Gulf War, 9/11, and Iraq. I don’t know why I didn’t focus on Middle Eastern literatures instead, except that I think the slant connections we can make for the materials I have assigned may be more productive for discussion, if only because the connections are less obvious and will need more exposition. Hopefully the connections aren’t so subtle so as to be only in my head.* * * * *
It’s been a largely uneventful winter break so far. As usual, I haven’t gotten nearly as much reading or writing done as I hoped. I did manage, however, to get to a number of the panels on poetry at this year’s MLA in Philadelphia. It was quite pleasant to see my old professors from PENN, as well as a number of my new colleagues and friends from Cornell. The entire conference being set in my own city had a way of estranging it from me, and as I drove in for the first night of the conference, I was simultaneously struck with the nostalgia the river and the skyline holds for me, and the newness of the city, made over again in its new purpose. The facades of the buildings had also changed here and there; I noticed some differences in the configurations of lights along the Schuykill.
The first panel I visited, “Poetries,” featured (in place of Jerome McGann) Daniel Tiffany, "Flash Crib: A Genealogy of Modern Night Life"; Michael Davidson, “The Dream of a Public Language: Cosmopolitan Poetics in the Shadow of NAFTA”; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Disjunctive Rhetorics and Cultural Studies.” For more recent writing from these and other writers (notably Marjorie Perloff, Juliana Spahr, and Barrett Watten among others), see the Poetries issue of the iowa journal of cultural studies.
The first paper considers the tavern and the nightspot as the place in and from which a poetics of the marginalized can emerge. Such poetics are derived or evolved from a kind of canting tradition, or slang of the underworld. 1881, the Chat Noir opens in Paris and provides a stage for intellectual and aesthetic coteries, often with anti-bourgeois principles in tow.
Michael opened with a series of interesting questions, situated within the tension between lyric and social models of subjectivity. I didn't notice whether or not the questions got answered, but here they are for the hell of it: Is the subject the author of her speech or the ventriloquist of institutional speech acts? If the subject is constituted by and within language, how can there be a turn toward the latter not underwritten by the former? Does discourse exist outside of the global systems producing discourse? What would a cosmopolitan poetics look like? Davidson fleshed out the talk with a consideration of the quite literally marginal art and poetry of political dissent along and on the walls of the US-Mexico border. It reminded me quite a lot of Jonathan Monroe’s “Avant-Garde Poetries after the Wall” in the 2000 Spring issue of Poetics Today.
Rachel opened by cataloguing the formal techniques of the avant-garde, and gave a definition of poetry that hinges on the concept of segmentation, if I recall correctly. That is, poetry is essentially to do with breaking the line and proceeding through fracture and segmentation rather than linearity and unity. I felt such a definition left out prose and visual poetries, although Rachel alluded to some possibility that one could think of visual poetry as segmenting the reading time of the picture plane.
What struck me most about all three talks was not just their emphasis on the marginal, but really, their implicit interest in producing the marginal and their relation to it. The margin seems more like prime real estate now than the outskirts of town. The terrain of the “authentic” margin is always moving, and the politically dissident critic? Always chasing it, quick to colonize it, package it, and export it from the margins for academic consumption and the MLA. And here I sit in this conference room in the Philadelphia Marriott, in what is undeniably a seat of privilege. Just something to keep in mind. I suppose it would make a difference, as in other cases of colonization, if the margin invited us to the margins. On another note, I wonder, is there an available position of critique that doesn't imply privileged access to knowledge? Is the work of the critic the best kind of discourse we can frame for political dissent?
On Thursday began a marathon of panels on poetry, beginning with the Presidential Forum, The Sound of Poetry. I’d say more on this, but Josh Corey has spared me the effort with his own account of the forum and the workshop that followed immediately afterward. Josh and I managed to stick it out for two other related workshops, Sounding the Visual and Poetic Sound in Translation. I stayed a little later that evening for Juliana Spahr’s panel, Orality and Sound in Poetry. M. NourbeSe Philip spoke of her own poetry and its attempt to enact the crack in silence through which the black voice can speak. The crack in silence is, for Philip, also a crack of the body and particularly, the female body. As she read some of her work, I was reminded of the unease that comes with such an overabundance of embodiment, as in Lucille Clifton’s poetry. James Thomas Stevens delivered an interesting talk entitled “A’khosa:tens—The That Aside: An Aside on Mohawk Language” on, among other things, the difficulty of translating the Mohawk language. Jena Osman offered a paper on the poetics and possibilities of BitTorrent, a client that shares digital content across its users in pieces, such that to download a file is to take a piece of the file from a number of users. Each user forms an integral piece of the whole.
Friday, I started the evening with Barrett Watten’s panel, Poetics and Cultural Studies: Engaging the Debate, and then made my way over to the MLA off-site reading at the Philadelphia Art Alliance on Rittenhouse Square. With about fifty readers and not enough seats in the house, the reading was still a blast. For those of you who weren’t able to attend, Ron Silliman has provided a recap of the reading on his blog as well as a sound recording.
Saturday morning, I managed to drag myself to an early panel at 8:30 chaired by Marianne DeKoven (whose recent edition of Q.E.D. and Three Lives I’d just thoroughly appreciated as I worked through a paper of my own on “Melanctha”), Experimental Poetry and the Visual Arts. The panel was excellent, with four talks on Creeley, Howe, digital poetry, and Leslie Scalapino. The most interesting talk for me was Maria Engberg’s “Digital Poetry’s Complex Surfaces: Navigations, Animations, Combinations.” The talk centered on a digital poem, “Leaf Life,” in which text appears, changes, and deteriorates according to user interaction. Engberg reflects on different registers of time in digital poetry: the time of writing, of coding, of reading, of performance. “Leaf Life” stages a lack of order against what is usually thought of as the processional, linear nature of computing. I wondered if this refusal of processional logic wasn’t a kind of nostalgia, especially given the poem’s representation of the natural and the non-technical (leaves, manuscript, romantic plot) against the digital means of its production. Engberg also directed my attention to The Institute for the Future of the Book, of which I wasn’t aware, and gifted me a copy of Electronic Literature Collection (V1). From thence I sat in on a panel on the future of lyric and poetry criticism, and then made my way over to the booksellers to pick up a copy of Doug Mao’s recent Bad Modernisms and Kristeva’s The Revolution in Poetic Language. The literary aside, the highlight of the day was lunch at a favorite restaurant in Chinatown, Ocean Harbor.
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Back to writing, more soon.
