#decontextualized poetry

[infernalhomo]

stressed to death about uni starting and being unemployed and broke and not being able to afford the meds that make my brain function or lunch at school five days a week or school books for that matter

so instead of doing anything about that i'm getting irrationally mad at the people voting on p/oetrysmackdown who have no fucking taste and let the fucking dog poem get to the finals why in the goddamn FUCK

[aropride]

you've heard of blackout poetry as a form of violence against a text but i feel like webweaves can be much the same. sometimes the decontextualization of quotes and art feels like an intentional destruction of the original creation. not to say that's always bad or that webweaves are bad, just that sometimes the finished product of a webweave is far more than the sum of its parts & can't be understood by examining each piece with knowledge of the original context

[taohun]

the decontextualization of art made by people of color has to end like for real. happens with agha shahid ali all the time im so lucky he isn’t more popular on here because he’s my beloved poet in a way no one else is and every time i think about his poetry over DESTIEL EDITS i want to DIE 

[fiercestpurpose]

like I do think that blackout poetry is an act of destruction decontextualization and vandalism but I also think destruction decontextualization and vandalism are acts of artistic creation. yknow?

[taylorftparamore]

also like. to be quite frank. a lot of poetry would read cringe if you took a line out of it, decontextualized it, and deliberately refused to understand it. i could do it with beyonce lyrics. "we've been hurtin, but it's happy hour" reads cringe without the rest of the context of the song's story. it also ignores the production & artistry that an entire song makes up.

with any given pop punk band's lyrics (ESPECIALLY blink-182). like if you pulled "what the hell is add?" from "what's my age again" without the context of the rest of the song and the concept, it sure as fuck reads cringey! like there's a level of songwriting that went into this song that understood how to make a whole song flow together.

to go even more serious, if i were to pull "jokes freely cracked, scrambled and fried" from a poem by andrea "vocab" sanderson, it reads a lil cringe! but it also is completely removed from its context and understanding (btw check her out, she's an incredible black poet from san antonio, tx) so of course it's not perfectly standing on its own.

poetry is meant to be consumed in its whole form. removing part of it from the rest of its context absolutely causes something to get lost.

really fucking hate it when people post taylor lyrics out of context and be like omg she's not a poet, she's awful. like wtf, not every lyric has to be amazing, they're also funny and sassy like some of u take her way too seriously oh my godfdfkjdsfhsf youre just looking for reasons to hate her

[firstfullmoon]

i was gonna write a rant post abt taking poetry excerpts out of context but cannot be bothered to get into it

[poetryforventing]

Exponentially

decontextualization

becomes commonplace

[cor-ardens-archive]

you know, i actually kind of like decontextualizing passages from poetry or prose. i know it’s a problem because people generally reblog those passages without being familiar with the work and never bother to read them, but like, as a personal thing, i do like taking some passages i like out of context, i think it can be an interesting exercise.

[suispiria]

mom come pick me up the twitter blue check marks are decontextualizing ilya kaminsky’s poetry

[maybuds]

Yes, i love poetry. (Quotes a decontextualized fragment by ocean vuong / richard siken / anne carson / mary oliver that trended on tumblr)

[theexistentialeasel]

The Cut, The Tear, and The Remix: Re-imagining Spaces for Art in a Covid Struck World

Week 2 | July 14th, 2021

In an exhibition entitled the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures presented by the McMaster Museum of Art and the Nia Center for the Arts's virtual exhibition the white cube is dematerialized to create a space for Black artists of the diaspora envisioning an Afrofuture.

The exhibition, curated by Stylo Starr during her curatorial internship with the McMaster Museum of Art, features eight Canadian artists of the African and Caribbean diaspora. Their works, each grounded in a different form of a collage, centers around their experience as immigrants. In this sense, collage is quite a fitting medium as it works with themes of construction and deconstruction, contextualization and decontextualization. The platform itself was created by the artist SPATIAL-ESK and is set in outer space with colourful planes carving out colour-coded rooms for each artist. The exhibition is removed from any familiarity and is without any floors or ceilings, instead exposed to the galaxy surrounding it. Once entered you can click and drag your mouse through the exhibition. Different icons lead you to a secondary webpages to get more information on the artist and their work or in certain cases to watch the artwork.

For example, after entering Sonya Mwamba's room in pastel blue, you can click on an icon to be redirected to the McMaster Museum's website where you can watch her short films. They reference the Kodak test photos and Hollywood movies where the white cultural canon reigned supreme. Mwamba thereby challenges the white default by superimposing the black bodies to recalibrate these films, thus taking back Black narratives and ways of being. Another artist whose work we are redirected to see is Kofi Oduro's hypertext code as an alternative to the performance of poetry. His works speak volumes about the creative potential of basic technology and hints at how the black and immigrant experience is often moved beyond physical space. Digital art can be understood to embody this state of being as it is at once a physical and imaginary space.  

Yung Yemi, “Nothing Real Can Be Threatened”, 2020

In another room, Yung Yemi's (also known as Adeyemi Adegbesan) black and white collages  refer to what he calls "the duality of blackness"; that is to be both infinitely diverse and singularly monolithic. Thinking about a future where blackness is freed of oppressive colonial rule, each collage is stripped of context and hung in white space. They are also simultaneously draped in detailed and decadent armour, expressing the need for protection even in an Afrofuture. In a yellow room, FEZA focuses on what she calls the 'middle space;' where reconciliation between the past and the present becomes possible. Her collages deconstruct and reconstruct her memories by tiling segments of photographic images together like pieces of a broken mirror that create an alternate reality.

Next, originally presented as an immersive exhibition, Anna Binta Diallo's work resembles portals using images of landscapes, space, or maps within the silhouettes of bodies that merge with the background of the exhibition. Themes of displacement emerge through the juxtaposition of different landscapes within the singular vessel. In a red-coloured room, Emkay's Adjei-Manu similarly collages into silhouettes focusing on hands and eyes signifying the search for one's own identity and history, and how they might speak to one's own future. Finally, in a brown room, Ghislan Timm's plays with GIFs and Marcel Camus' 1959 film Black Orpheus to bridge the past and the future by juxtaposing and assembling the fate of the two lovers with imagery of the joyful festivities of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thus inserting black and brown bodies into Greek mythologies. Her space is more furnished than most, with brown columns blending into the rooms' background.

Overall, the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures is successful in its two goals. Its first, presenting a diverse selection of collage artists that engage in the discussion about the Afrofuture. For example, although all the artists addressed feelings of non-belonging through their common language of collage, some like Sonya Mwamba or Anna Binta Diallo addressed their displacement and search for identity by creating a sort of an alternate reality where they would belong, while others like Kofi Oduro or FEZA offered more contemplative experiments of what it means to be a migrant.

As for its second goal; offering an alternative to the white cube, both Stylo Starr the curator, and SPATIAL-ESK the designer of the platform, were able to capture the experience of going to an art gallery within the comfort of our own home away from the 'snobby' art world. They were able to do this by taking what was important; scale, accessibility, and order, and discarding the rest leaving us in this space between the physical, and the immaterial. This makes the space itself its own kind of artwork which blend in really well with the theme of the exhibition. For example, one aspect that often gets lost in virtual spaces is the sense of scale, as we can be left to zoom in and out infinitely. However, because the viewer can't actually walk around the platform and is constrained to a clicking on a single marker, the collages never lose their sense of scale as seen in Anna Binta Diallo's series of collages where we can stilll grasp how big the works would have been in their original installation setting.

Having said this, there were two things that could have been improved. First, is the creation of a space where you could do everything, like see Sonya Mwamba's short films or Kofi Oduro poetry without being redirected to another webpage. Second, the work of interpreting the pieces somewhat on our own has been done for us. In every artist's individual page is a statement giving us a reading of the work on top of the artist's statement which isn't necessary as it almost robs the viewer of their imagination when looking at the art. In the end, the cut, the tear, and the remix bridges the gap that the pandemic has left us with this past year and a half by bringing together an interesting departure from the white cube to possibly offer a more inclusive space that isn't limited by the audience's distance or time.

Link to the exhibit: https://museum.mcmaster.ca/the-remix-virtual-exhibition/

[icouldhavebeenfree]

Like 75% of the time i see a poetry quote on tumblr and i go to read the full poem it's like. Wow ! Thank you for wildly decontextualizing this incredibly meaningful piece written by a poc into some like tenderqueer vague sense of longing richard siken esque shit . Really appreciate it

[zaethro]

Mach Log season 7, resolution 30

There are eleven essay drafts sitting in the pre-publish bin on the Mach Log right now.

I want to finish them; none of them deserve to be discarded entirely; several of them are about two polish sweeps from completion. But I can’t put any of them out yet, partly because housework and workwork have swamped me for months, robbing me of the momentum I need to keep the Mach Log moving, but also because doing so would violate my 30thbirthday resolution, which I should have revealed here several months ago but the explanation for it got trapped inside one of the essays I can’t publish while abiding by it, at least for now. I do need to get back into the swing of this, however, so I’m going to kick off Mach Log season 7 now with a decontextualized read of the resolution, promising a better explanation in the future. It is as follows:

It is neither above nor beneath you to create beautiful things, and refuse any lesser aim in doing so: academic, interpersonal, moral or emotional.

There is a man by the name of John Dolan who frequently goes by Gary Brecher who is known under the alias The War Nerd. This 60-something year old Irish-American expatriate understands the vile logic of war and the rhythmic backboard of poetry, having studied both his entire life from more places and circumstances than I ever expect to encounter. He has world-worn experience of a brand I had forgotten was real, and that I’ve never heard relayed so clearly OR honestly. I’ve been trying to absorb this intergenerational lost wisdom through his podcast and his newsletter, burning many of my spare hours this year doing so. I’m not quite done with this ersatz seminar on the War Nerd, but I’m almost there.

Writing can be a beautiful thing, and in keeping with this resolution I’m not about to publish a paragraph that can’t take advantage of this man’s perspective to the degree that’s feasible. It would be lesser without it. You might wonder whether this attitude lead to a spiral of patient enrichment over the rest of my life? God I hope so.

[pagebypagepoetry]

Mary Oliver was my favorite living poet. Articles like this are quoting her beautiful poem, “When Death Comes,” in particular the line, "When it's over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement."

However, this snippet suffers from some decontextualization, as they are leaving out the next line, the last line of that stanza: “I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” Mary Oliver is not just a bride. She is writing to capture a universal human experience that’s beyond gender.

So here’s a fuller, better excerpt:

“When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world”

[echoes-of-realities]

This might be a random request, but would u mind sharing any good sources u had for that paper on queer Native Americans in media? A while back, I read something that said more POC identified as queer than white ppl (something to do with how our cultures embraced queerness until white colonizers came along and demonized it, so it was a fallacy to say that white ppl embraced gay ppl more than POC, Bc the rampant homophobia in our cultures now is western influence) and I'm curious about it now.

Okay so I totally would have answered this yesterday, but I was preparing to lead a 3 hour long seminar discussion so I was focusing on that lmao.

But! Not weird at all!!! Cause I finished that paper, and then today, said 3 hour long seminar discussion was about sexuality, labels, metaphors, and the problems of decontextualizing terms from the cultural context they arose in, so I have Many Thoughts about this, so I’m going to put it under a cut.

Yeah that’s exactly what the basis for my paper was!! Basically the rampant homophobia in a lot of communities is from colonial governments pushing a heteronormative nuclear family based on Christian ideals. There’s a novel called Drowning in Fire by Craig Womack that I haven’t had a chance to read, but I’ve read a lot of articles that reference it, and his novel explores how the ideal of “straightness” was forced upon Creek people by the colonial American government as a part of their “civilizing program.” In other words, homophobia was a way to “civil” the Native American “savages.” There’s a lot of poetry from Billy-Ray Belcourt that’s really beautiful, and painfully honest, in how colonization has, for lack of a better term, completely fucked First Nations and Native Americans, and what it’s like being queer in a First Nations community that’s had homophobia forced upon it. Also!!! Richard Van Camp has a whole bunch of short stories and novels exploring the First Nations experience in general, and he has a couple that touch upon sexuality and colonization (my favourite of which is “Aliens,” though my favourite of his in general is “The Fleshing”), and I actually got to meet him last week and he’s so chill and funny and cool!!!! So he has some really good stuff to look into as well!!

So that’s the more fiction-based readings, but for academic articles/sources I used Scott Morgensen’s Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. I didn’t get a chance to read all of it, but of the relevant chapters I did read, he has some really interesting arguments!! One of my favourites from him is the idea that performative settler modernity allows non-Indigenous queer people to portray Indigenous culture as something “adoptable” because it fits the white settlers’ narrative of anti-colonialism, especially related to white people using the term Two-Spirit. Which, like, okay so technically I actually fit the criteria to be Two-Spirit (and have been called it by some white people), because I am First Nations and gay, but I never grew up around my culture (my dad was Cree, but we’ve been estranged since I was 9 so I never learned about that side of my family), so I don’t identify as Two-Spirit. And, like, white people have their own terms for queer identities, I don’t understand why they need to take the term that First Nations and Native Americans picked specifically for their own people, but I digress. 

Morgensen’s other major argument is that the white heteronormative narrative sexualizes the racial, economic, and political practices of the queer community in order to “protect” white settler society from queer people who have been demonized, where queer people of colour become even more of a “threat” to a heteronormative white settler society as both queer people and as people of colour. And so from this, narratives of queerness are racialized in order to absorb queer people of colour into a normatively white settler, and especially non-Indigenous, colonial project; homophobia is not a product of colonialism, it is a method to produce settler colonialism.

I also used Mark Rifkin’s “Native Nationality and the Contemporary Queer Tradition, Sexuality, and History in Drowning in Fire,” which was also really interesting! Basically Rifkin argues that homophobia is to be understood within a colonial context, where the settler government regulates sexuality to re-enforce the heteronormative nuclear family because many First Nations and Native American ideas of family, sexuality, and gender did not fit with the Christian ideals that were so dominant at the time and influenced politics so much.

But honestly the most interesting article I read was Heather Sykes’ article, “Gay Pride on Stolen Land: Homonationalism and Settler Colonialism at the Vancouver Winter Olympics,” which was basically about the Pride Houses opened for the queer community in B.C. to watch the Olympics, but that ended up alienating Two-Spirit people and refusing to acknowledge that the reason they were able to open these Pride Houses in the first place is because the settler government had stolen the land from First Nations (B.C. is a really interesting case, because the First Nations there never ceded their land to the government unlike other Treaty First Nations, and so non-Indigenous B.C. citizens are actually living on stolen land right now). So basically this put queer First Nations in direct opposition to white queer settlers, and to “rectify” this, the queer white settlers only symbolically included two Two-Spirit people to fulfill a “performative need,” but still ignored colonial injustices.

I also used the first bit of the “United States” episode of Gaycation where they visit Two-Spirit people in Saskatchewan (specifically this quote from it). 

And finally, I used this article by Carrie Tait, which was really useful too in understanding the racism First Nations face in the queer community (I’m a white passing First Nations, so I don’t experience the full effects of this racism, it’s only when I tell people my dad was First Nations that people get Weird about it)! It also talks about the backlash to adding Two-Spirit to the LGBTQ+ acronym (which would be a step towards acceptance of queer First Nations within the queer community), but considering the backlash and discourse within the community regarding the inclusion of the ace spectrum and people who identify as asexual, it is discouraging, though unfortunately unsurprising, that there’s so much backlash to adding 2S or A. Hell, it’s 2018 and I’ve seen discourse about including the “+” to the acronym. For how supposedly accepting the queer community is, there is so much elitism surrounding “how oppressed” you are and there’s so much division and exclusion. I see so much biphobia within the community its both disgusting and unbelievable.

Lowkey if you want the articles without having to pay to access them dm me and I’ll download them and send them or screenshot because academia is Stupidly Elitist and I Will Fight It

[bisluthq]

He was super popular in school too.

This isn’t true from what he’s said in interviews 💀 Like Stern asked him that he must’ve been batting away the ladies during school because of his looks lmao and he must’ve been super popular, and he was like, yeah I was decently popular in that I had friends and wasn’t bullied but I wasn’t the most popular guy in school or whatever. He said he had puppy fat in school and worked at the bakery on weekends so he wasn’t exactly the coolest person lol which tracks, and I don’t think a boy who spends his wages on train tickets to go see his girlfriend and writes her bad (but very cute) poems is the epitome of cool. The band and his charm probably helped out lol but he’s said multiple times he wasn’t that popular because people expected him to be in school after seeing him in the band.

That’s what I’m getting from pics of him, what we know of his lifestyle, his personality overall tbh, and his interests and shit. He obviously wasn’t bullied. He’s crazy charming and he wasn’t ever ugly and he wasn’t poor and he wasn’t a complete nerd or anything nor is he stupid.

He wasn’t particularly athletic though, and he wasn’t rich - which tbh are the two main ways boys are suuuuper popular at school. The band looked like this:

Those weren’t boys you bullied and obviously they weren’t completely dateless because all four were cute, but you were looking at girls your own age who were also a bit weird and were tbh pretty nice girls.

These aren’t boys who the mums in Cheshire were scared of being brought round lmao.

I think there’s a weird desire in fandom - often from the same people - to keep Taylor virginal for as long as possible and there’s a perception that Harry must’ve “obviously” been sleeping around from his early teenage years. That’s patriarchy speaking and it’s a weird decontextualized patriarchy speaking. Hot girls who date older boys and have a lot of money and a cool job are far likelier to be having sex than a VERY young looking boy who dates girls his age and works at a bakery.

With Harry, we know he was fucking Caroline because she didn’t just invite him round to bake cookies. That makes her a perv. Not a pedo, but 100% pervy as fuck. Maybe he’d fucked someone before - the girlfriend he wrote the poetry for, a groupie, someone in his town who heard he was doing well on the show and was gonna be on telly - or maybe Caroline was his first PIV. We won’t know and nor should we but “obviously he was having tons of sex before that” seems untrue. Maybe he’d had an encounter or something but come on lmao that guy wasn’t a stud: