#this poet is precise in their self description

[definegodliness]

Hi hi. I hope this finds you well. Haha.

Your work is fucking riveting. Just the perfect amount of Perplexing, relatable and You.

I keep wondering, given you mentioned you didn't ever expect or perhaps want, to get into writing how did writing find you and how is your experience. Writing. What does that feel like for you?

And your writing voice. Its so eloquent so... artful..is that something you cultivated or was that simply a natural happening.

Personally I find nyself very disconnected from my work and the experience when i try to actively cultivate or "play around" with technique and prose etc. I naturally have a keeness to word play of sound and feel. Cadence. But the eloquence of your word choice is beauteus. Its something I would love to see in my own work im not quite sure though how to approach that goal whilst staying connected and thoroughly immersed in my experience when writing.

Hello there, Anon,

Thank you for your glowing, upbeat words. They have found me very well today, and I will cherish them. I did not expect to get into writing, because as a young adult my aim was to be successful in a rather narrow- corporate-minded way. I aimed for a job that paid well. So, writing absolutely did not fit my ego-fueled ambitions. A simpleton I was, but fortunately I can blame my inexperience in doing this living thing. I have always been a logophile. A word sponge. I care not for archaism or rarity, what matters is descriptiveness. When I find a word that is oddly particular, specialist, and above all precise, I experience a sense of elation. Even more when I finally get to use such a word. I guess you could say I favor precise communication over clear communication. Ironically, this is instigated by an innate longing to communicate clearly; as to achieve the purest possible connection, with as little as possible noise on the line between sender and receiver.

So, even when I had abandoned my love (for writing) to climb the corporate ladder, she has always kept seducing me, and has always remained part of me. Life, since then, has been slicing away at me. On the one hand, unfortunately, because life would be so much easier if I still had the same ambitions as then, but on the other hand I feel fortunate to have been chipped away, and ongoingly ever closer, to my core-self. Now, I can honestly say The Writer is a core-part. A part of me that blew up when I met my first love.

Without consciously setting out to write poetry, in hindsight, I wrote poem after poem for that girl. Of course, back then, it felt like simply sharing my heart with her. And it was such an overwhelming outpour of love, that, when she was not near, I had to canalize it through writing.

When she shattered my heart, it was very much the same. I developed scribomania, and for years I could not go without writing without suffocating. I always say writing helped me to learn to breathe underwater. However, it was more than catharsis. Prose turned to poetry, and I fell in love with this art form. Aside from getting emotions out, I also soaked in every bit to do with the craft. In that, poetry has given me a sense of purpose. What I love most is that you're never done learning, and therein you are never done evolving as a poet.

Curiosity is key. Reading-wise, when I like a poem, I am always keen to learn the whys. Then, try my hand at it. So I tried a lot of different styles, and when I finally wrote a satisfactory poem in that style, I went back to my own. Still incorporating the things I have learned. I have tried (nigh) every type of fixed verse similarly. Yes, sometimes fixed verse feels mechanical. But when I reread old work I do see my, then subconscious, emotions resurface. It may feel as if you are more disconnected than when writing free verse, but I assure you you are not. The set boundaries of fixed verse should not be seen as shackles, but as a lens; you utilize it to create a focal point.

Still, if you are truly averse to fixed verse, it has been mostly beneficial to me, because counting syllables, utilizing meter, and searching perfect rhymes has often sent me to my thesaurus and dictionary. It helps to hone your inborn skills, like lyricism and cadence. I do think my writing voice is natural, and that any writing voice is — I have never searched for it, doubted, or questioned it — but I also have cultivated it, longing to make it resound as clear as can be.

I think it's great you are confident in your own writing voice. That you know your strengths, and can play around with them. Never let anyone take that away from you. Never be hesitant, worried, or ashamed to write what you feel, need, or just plain simply want to write. Like I said, I love poetry because you can continuously keep evolving, and even if you feel a poem turned out subpar, or bad, or great for you but it turns out nobody else likes it, it is always a step in your evolution. There are many roads that lead to Rome. I now shared a glimpse of my path. But if you stay curious and just keep doing what you love, you will always get where you want to be.

Long answer, but I haven't written for a week, and I guess I am still a bit scribomanic. Your message offered a welcome distraction, and reason to pick up the pen.

For which you have my thanks,

Best wishes,

Mark

[aboutanancientenquiry]

The figure of ἐπιστάµενος (a person with knowledge) and the relationship between poetry and history in Herodotus

"To begin with a striking internal parallel, Herodotus introduces the Athenian lawmaker and poet Solon into his narrative as one of several Greek wise men or sages, σοφισταί (29.1), who visited the court of the Lydian king Croesus in Sardis. Before Solon has demonstrated his disregard for the king’s wealth, Croesus too makes much of the wisdom (σοφίη) that Solon has gained through his travels. However, when Solon proclaims his fellow Athenian Tellos and the Argive brothers Cleobis and Biton to be more prosperous than his fabulously wealthy host, Croesus demands to know the basis for Solon’s rankings, to which the Athenian replies (1.32.1):

ὁ δὲ εἶπε· Ὦ Κροῖσε, ἐπιστάµενόν µε τὸ θεῖον πᾶν ἐὸν φθονερόν τε καὶ ταραχῶδες ἐπειρωτᾷς ἀνθρωπηίων πρηγµάτων πέρι.

‘Croesus’, Solon replied, ‘you are asking me about human affairs, as one who knows how utterly resentful and disruptive [sc. of human prosperity] the deity is.’

Solon’s self-description as ἐπιστάµενος45 is underscored by the emphatic placement of the participle immediately after his direct address of the king. As I have argued elsewhere,46 the explication of this gnomic generalisation by the Herodotean Solon incorporates several references to surviving pieces of the historical Solon’s poetry, beginning with his statement that he sets the limit of a human’s life at 79 years (32.2 W2, cf. 27).

If we look beyond Herodotus, external parallels confirm the use of ἐπιστάµενος to describe the skill and wisdom of the archaic singer/poet. At Odyssey 11.367-8, Alcinous praises the arrangement (µορφή) and good sense (φρένες ἐσθλαί) that characterise Odysseus’ tale of his travails while traveling from Troy: ‘You have told your story in expert fashion, like a singer’ (µῦθον δ’ ὡς ὅτ’ ἀοιδὸς ἐπισταµένως κατέλεξας).47 Solon’s longest surviving poem (13 W2) contains a generic description of a poet as ‘instructed in the gifts of the Olympian Muses, expert in the full measure of lovely skill/wisdom’ (ἱµερτῆς σοφίης µέτρον ἐπιστάµενος, 52). The parallel with the most striking Herodotean resonance, however, occurs in four lines from the Theognidean corpus, describing the poet’s responsibility to his audience (769-72):

χρὴ Μουσῶν θεράποντα καὶ ἄγγελον, εἴ τι περισσόν εἰδείη, σοφίης µὴ φθονερὸν τελέθειν, ἀλλὰ τὰ µὲν µῶσθαι, τὰ δὲ δεικνύεν, ἄλλα δὲ ποιεῖν· τί σφιν χρήσηται µοῦνος ἐπιστάµενος;

The attendant and messenger of the Muses, if he should know Something extraordinary, must not be grudging of his wisdom, But must seek out knowledge, display it, and compose it. What good will it do him if he alone is knowledgeable?

The recurrent emphasis on the poet’s special knowledge/wisdom/expertise culminates in the pointedly deferred participle, ἐπιστάµενος. Robert Fowler calls special attention to the penultimate line, with its triple admonition to ‘seek out, display, and compose knowledge’.48 Fowler suggests that these activities comprise precisely what Herodotus means by that much-discussed phrase in the first clause of his opening sentence, ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις. In Fowler’s own words, ‘[Herodotus] sought knowledge and, good Greek that he was, shared it publicly’.

In fact Fowler’s formulation fails to do justice to the specificity of this text, since by its criteria what Herodotus proves himself to be in sharing the results of his inquiries is not merely a good Greek, but more precisely a good Greek poet. In other words, at the end of his prologue—an unmistakably prominent juncture in his narrative—Herodotus not only invokes the precedent of the Odyssey but also, and more broadly, promises the kind of generalising insight into the nature of the human condition traditionally professed by poets. It is as if Herodotus anticipated Aristotle’s criticism in the Poetics (1451a–b) that history—and indeed, explicitly Herodotean history—is less philosophical than poetry because it tends to focus on specific past events rather than universal human truths.49 On the contrary: from the outset Herodotus frames his account of historical particulars as a manifestation of the sobering universal truth that human prosperity is fleeting. In other words, Herodotus brings to historical narrative a poet’s eye for an issue of fundamental importance, mankind’s place in the universe at large.50 This is also reflected in the tendency of prominent advisor figures in the Histories to utter gnomic generalities when offering counsel in the face of specific crises, as they warn their powerful interlocutors about divine resentment of human prosperity and mortal liability to misfortune (Solon to Croesus, 1.32); or the cycle of human affairs that prevents anyone from enjoying continual success (Croesus to Cyrus, 1.207.2); or the deity that cuts down whatever is outstanding and allows no one but himself to ‘think big’ (Artabanus to Xerxes, 7.10ε)."

From the article of Charles C. Chiasson "Herodotus' Prologue and the Greek Poetic Tradition", Histos 6 (2012), 114-143

[the-consortium]

Doctor! How did you get your pimp cane and how you used it before?

The two opponents meet in the middle of the training cage, Bellephus turning sideways by just the tiniest of margins that Arrian can use to follow up and turn the fight in his favour. The nails hum dully at the base of his skull, their siren song toned down by the self-injected poison. For a second, the World Eater allows himself a sense of premature triumph before realising that he has walked into the very trap the Gutter Poet has been setting up for three seconds - an eternity by Astartes standards. Going into the cage with one of the Emperor's Children is always a lesson for Arrian - no matter the outcome. This time, he is just able to pull himself to safety with an inelegant dodging move from Bellephus' precise attack, which was exactly expecting Arrian's not even heartbeat-long mismatch, and is looking for distance to reorient himself when he notices out of the corner of his eye that Saqqara, who has been sitting and watching with interest on one of the crumbling tiers of the amphitheatre, suddenly jumps up, his eyes fixed on his dataslate. Laughing until he has to support himself with one hand, he then immediately makes his way to the exit. A cheerful Word Bearer is rarely too good a sign. Arrian jumps back, leaving the perplexed Bellephus standing, and dashes after the Diabolist and his Dataslate. "Mooooment!" Saqqara turns to face him. Innocence painted on his dark face like a not really convincing mask. "What? Mail for the Chief Apothecary. I'm being helpful!" Arrian reaches for the dataslate. Reads the short sentence. "Seriously?" Saqqara shrugs. "I want to hear what he says!" - "What he says? I mean, it's clear this is about Torment … but … Pimp Cane?" Against his will, Arrian notices silly laughter building up. Yes, that is indeed funny. One of the most unpleasant weapons in the galaxy. A demonic shard with a malevolent intelligence. A monster, only barely held in check by Fabius. And this, a pimp cane? Saqqara tries an innocent eye-roll. "Well, I like that description. And the Chief Apothecary is still a son of his father and loves to make a grand, elegant entrance. All that's missing is a few sparkly rhinestones." Bellephus has got a grip on his anger - no one leaves an Astartes of the Third Legion in the middle of training! - and gives in to his curiosity. Steps up beside Arrian. Looks over Saqqara's shoulder. You can't see his face through the mutant-grown helmet, but there's a grin in his voice, wider than the Great Rift. "Now, that's what I want to read, what he says in response!" Arrian shakes his head. "Let's leave that for now. At worst, we can track down some poor sod and drag them here for him to make his point about respect. And I don't fancy that at all. Although the hunting will probably be more on you and your lot, gutter poet. Still, more than unnecessary. No, make that disappear, Saqqara. If the questioner shows up in person, they have giant balls of Ceramite and have earned their audience with him. But otherwise, we'll leave the Chief Apothecary blissfully ignorant with this for now." Saqqara gives a mock disappointed sigh.

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Fallen Love by Deirdre Garr Johns

Fallen Love by Deirdre Garr Johns

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/fallen-love-by-deirdre-garr-johns/

Fallen Love is a collection of #poems that explores the ways in which #love can build, break, and restore the spirit. Fragments of memories establish the structure of Fallen Love, with carefully sequenced poems that create a #journey through the phases of love. To fall in love, we must open ourselves to vulnerability and be prepared to confront the difficult nature of fallen love. A narrative voice evokes an intimate tone that will resonate with those who desire to love and to be loved. Strong imagery and subtle rhymes expose love’s gentle and tumultuous nature, capturing its ability to take us by the hand and bring us to our knees. Though this collection offers a singular experience, the larger journey explored is the relationship one has with the self, which transcends the physical nature of love. In an attempt to reconcile love’s simple, yet complex nature, Fallen Love reveals a deeper understanding about love’s transformative power.

Deirdre Garr Johns is a writer originally from Pennsylvania and who currently resides in South Carolina with her family. Her work is inspired by memories of people and places. Nature is an inspiration for her writing, which often incorporates elements of the natural world. Poetry is a first love, but she writes in several genres, including nonfiction and children’s fiction. Her website is www.amuseofonesown.com.

PRAISE FOR Fallen Love by Deirdre Garr Johns

Deirdre Garr Johns’ debut collection of poems, Fallen Love, captures the immediate and nostalgic landscape of love. The moment-by-moment description of driving in Pennsylvania searching for a radio reception (A Place of the Heart) takes us to the tense yet somehow sweet state of mind, the observation of skipping stones with a sense of loss (Unlike the Stone), or the reflection of how we planned that first call being tangled in a telephone cord (Landline) take us where our hearts have once been. Garr Johns’ unpretentious yet memorable expressions about a time in the life of love will add fresh impressions to readers’ memories.

–Miho Kinnas. Author of Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias (Free Verse Press.)

As a poet, Deirdre pays attention to the world around her in a way that made me stop and appreciate the energy of my surroundings. Street lamps, old rooms with faded lavender, aroma, and a phone ringing at midnight are a few of the glimmer moments that made their way into this collection. All written with a touch of honesty and emotional depth. I’m glad you made the choice to read this book. And perhaps Fallen Love will help you to see the many layers of this life we’ve chosen to live.

–Marcus Amaker, first Poet Laureate of Charleston, SC.

Impressive about Deirdre Garr Johns’ Fallen Love is the ways in which the collection explores���in a language compact and precise, smart and lyrical—the subtle arc of its theme, each poem carefully constructed while at the same time furthering the larger story. Fallen Love is the perfect example of Frost’s dictum that a collection of poems should itself be a poem. From the innocence of young love (“a boy and a girl/the beginning of something”) to their eventual breakup (“and I wish I could bury that child’s view/under dead flowers, /little tombstone for what is lost”) to a deeper wisdom (“A resting place will suffice–exposed to light,/memories surface,/ ripples in a still lake”), Fallen Love is a remarkable first collection from a most promising poet.

–Philip Terman, author of This Crazy Devotion (Broadstone Books) and Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press)

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems #flp #love #life #relationships #nature

[thepotentialof2007]

ode to the house of weeping queers: #1 by stevie redwood

we trade notes about loving each other & killing capitalism—

flicked under bedroom doorways, left on the hallway mirror, taped

to the coffee grinder. laid out across the butcher block m found

propped against a telephone pole on bougie-street trash day

before they hauled it home & got the gristle out. they sanded & polished it

until it was slick & manicured as jeff bezos’s idle hands, & less stained

with the blood of other creatures. until it was well-oiled,

gleaming like teeth, so clean we could have eaten

the rich right off it. until one day we did,

& found out they don’t taste like chicken after all. we knifed the rich

into mouth-sized bites & ate with tiny silver spoons

k stole from the minimalist housewares store that got a whole building

of seniors evicted. we chewed & chewed, hungry for a heart

-y cut, but m said when they sliced behind the breast

there was nothing there. we gorged ourselves anyway & bickered

about whether we were still vegetarians. m said yes,

that things only count as meat if they were alive once. k said no,

but it was worth it.

[x]

[gardenofkore]

Lake Pergusa is a major wet zone in central Sicily and an important resting and wintering spot for migratory birds from all over the Mediterranean. The lake is the most important area in Sicily for the wintering of ducks and coots, and it hosts swans, herons, flamingos, cranes, and many other water species. Today, Lake Pergusa faces an environmental threat from an autorace track that has been built around its entire three-mile perimeter. The twentieth-century discovery of the archaeological site known as Cozzo  Matrice, a plateau situated less than a quarter mile from the lake, whose name means "hill of the Mother," has provided abundant evidence that Lake Pergusa was once the location of an important religious center dedicated to female deities. Ceramic material found there dates to as early as 4000 BCE, and remains of circular and elliptical huts overlooking the lake date to 2500 BCE. The presence of circular enclosures, which in Paleolithic and Neolithic Europe symbolized the "womb" of the female divinity, suggests that this site was probably sacred to a goddess or goddesses from very early times. An important archaeological layer has been found dating to the fifth century BCE that reveals the joint influence of the indigenous Sicilians (or Sicels) and the Greeks who began colonizing the island in the eighth century BCE. This layer contains the stone remains of a sanctuary and statuettes of either  Demeter or Persephone (or both), as well as related sacred objects. At other villages near the lake -Zagaria, Juculia, and Jacobo- statuettes representing Demeter and/or Persephone dating from the sixth to third centuries BCE have also been found. Perhaps most significant, Lake Pergusa was closely connected with Enna, a nearby twin-peaked or double-breasted mountain town that was a celebrated religious center dedicated primarily to Demeter. Archaeologists generally agree that the Greeks easily superimposed their religion of Demeter and Persephone over the indigenous Sicilian cult at Lake Pergusa and Enna because it strongly resembled the earlier tradition; thus, these two goddesses or their precursors were associated with the lake going back as far as the Bronze Age, if not earlier. Ross Holloway notes that even the Greek cult at Pergusa retained indigenous Sicelian, rather than Greek, characteristics.'? With the commencement of Roman occupation of the island in the late third century BCE, the goddesses came to be known by their Roman names, Ceres and Proserpine, but their cult at Enna and Lake Pergusa continued. Women served as important, and sometimes primary, leaders and ministrants of the religion both at Enna-Pergusa and throughout the island. A funerary plaque dedicated to a "priestess of Ceres" found on one of the mountain peaks of Enna indicates the prominence of women in religious leadership, as do the writings of historian Diodorus Siculus and Roman orator Cicero.

Diodorus and Cicero attest that the religion dedicated to Demeter and Persephone at Enna-Pergusa was characterized by elaborate festivals celebrating Sicily's agricultural cycle, particularly as it related to the production of wheat and barley, as well as rites centering on the human seasons of birth, growth, and death. It will become significant to this discussion that one of those rites was the Thesmophoria, an all-female rite honoring Demeter and Persephone that was also conducted in Greece. In Sicily, as elsewhere, Demeter was the goddess of growth and abundance, and Persephone was a goddess of both budding spring and death, or the underworld. Several ancient literary renderings name Enna or its environs as the location of Persephone's abduction into the underworld by Hades. Key to this discussion is the fact that Roman poet Ovid names Lake Pergusa specifically as the precise spot where this took place. Ovid further describes the lake as a remarkable environment filled with forests, waterbirds, and wildly blooming flowers. [...]

The flower motif is also important because it may help us date the religious center at Lake Pergusa. Sicilian scholar Giuseppe Martorana believes that the ancient descriptions of Enna and/or Lake Pergusa as places where "flowers continually bloom" and "spring smiles eternally" refer to the preagricultural, hunter-gatherer epoch in the history of the island. Extrapolating from his assertion, this would place religious activity at the lake earlier than 6000 BCE, when it is documented that Sicilians began domesticating crops. Martorana hypothesizes that this was a time in which a pre-Greek version of Kore as maiden goddess of spring was the principal deity of Sicily. It is important to note that although she embodied the life-giving aspects of springtime, she would have been, at the same time, a goddess of death. Thus, says Martorana, Kore, or some earlier form of her, was probably the original goddess of Lake Pergusa-an independent, free-standing goddess who embodied the totality of the life and death cycle. He maintains that it was not until the cultural transition to agriculture that her supremacy gave way to that of Demeter, "Goddess of the technology of grain cultivation." With the flowers of Kore replaced by the grain of Demeter, the primary religious conception of the goddess moved from that of the parthenogenetic, self-fertilizing "virgin" to that of the "mother". Günther Zuntz details archaeological and literary evidence confirming that Persephone, or some earlier version of her, was indeed a very old, "pre-Greek" goddess who may well have been a -or the- principal deity of pre-Greek Sicily. Noting that the Sicilians of the late Paleolithic and Neolithic periods put great spiritual emphasis on death and rebirth, as evidenced by the centrality of tomb-wombs in their sacred life, Zuntz affirms that Kore-Persephone was a holdover of the "silent Goddess of Life and Death" of the early peoples of the island. Significantly, archaeologists Paolo Orsi and Bernabo Brea noted in the first half of the twentieth century that the entire region surrounding Pergusa was one large necropolis from the eighth through sixth centuries BCE. I thus suggest that the lake may have symbolically represented to ancient inhabitants the chthonic, underworldly regions, and the nearby mountaintop of Enna, where Demeter's worship predominated, represented the upperworldly realms. [...]

The mythological motif of Persephone's gathering flowers in both the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Metamorphoses is also extremely significant here. I believe this is a reference to the picking of entheogenic plants, the ingesting of which propels Persephone's journey into the underworldly realms. In the Hymn, it is her picking of the narcissus in particular that initiates the "abduction" by (into) Hades. Ann Suter notes that the etymological root of narcissus is nark, meaning "grow numb, stiff, dead." This and the fact that nark is also the root for narcotic strongly suggest that Persephone's descent describes female shamanic initiation induced by sacred medicines to help one shift consciousness, become "dead," and enter the otherworld/underworld for the purpose of connecting with divine consciousness and obtaining wisdom. Again, following on Martorana, the reference to "gathering" may place the origins of such a ritual in the preagricultural Paleolithic era. Although Ovid does not mention the narcissus (rather, he speaks of violets or lilies), I believe he is nevertheless referencing the activity of picking sacred medicinal flowers or herbs in conjunction with puberty initiation. If the posited Paleolithic time period is correct, this would make such a ritual very ancient indeed. Cicero intimates that "mysterious rites" were conducted in connection with Demeter and Persephone at Enna, suggesting that in later Greco Roman times, formal mystery rites akin to the nine-day Greater Mysteries of Eleusis may have been held there (and, again, by extension, at Lake Pergusa). Given the level of intensity of the initiatory experience at Eleusis, I agree with scholars who contend that the Greek mysteries most likely involved the use of entheogens; and, if the Sicilian mystery rites were indeed similar to their Greek counterparts, they thus involved the use of such sacred medicines as well. I therefore suggest that such mystery rites-both at Enna-Pergusa and in Greece-may have originated in more remote times in the kinds of female initiatory rituals I am describing here, in which women may have used the sacred medicines they discovered and developed through their intimate work with plants.

Marguerite Rigoglioso, Persephone's Sacred Lake and the Ancient Female Mystery Religion in the Womb of Sicily, p. 7-9; 11-12; 19-20

[vital-information]

Zadie Smith, from “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” “’Re-examine all you have been told,’ Whitman tells us, ‘and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.’ Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did. But I feel no sense of triumph in my apostasy. It might well be that we simply don’t want or need novels like mine anymore, or any of the kinds of fictions  that, in order to exist, must fundamentally disagree with the new theory of “likeness.” It may be that the whole category of what we used to call fiction is becoming lost to us. And if enough people turn from the concept of fiction as it was once understood, then fighting this transformation will be like going to war against the neologism “impactful” or mourning the loss of the modal verb “shall.” As it is with language, so it goes with culture: what is not used or wanted dies. What is needed blooms and spreads. 

Consequently, my interest here is not so much prescriptive as descriptive. For me the question is not: Should we abandon fiction? (Readers will decide that—are in the process of already deciding. Many decided some time ago.) The question is: Do we know what fiction was? We think we know. In the process of turning from it, we’ve accused it of appropriation, colonization, delusion, vanity, naiveté, political and moral irresponsibility. We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it—what theories of self-and-other it offered us, or why, for so long, those theories felt meaningful to so many. Embarrassed by the novel—and its mortifying habit of putting words into the mouths of others—many have moved swiftly on to what they perceive to be safer ground, namely, the supposedly unquestionable authenticity of personal experience. 

The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane. This principle permits the category of fiction, but really only to the extent that we acknowledge and confess that personal experience is inviolate and nontransferable. It concedes that personal experience may be displayed, very carefully, to the unlike-us, to the stranger, even to the enemy—but insists it can never truly be shared by them. This rule also pertains in the opposite direction: the experience of the unlike-us can never be co-opted, ventriloquized, or otherwise “stolen” by us. (As the philosopher Anthony Appiah has noted, these ideas of cultural ownership share some DNA with the late-capitalist concept of brand integrity.) Only those who are like us are like us. Only those who are like us can understand us—or should even try. Which entire philosophical edifice depends on visibility and legibility, that is, on the sense that we can be certain of who is and isn’t “like us” simply by looking at them and/or listening to what they have to say. 

Fiction didn’t believe any of that. Fiction suspected that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest. Fiction wondered what likeness between selves might even mean, given the profound mystery of consciousness itself, which so many other disciplines—most notably philosophy—have probed for millennia without reaching any definitive conclusions. Fiction was suspicious of any theory of the self that appeared to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye, that is, those parts of our selves that are material, manifest, and clearly visible in a crowd. Fiction—at least the kind that was any good—was full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It had grave doubts about the nature of the self. 

Like a lot of writers I want to believe in fiction. But I’m simultaneously full of doubt, as is my professional habit. I know that the old Whitmanesque defense needs an overhaul. Containment—as a metaphor for the act of writing about others—is unequal to the times we live in. These times in which so many of us feel a collective, desperate, and justified desire to be once and for all free of the limited—and limiting—fantasies and projections of other people. With all due respect to Whitman, then, I’m going to relegate him to the bench, and call up, in defense of fiction, another nineteenth-century poet, Emily Dickinson: 

I measure every Grief  I meet With narrow, probing, eyes— I wonder if It weighs like Mine— Or has an Easier size. 

This gets close to the experience of making up fictional people. It starts as a consciousness out in the world: looking, listening, noticing. A kind of awareness, attended by questions. What is it like to be that person? To feel what they feel? I wonder. Can I use what I feel to imagine what the other feels? A little later in the poem, Dickinson moves from the abstract to the precise: There’s Grief of Want—and grief of Cold— A sort they call “Despair”— There’s Banishment from native Eyes— In sight of Native Air— 

She makes a map in her mind of possibilities. But later, as the poem concludes, she concedes that no mental map can ever be perfect, although this does not mean that such maps have no purpose: 

And though I may not guess the kind— Correctly—yet to me A piercing Comfort it affords In passing Calvary— To note the fashions—of the Cross— And how they’re mostly worn— Still fascinated to presume That Some—are like my own— 

In place of the potential hubris of containment, then, Dickinson offers us something else: the fascination of presumption. This presumption does not assume it is “correct,” no more than I assumed, when I depicted the lives of a diverse collection of people in my first novel, that I was “correct.” But I was fascinated to presume that some of the feelings of these imaginary people—feelings of loss of homeland, the anxiety of assimilation, battles with faith and its opposite—had some passing relation to feelings I have had or could imagine. That our griefs were not entirely unrelated. The joy of writing that book—and the risk of it—was in the uncertainty. I’d never been to war, Bangladesh, or early-twentieth-century Jamaica. I was not, myself, an immigrant. Could I make the reader believe in the imaginary people I placed in these fictional situations? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the reader. “I don’t believe it,” the reader is always free to say, when confronted with this emotion or that, one action or another. Novels are machines for falsely generating belief and they succeed or fail on that basis.”

[joshuaevans2020]

Come To where I'm from monologues

Describe briefly in a few sentences what each of the Paines Plough  monlogues was about?

(Come to where I’m from Plymouth)

This monologue is about a grieving widow who has lost her love at war, there are implications of an affair due to the mention of a “French woman” from the quote “…she was a French woman” which is followed by a pause implying distress and emotional trauma. However, through the use of repetition in the dialogue we hear he recall a story from her and her lovers past involving a piano which contrasts the other themes of the monologue such as war and loss with a more tender moment that she seems to be found of remembering.

(Come to where I’m from Cardiff)

This monologue is about a man recalling his youth, how he was raised in a rough crime infested environment and how this affects him now. He mentions how he had a perm hairstyle and how this made him stand out from the crowd, he goes on to recall being arrested by police after he was found trying to steal a bike. After being held in a prison cell he vividly tells us his memory of being alone in there with a duck, although this seems very random and unrelated to the story completely, this is a metaphor as in the prison cell he realises that he was an ‘ugly duckling’ trying to fit in by making himself different ( the perm) and committing crime out of frustration brought about an epiphany of sorts where he discovers he never needed to change himself to fit in since he was already perfect in himself, very much reminiscent of the ugly duckling children’s tale.

(Come to where I’m from Manchester)

This monologue depicts a retelling of a traumatic event that happened on a drunken night shared between friends, the main character speaks about how he was in deep thought whilst intoxicated however his friends around him where laughing and poking fun at his demeaner. He goes on to tell us about how during this moment of deep thought his friends took advantage of him to such an extreme that he was scared that it would lead to sexual assault, after the moment of the assault ends he stands and leaves the room to only return with a golf club and proceeds to attack his friends out of anger and leaves them extremely injured, we understand this is an attack of revenge to re-instate his manhood amongst other male friends. He ends his story by now describing how this event has shaped him as a man as now he realises that he is not in control of his own temper and what happens when this anger over comes him.

(Come to where I’m from London)

This monologue depicts the story of an immigrant who finds himself in London and now feels this is his true home, he describes the city in a love song like manner personifying the city of London itself. He references modern British pop culture with reference to ‘major tom’ (David Bowie), this reference connects to the story as the song itself describes being lonely and far away from home which this character is himself. He sings in his native tongue for a moment during the speech, connecting us with his culture from back home. Finally the most important message given is that no matter the distance or the place he will be forever connected to his home country.

(Come to where I’m from Liverpool)

This monologue recalls the childhood of a woman from Liverpool in 1988 when she was 12 and in school struggling with severe anxiety, she tells us about  the one day she had had enough and decided to not abide by the school rules but instead remain in the toilets even after the bell had rung for lessons. She sits on the toilet and does a certain routine of tapping and pulling on her body in different areas and in very precise numbers implying to us that she had OCD and does this routine in order to calm herself in times of stress. The OCD is so self-consuming that any minor change to her routine be that enforced by teachers or anyone else she MUST find a way to cope therefore adjusts the routine to fit circumstances. The story comes to a conclusion with a revelation of sorts, she is at the beach and gets stuck in quicksand whilst trying to retrieve a ball and escapes without saying or doing her OCD routine which brings about her realising she doesn’t need it to survive in the world.

What images/ characters / moments particularly stuck out for you in any of the Paines plough monologues and why? ( choose 3)

(Come to where I’m from Plymouth)

The parrot, the piano, the French woman, “he was a poet”, “I was a musician”, the audio overlapping at parts. These specific moments/images successfully depict the denial to accept the loss of a loved one to war and that life will not be as it was before.

(Come to where I’m from Cardiff)

The perm, the bike, the duck, the moment when he becomes the duck. These moments/images successfully depict how the main character struggled to fit in in his society and was driven to petty crime to let out his frustrations.

(Come to where I’m from Manchester)

The balls in his face, the description of his friends and his own anus leading to the line “it’s not happening because of who I am, it’s happening because of where I am” implying it was anything to do with him personally but to do with the situation he placed himself in to begin with. The description of the violence in this monologue projects how toxic masculinity and his fragile male ego are the main themes in the monologue and the main causes of his anger issues.

How were the National Theatre Scotland monologues using the frame ( screen) to succesfully tell a story?

National Theatre Scotland’s monologues where presented to us in a very casual listening form, where we can build the imagery mentally and understand/relate to their stories more. Therefore allowing us to implement our own thoughts and opinions as to why characters behaved and acted in the ways that they did making this method of storytelling successful.

[ucflibrary]

The national celebration of African American History was started by Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and first celebrated as a weeklong event in February of 1926. After a half century of overwhelming popularity, the event was expanded to a full month in 1976 by President Gerald Ford.

 Here at UCF Libraries we believe that knowledge empowers everyone in our community and that recognizing past inequities is the only way to prevent their continuation. This is why our featured bookshelf suggestions range from celebrating outstanding African Americans to having difficult conversations about racism in American history. We are proud to present our top 20 staff suggested books in honor of Black History Month.

 Click on the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links for the Black History Month titles suggested by UCF Library employees. These 20 books plus many, many more are also on display on the 2nd (main) floor of the John C. Hitt Library next to the bank of two elevators.

 A Fool's Errand: creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the age of Bush, Obama, and Trump by Lonnie G. Bunch III Founding Director Lonnie Bunch's deeply personal tale of the triumphs and challenges of bringing the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture to life. His story is by turns inspiring, funny, frustrating, quixotic, bittersweet, and above all, a compelling read. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 An American Marriage: a novel by Tayari Jones Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together. Suggested by Rebecca Hawk, Circulation Services

 Becoming African Americans: black public life in Harlem, 1919-1939 by Clare Corbould Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American. Suggested by Betsy Kaniecki, UCF Connect Libraries

 Black Sexualities: probing powers, passions, practices, and policies edited by Juan Battle, Sandra L. Barnes Why does society have difficulty discussing sexualities? Where does fear of Black sexualities emerge and how is it manifested? How can varied experiences of Black females and males who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), or straight help inform dialogue and academic inquiry? From questioning forces that have constrained sexual choices to examining how Blacks have forged healthy sexual identities in an oppressive environment, Black Sexualities acknowledges the diversity of the Black experience and the shared legacy of racism. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Charlottesville 2017: the legacy of race and inequity edited by Louis P. Nelson and Claudrena N. Harold How should we respond to the moral and ethical challenges of our times? What are our individual and collective responsibilities in advancing the principles of democracy and justice? This book brings together the work of UVA faculty members catalyzed by last summer’s events to examine their community’s history more deeply and more broadly. Their essays―ranging from John Mason on the local legacy of the Lost Cause to Leslie Kendrick on free speech to Rachel Wahl on the paradoxes of activism―examine truth telling, engaged listening, and ethical responses, and aim to inspire individual reflection, as well as to provoke considered and responsible dialogue. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Diversifying Diplomacy: my journey from Roxbury to Dakar by Harriet Elam-Thomas This is the story of Harriet Lee Elam-Thomas, a young black woman who beat the odds and challenged the status quo. Inspired by the strong women in her life, she followed in the footsteps of the few women who had gone before her in her effort to make the Foreign Service reflect the diverse faces of the United States. The youngest child of parents who left the segregated Old South to raise their family in Massachusetts, Elam-Thomas distinguished herself with a diplomatic career at a time when few colleagues looked like her. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Go Ahead in the Rain: notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group’s history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. Suggested by Jada Reyes, Research & Information Services

 How We Fight White Supremacy: a field guide to Black resistance edited by Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It's a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Long Division by Kiese Laymon Kiese Laymon’s debut novel is a Twain-esque exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in Post-Katrina Mississippi, written in a voice that’s alternately funny, lacerating, and wise. The book contains two interwoven stories. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 Magical Negro by Morgan Parker Parker presents an archive of black everydayness; a catalog of contemporary folk heroes. Her poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration. She connects themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification while exploring the troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Suggested by Jada Reyes, Research & Information Services

 Olio by Tyehimba Jess With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America's blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them. Suggested by Jada Reyes, Research & Information Services

 On the Other Side of Freedom: the case for hope by DeRay Mckesson Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible. Honoring the voices of a new generation of activists, this is a visionary's call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Rest in Power: the enduring life of Trayvon Martin by Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin Five years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin’s name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one black child’s death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade? Told through the compelling alternating narratives of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, this book answers those questions from the most intimate of sources. It’s the story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and the inspiring journey they took from grief and pain to power, and from tragedy and senselessness to meaning. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, and a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, this is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers. Suggested by Rachel Mulvihill, Teaching & Engagement

 The Segregated Hour:  a layman's guide to the history of Black Liberation theology by Jeremy D. Lucas On March 18, 2008, as Barack Obama rose to the stage in Philadelphia, political commentators were on pins and needles over how he was going to address the fiery sermons of his long-time friend and mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. With an eye toward a more perfect union, the soon-to-be president offered his initial thoughts on the current state of race relations in America. "The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning." Soon after the Civil Rights Movement came to an end, James Cone had been the first to write of this "old truism" when he introduced the world to something he called Black Liberation Theology. For those still angered by past and present oppression, there was only one place of refuge where the government would not intrude: the black church. Cone became their primary theologian. Rarely seen in small towns and rural fellowships, black liberation has been relegated to the inner city neighborhoods where the poor reach out for anyone who will give them hope for a better tomorrow. Suggested by Jeremy Lucas, Research & Information Services

 Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Suggested by Rachel Mulvihill, Teaching & Engagement

 We've Got a Job: the 1963 Birmingham Children's March by Cynthia Levinson The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March was a turning point in American history. In the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, the fight for civil rights lay in the hands of children like Audrey Hendricks, Wash Booker, James Stewart, and Arnetta Streeter. This is the little-known story of the 4,000 black elementary, middle, and high school students who voluntarily went to jail between May 2 and May 11, 1963. The children succeeded ―where adults had failed―in desegregating one of the most racially violent cities in America. Suggested by Betsy Kaniecki, UCF Connect Libraries

 Wrapped in Rainbows: the life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd The first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in more than twenty-five years, this book illuminates the adventures, complexities, and sorrows of an extraordinary life. Acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd delves into Hurston’s history��her youth in the country’s first incorporated all-black town, her friendships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, and her mysterious relationship with vodou. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

[womenintranslation]

Women in Amerindian Literature: an essay by Elisa Taber

(Image: armadillo carving, a handicraft of the Mbya Guaraní, the indigenous community the poet Alba Eiragi Duarte belongs to.)

Women writing in indigenous languages in Latin America are working to both decolonize hegemonic feminism and to counter systematic linguistic censorship. Their poetic discourse posits that women’s rights do not need to be individualistic but communal and that national identity needs to be multicultural. It is not why but how they write, and the range of languages they use, that makes their writings impossible to group together under the label “indigenous literature.” The Mixe writer and linguist Yasnaya Elena Aguilar Gil has rejected the standard binary imposed on literary production in indigenous languages in Mexico, “I have yet to find a common trait that justifies that a literature written in such distinct languages and that belongs to eleven disparate linguistic families shares any grammatical features or poetic devices that, together, can be contrasted to Spanish.” (��(Is There) An Indigenous Literature?”) The distinctiveness of each indigenous language and culture must be respected and the conception of a ‘minority’ literary category that homogenizes them must be questioned.

Those eager to discover linguistic, cosmological, and poetic diversity should read the work of the following contemporary women writers: Natalia Toledo and Irma Pineda, Zapotec poets; Ruperta Bautista Vázquez and Marga Beatriz Aguilar Montejo, Maya Tsotsil and Maya Yucatec poets, respectively; Liliana Ancalao and Faumelisa Manquepillán, Mapuche poets; Lucila Lema Otavalo and Eugenia Carlos Ríos, Quechua poets; Alba Eiragi Duarte and Susy Delgado, Mbya Guaraní and Jopara poets, respectively.

The community of Latin American writers and academics studying Amerindian poetry–especially Violeta Percia and Juan G. Sánchez Martínez–have generously shared with me the work of these contemporary women writers. I encourage readers to visit Sánchez Martínez’s multilingual digital collaborative anthology platform, Siwar Mayu. The digital nature of this anthology shows that, as Walter Ong posits, it is electronic, rather than print, media that makes visible the transgressions writing inflects on transcribed orality. The auditory and visual performance components of oral literature are rendered through multimedia; i.e. the translated text is accompanied by recordings and illustrations. A lyrical, fictional, or non-fictional piece is published in the original indigenous language as well as in Spanish and English, together with an illustration by an indigenous artist and an essay by an indigenous academic reflecting on the work’s literary value. The result, which is not simply the transcription but the multi-sequential and multisensory translation of oral literature, calls forth a secondary orality.

The poetry of these Zapotec, Maya, Mapuche, Quechua, and Guaraní poets present distinct modes of production, lyrical devices, and linguistic features that are jointly defiant of their Western counterparts. Their collections live between Spanish and an endangered indigenous language. They are crafted and distributed orally; transcription is a secondary and sometimes unnecessary step. Many are self-published in print or online, via social media. Language loses its weight this way; it becomes ephemeral, alterable, it ceases to belong to one person. However, the content is firmly rooted in the soil, sometimes focused on the quotidian–specifically, the act of boiling a potato–and other times on the metaphysical– specifically, the distance between life and death bridged by another conception of corporeality within time and space. I believe this poetry is excluded from the national canon of each country these poets belong to precisely because there is so much complexity encrypted in its apparent simplicity.

In this post I will introduce the poetry of the Paraguayan poet, Alba Eiragi Duarte, who writes in Mbya Guaraní (which is distinct from Jopara, a variant of Spanish-inflected Guaraní) and will discuss how her work is excluded by a definition of national literature so narrow that it has no place for indigenous poetries. Eiragi Duarte has introduced, illustrated, and self-published her collection Ñe'ẽ yvoty, ñe'e poty (Our Earth and Our Mother), writing bilingually in Spanish and Mbya Guaraní. The first section consists of sixteen of her own poems. The language and content are simple. The poems address ontological subjects: what it takes to survive, to cook, sleep, and work. Or what it means to be alive: the passing of the seasons, the transition from dawn to dusk, the birth and death of loved ones. The lines are short but read as sentences, almost like instructions. The language is formal and distant until speech erupts, In “Pore’ỹ” (The Absence), the third person narration shifts to the first with the lines

Che kérape rohecha,

che páype rohechase

che membymi porãite

I see you in my dreams and

when I wake, I wish to see you,

my daughter, my life.

Emotion is unmediated yet counters nostalgia with a sense of what is real now: her daughter is deceased and the narrator, alive. There is nothing mythical about these poems, if myth is defined as the attribution of human intentionality to the inexplicable or meaningless.

In her last poem, “Che Rata” (My Fire), day dawns, the narrator lights a fire and sets a sweet potato, a mandioca, and a kettle atop it. The poem ends with the lines, “che rata ikatupyry, / ombojy ha’uva’erã” (fire is vital, / it cooks food). Life appears to be as simple as waking. Regaining this clarity is a task that is as complex for the reader as it is for the author. The poet refuses to be distracted by the superfluous and encourages the reader to do the same. Alba Eiragi Duarte is, above all, an ethical poet. There is a circularity in each text that is intrinsic to the author’s conception of life and poetry: what is simple is complex and what is complex is simple. She has no need to resort to complex metafictional device to underscore this paradox.

In the second section, titled “Mombe’u añeteguaite Avá Ruguái rehegua” (The True Story of Avá Ruguái), Eiragi Duarte retells a religious myth. (In Guaraní Avá means man and ruguái, armadillo.) Avá Ruguái is like a man, but is more solitary, agile, and cruel. When men hunting in the jungle enter too deep to return before nightfall, he puts them to sleep and kills, quarters, and skins them. The poet recounts the story of the man who kills Avá Ruguái because Ruguái has killed his brother. In one scene, the narrator squats in the scrubland, watching Avá Ruguái lift his sleeping brother by the nape of his neck. There is something cinematic about the specificity with which corporeality in space is described. Time is ambiguous but the events that are recounted seem to occur in the span of one night.

The wilderness—its flora and fauna—is heightened by the descriptions and accompanying illustrations. It is as though the quebracho and palm trees witness the events as the readers do. Behind a low stand of thorn bushes, a man lies stiffly on the ground. The tips of his feet point right. He wears a dark shirt and light pants. His silhouette is delineated by the darkest line in the drawing. His eyes and mouth are lightly sketched, they fade into the white paper. He grips his hand over his abdomen. He seems dead, not asleep. Another man stands over him with a bow in his hands and a sack full of arrows on his back. Palm trees lean left and right in the background. The rigidity and lack of expression of the human figures is in stark contrast to the ornamentation and movement of the bushes and trees. The book’s illustrations underscore people’s inflexibility towards the elements of nature, which in turn adapt to them. The narrative shows the retribution of nature, embodied by Avá Ruguái, to the transgressions of humans.

Eiragi Duarte recites these poems and stories, transcribed on illustrated placards, to children in rural schools across Paraguay. This educational program counters the loss of knowledge of the Mbya Guaraní language and of sacred narratives. She comes from an oral or mnemonic tradition in which authorship is not individual but communal. The poet compensates for the transgressions writing inflects on transcribed orality by combining her poetry with stories that have been passed down to her and by illustrating both on the placards.

She aspires to create a national Paraguayan literature that is multilingual and multicultural. Yet her poetry is intrinsically untranslatable unless the conception of literature broadens to include her manifesto of social ecology. In the introduction to the book she not only posits an equality between genders but also between human beings and nature. By conceiving of human rights and authorship in a communal sense, and at the same time blurring the distinction between the social and ecological, she forces readers to regard the parts of a whole as distinct yet interconnected in new ways. Behind the apparent simplicity of these poems and stories lies a true reconception of reality and how it is rendered in fiction and poetry.

The term literature must be challenged because it reduces these verbally organized materials to a variant further developed by literate cultures. With respect to sacred narratives, the term authorship must shift from an individual to a communal definition. The narratives do not belong to the ones reciting them—they only author a version—but rather to the millenary indigenous cultures the reciters belong to. The history of the transcription and translation into Spanish of poetry from indigenous languages since the conquest has three stages. The first was carried out by missionaries; the second, by social scientists, specifically linguists and anthropologists; and the third, by writers.

I have featured the work of Alba Eiragi Duarte in this post because it speaks to the literary properties of the text, rather than exclusively to its cultural or linguistic aspects. She shows that the culture or language is not so much in danger of extinction as it is at risk of voluntarily subjugating itself through national aspirations to westernization. She also proposes that her translations are parallel versions of the original. It is only by challenging the terms “literature and authorship” that the national as well as the continental canon will be broadened to include indigenous poetry. Failing that, its lyrics will continue to circulate orally as common knowledge, but without validation as artistic works in their own right, not folkloric artifacts.

—Elisa Taber

Works Cited

Aguilar Gil, Yasnaya Elena. “(Is There) an Indigenous Literature?” Translated by Gloria E. Chacón. Diálogo, vol. 19, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 157-159. (Original article in Spanish published in March 2015 in Letras libres (https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/libros/literatura-indigena).

[oliverarditi]

Life grooves

Jaime Hernandez often uses techniques that seem cinematic; in fact they are no more proper to cinema than they are to comics, but some narrative tactics are available to both fields that have no direct analogy in other story-telling media, known in cinema by terms such as framing, focus, depth of field, camera distance, and so on. They may have their own terms in comics studies, but I’m not aware of them yet. Camera or viewpoint distance plays an important part in Is This How You See Me?, the latest instalment in the long running Locas sequence from Love & Rockets.

Hernandez’s characters appear older in close-up; at a distance, some of their detail disappears, and they look closer to the way he drew them in the 1980s. This effect relates to their own subjective experience of the past, whose distance erases detail and transfigures its images with the beauty of youth. The narrative present ticks by with a regular eight-panel routine of daily detail, the prosaic grit that makes it particular, but in flashback the layouts are more open and more variable, more expressively responsive to the events of the narrative, and although the present-tense drawing is no less beautiful, there is perhaps something more deliberately aestheticised about the imagery of recollection.

A comic strip can’t really represent the past, in the sense of something which is not present: both ‘now’ and ‘then’ have equal presence on the page, and this variation in layout opens a space between them, within the inherently historical domain of the page. I say ‘inherently’, because the narrative present can never be present in the way that the experiential present is: instead it is present as something already done, fixed in place with printer’s ink, another facet of the past – the whole strip is a recollection, a trace of some days that Hernandez spent in his studio. This might seem a glib and irrelevant observation, but recollection, and the irrecuperable character of what is recalled, are the central themes of this story.

At the centre of the work is the archetypal act of social recollection, the reunion. Various characters from the long history of the strip gather for a punk gig in Hoppers (what the locals call Huerta, Hernandez’s fictionalised version of Oxnard, north of Los Angeles), featuring fictional bands with names that still live in my memory, as a long-time reader of Love & Rockets, with the same kind of resonance as real ones. Old relationships and tensions are rehearsed, reiterated or revised, and characters recuperate their individual experience from their collective history, a chronicle written in living memory. Not for the first time I am struck by the contrast with W.G. Sebald, the unsurpassed prose poet of memory: Sebald’s narrators remember in solitude, and recover the experience of whole casts of characters from a documentary archive. This patently melancholy approach to recollection is the structural inverse of Hernandez’s celebratory treatment of memory: in Sebald a society is recalled individually; in Hernandez the individual is recalled socially.

In contrast to the previous instalment of Locas there is no structural rhythm of violence, indeed no clear markers of narrative order, other than the transitions to and from Maggie’s dramatic present-tense and Ray’s reflective narrated interludes, and to memory. While it’s easy to make critical generalisations like ‘this is all about memory’, Locas is always about its characters, characters who have grown and changed in real time for nearly forty years. Hopey, the puckish, skinny punk who was as much at the centre of the early stories as her lover Maggie, returns for her most detailed scenes in a long time; she is no longer the carefree prankster, but a woman threatened by her past, convinced that anyone who knew her in her youth will despise her. Izzy returns as a symbolic, oracular presence, her damage more profound and her surface more enigmatic than any other character – in flashback we see her intelligent, self-aware, morally centred and strong-willed, but how she gets from there to here remains mysterious (the story was told in Flies on the Ceiling, but we’re still none the wiser). ‘You can’t go home’, as Hopey tells Maggie, seems to be a touchstone for this story, but Hernandez’s take on recollection is nuanced, and memory is experienced in as many ways as there are characters – a variability that is explicitly dramatised at the reunion.

In many ways this is a very conventional kind of fiction, in which stable characters are articulated through an uncontroversial form of psycho-biographical causality, but having been writing them episodically for four decades Hernandez has at his disposal a depth of personal history that exceeds anything it is possible to construct instrumentally. The result is a kind of lustre or patination on their speech and interactions which should be apparent even to readers who encounter these characters for the first time in this book. They have a particular, individuated habituality – as though they were stereotypes of themselves alone, enacting clichés that are shared with no-one.

This is also an exact description of Hernandez’s drawing, whose vocabulary of schematic gestures gives an impression of precise verisimilitude even when he describes a street with three lines, and even when he resorts to out-and-out cartooning to represent a comically extreme emotion.  Like his creations, he is deep into his groove, laying out a web of possibilities through the entangled life paths of these old Huerta punks. He is himself an old Oxnard punk, so he knows his material, and his chosen topic – a topic which is memory, recollection, the past and all the other abstract things I’ve touched upon, but only inasmuch as they are manifest in people, and only in the multifarious and peculiar ways that they are experienced. Which is to say, more or less, that his topic is life.

[autobiographyofread]

Old School

“A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”—from Old School, Tobias Wolff

When I was 17, my friend Nicole and I would wake early on Saturdays to stand in line for the bus outside the Sheraton Hotel. The T67 cost $4.25 to ride it from Teaneck to Port Authority. It was thrilling to enter the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey and emerge on the other side to the concrete slabs of Manhattan. At Port Authority, we’d buy large iced coffees at the Au Bon Pain kiosk, across from the Strawberry and next to the Duane Reade. Our coffees would turn from black to off-white from the large amounts of cream we poured in. Coffees in hand, we’d hop on the R train and ride it to Union Square, exiting the park at East 12th Street where Strand Bookstore sits on the corner of Broadway. Nicole and I would spend hours browsing the stacks of used books, of which the store boasts 18 miles. Our habit was to grab everything. Grab first, decide what to keep later.

As someone who grew up conflating “bookstore” with Barnes and Noble, I was enamored with the Strand’s lack of escalators and gloss. I loved the poorly ventilated three-story building and its staff-curated tables of books. I dreamed of moving to the city after college and getting a job at the Strand. (I now live in the city, but have yet to fulfill my dream of becoming a bookseller.) 

I think of myself scanning the shelves at 17, and I’m reminded of my conviction. I was so certain that if I spent hours in the store, the right book would reveal itself to me. “Is there a right time to read each book?” asks the poet Mary Ruefle in an essay. “A point of developing consciousness that corresponds with perfect ripeness to a particular poet or novel?” At 17, I thought so.

The first time I encountered Tobias Wolff was on a wooden cart of books waiting to be shelved at the Strand. It’s easy to single out an area of the store as your favorite. It’s crammed with niche offerings, from a section of “Writers Writing About Writing” to a wall of colorful socks and pins. The section that houses the carts of novels-to-be-shelved has always been my favorite. I’m easily overwhelmed by choice, and the carts feel like a manageable sampling of the entire fiction offerings of the store. It was here that I found a $7 copy of Tobias Wolff’s Old School—a novel about literary adolescents at an elite boarding school for boys in the 1960s. If ever there was a perfect book coalescing with my life at the perfect time, it was this one. 

I’m an avid consumer of all things prep school and moneyed academia. I love stepping into the world of ivy-covered brick and characters who worship poetry and grow pale from reading too much indoors. To my bookish self, this is the ultimate fantasy. Even after I gained entry to one of these elite campuses for college, and came face to face with the inherent flaws of these wealthy institutions, I continue to have a soft spot for the genre.

Old School is among the best this genre has to offer. In a story where serious students compete for an audience with literary giants—Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway—the meat of the novel is its interiority. Wolff captures so palpably the furtive desires that the competition sets in motion. The book opens, “Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election. It tells you something about our school that the prospect of his arrival cooked up more interest than the contest between Nixon and Kennedy, which for most of us was no contest at all.” From these first sentences, Wolff establishes an insular setting, exempt from the noise of the outside world. The whole book is blanketed in a hush—the characters and the actions are not loud or showy. In fact, if you don’t read closely enough, you can easily pass over some of the more affecting moments of the book. One such moment occurs when the protagonist, a sixth former in his final year at the school, decides to type out Hemingway’s stories “in order to learn what it actually felt like to write something great.” Because as we learn early on, these literary competitions mattered, not for the honor of winning, but for the reverence Wolff’s characters have for the written word and the writers themselves. 

The protagonist’s awe is mixed with desperation— “My aspirations were mystical. I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems, hands that touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed.” When I first read Wolff’s book, I was also in my final year of high school and hoped to gain entrance into the world of “living stories and poems” upon my arrival at college. As someone who spent much of high school as an observer, I had acquired a taste for literature and knew what it was like to be hungry. Sometimes a book resonates so deeply that it momentarily knocks the wind out of you. Is this what Mary Ruefle meant about a consciousness corresponding to a certain ripeness? 

Just as Wolff expanded my notion of story, he expanded my understanding of language and what it can do. His prose crackles with exciting words. He conveys one character’s devotion to another by describing him as “spanieling” after his cousin like a loyal dog. In another scene, the protagonist is talking to a girl on a train and observes her “forehead faintly stippled with acne scars.” I immediately fell in love with the word “stipple.” It’s so precise and exacting, and whenever possible, I try to squeeze it into my writing.

At one point in the novel, the headmaster reads a Robert Frost poem to the students, after which he tells them: “Make no mistake, a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.” I believe this and am fortunate to have experienced this more than once. In many ways, Tobias Wolff’s book determined the course of my college career. I chose my freshman seminar after reading in the course description that the class would read This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff’s boyhood memoir. I entered college unsure of myself—I questioned whether I was smart enough to be there and was intimidated by my classmates. They reminded me of the boys in Wolff’s book, with “their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that it is already reserved for them.” 

My freshman writing seminar was my very first college class. On our first day, we read a short story called “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel, who quickly became my favorite living author, and who I would go on to meet twice after graduating college. Discovering a writer whose work I immediately connected with, offered me reassurance. I was unsure of my intellectual footing, but I knew I was in the right place. That class introduced me to writers who became foundational to my life as a reader—Grace Paley, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Carver, and Lorrie Moore—all of whom I discovered because of Wolff’s book. I didn’t know it then, but that freshman writing seminar cemented my decision to be an English major.

There are so many books in the world. How do we find the ones we’re meant to read and then read them when the moment’s right? When I found Old School at 17, I was so sure that there was some greater mysticism at work pointing me towards that book. It’s easy to dismiss the romanticism of our younger selves, when we are silly and full of hope in an effort to find something to believe in. But it’s nine years later, and I’m still thinking about Old School and all the ways it impacted my life.

“Is there a right time to read each book?” asks Mary Ruefle. “A point of developing consciousness that corresponds with perfect ripeness to a particular poet or novel?” At 17, I thought so. And at 28, I still think so.

[thequietestnoiseonearth]

Manifesto for Concrete Poetry (1952-55)

By Öyvind Fahlström, Sweden

1. Starting Point

The literary fashion for 1953 was dictated by Sigtuna [where a literary conference was held]. One rejected the psychoanalytically marked bust line and hop line, pulled down the skirt length and lowered the neck line. Since fantasy is to be stressed this year, flounces and butterflies in the hair, everyone Sings with Setterlind (Swedish "court" poet).

All this is well-known. But what lies behind these general recommendations, how shall we realize them? It has been said that we should interpret modern myths (at the same time that Freud has been accused of myth-making); and that we should not bury ourselves in the situation of our time, but should concern ourselves with timeless symbols.

Myths: does this mean to construct a complicated apparatus of symbolic and mythological contacts a la Joyce, Gösta Oswald [Swedish novelist], etc. "who did the same thing with Shakespeare or Virgil"?

Or to give up the precise complexion and to be satisfied with single ideas, most often only single words, floating around without definite contexts? The risk is that the impression will be less timeless and less related to our timeless humanity, quite simply that it will be looser and more general; since the eternally valid word-symbols (if there are such animals) have become faded by much rubbing on the washboard. To some, Lorca, for example, they have been quite useful in new contexts. Also for the surrealists, but on another level, for them it has been valid not to create eternal myths, but myths useful for the future.

At Sigtuna they also talked about the structural analysis of the new criticism. But no one claimed freedom from preoccupation with the self in connection with the claim of interest in poetical structure.

Poetry can be not only analysed but also created as structure. Not only as structure emphasizing the expression of idea content but also as concrete structure. Say good-bye to all kinds of arranged or unarranged private, psychological, contemporary, cultural or universal problematics. It is certain that words are symbols, but there is no reason why poetry couldn't be experienced and created on the basis of language as concrete material.

That the word has symbol value is no more remarkable than that in art representative forms have symbol value over and above their Superficial representational value, and that non-figurative forms, even if it is the white square on the white tablecloth, also have symbolic value and further suggest associations over and above the experience of the play of proportions.

The Situation: since the war a long beer housesad-doomsday-mood, the feeling that all the experimental extremes have been arrived at. For the person who refuses to soar in the worlds of vodka and ambrosia, it remains only to analyze

analyze

analyze the misery with the given means.

Today when the rough symbolic cryptogram, "beautiful" romantic jargon, or desperate grimaces outside the church gate appear to be the current alternatives, the concrete alternative must also be presented.

Starting Point: Everything that can be expressed with language and every linguistic expression on an equal basis with another in a given context that heightens its value.

Therefore Dostoyevsky problematics do not appear to me as anything more essential and human than to consider whether the voices of men are more beautiful in värder [host] or in världar [worlds-pronounced the same as värder]. Motive for drama can be for the poet, as well as for the dictator situated in time, the fixed fact that a certain sound can never be repeated. Experimental psychological results can be taken as starting points for a novel as well as for psychoanalysis. I describe certain people: Bobb, Torsten, Sten, Minna, Pi, without the slightest interest in them as people. Literature won't be inhuman for all that. Ants should only write books about ants, but man, who has the ability to look around himself and objectify, need not be that one-sided.

2. Material and Means

What is going to happen to the new material? It can be shaken up as you like, and after that it is always unassailable from the "concrete" point of view?

This can always be said at the beginning. But the circumstance that the new means of expression have not found their norms of value ready-made, does not prevent us from testing them, if their value is ever to be clarified.

One way is that as often as possible we must break against the path of least resistance, Mimömolan [minsta mötstånders lag]. This is no guarantee for success, but it is a way to avoid sitting in the same spot. To use the system as well as automatism, mostly to use them in combination, but not in such a way that the system becomes other than an auxiliary means. So no ambition whatsoever to reach the purest "poetry" with automatism; even the surrealists do not pay homage to that any more. But do not criticise the systems: if you choose them yourselves and do not follow the rules. Therefore the question is not whether or not the system is in itself The Only Right One. It will become so because you have chosen it and if it gives you a good result.

In that case I can construct, I say construct, for example, a series of 12 vowels in a certain succession and make tables accordingly, even though a twelve vowel series as such does not make the same sense as the series of the twelve-tone chromatic- scale.

It is said that our time longs for stable norms. It is clear: when we tire of regular meter and at last tire also of rhyme, we must find something else that will give the poem that general effect. Nowadays the connecting element has a tendency to be content, both descriptive and ideational content. But it is best if form and content are one.

It remains, therefore, to give form its own norms again. This is already being done in punktmusik. The possibilities are uncountable. In the case of poetry strophes can be broken up into vertical parallelisms in such a way that content determines form by placing the word exactly below the word above it, which it repeats, or vice versa so that when you have a fragment of line vertically parallel with the one above, it brings with it the content of the line above. Identical strophes aided by filling out a line with rhyme on the last word in the line, or with agreed syllables, words, etc. Marginal strophes beside the principal strophes. Framed-form strophes with a kernel strophe within: the possibility for more readings corresponding to the free movement of sight when you look at abstract art. Thus the strophes can be read not only from left to right and from above to below but vice versa and vertically: all the first words in every line, then all the second, the third, etc. Mirroring, diagonal reading. Change of lines, particularly of short lines. Free emphasis and free word order as in classical literature (that we don't have the same linguistic conditions is no reason not to make these experiments).

Therefore a richness of possibilities for reaching greater complexity and functional differentiation so that the different elements of content in a work of art can assume their own shape.

The simplest of all systematizations of formless material is, as always, the change between the contrasts, the contrasts within all thinkable aspects of the work of art. The play between difficult and easy sentences (respectively texts or words), rich and poor, normally syntactic and primitively added, such with and such without context in the environment, lofty, porridgy, knotty, gliding, sounding, and representing.

Not only simple changes but also augmentations -and rhythms. Everything except the lazy stumbling forward according to Mimömolan [the law of least resistance]. (It is something else, of course, if amorphous pieces are put in with intended, directed effect.)

Above all I think that the rhythmic aspect contains unimagined possibilities. Not only in music is rhythm the most elementary, directly physically grasping means for effect; which is the joy of recognizing something known before, the importance of repeating; which has a connection with the pulsation of breathing, the blood, ejaculation. It is wrong that jazz bands have the monopoly of giving collective rhythmic ecstasy. The drama and poetry can also give it. Even in art with its limited time dimension it can be done, Capogrossi has shown that.

It is only to break loose from the grinding of the new, new, new; not to leave behind oneself a kitchen mess of ideas for every step in the work one takes: instead of biting oneself to stick with the motifs, to let them repeat themselves and form new rhythms; for example one works at filling out rhythmic words as a background for principle meanings, which can be bound or unbound by the background rhythm. Independent onomatopoetic rhythmic phrases, like those which the African or East Indian drummer forms to represent his melodies of rhythm. Simultaneous reading and above all-readings of several lines of which at least one has rhythmic words. Of course metrical rhythms also; rhythms of word order, rhythms of space.

Another way to have unit and connection is to widen the logic by forming new agreements and contrasts. The simplest way is to go to the logic of primitive people, children and the mentally ill, the intuitive logic of likeness, of sympathetic magic.

This logic applied to language: - words which sound alike belong together, the fun comes from that. Rhyme has had a similar effect. Myths have been explained like this: when Deukalion and Pyrrha had to create new people after the deluge, they threw stones and people grew up: the name for stone is lias, for people laos.

When the fire has gone out [släckts], I am less sure that it has stopped burning than that the family [släckt] have gone on their way. The fire can both burn and be extinguished [släckt] and be related [släkt] to the family [släkten] or be extinguished [släckt] with the family [släkten]. Laxar [salmon] has to do with laxcring [laxatives], and taxar [dachshund] with taxering [tax assessment], and not vice versa. Homonyms provide great possibilities. Zeugmabinding also belongs here: to connect words, meanings and fragments, for example, poetry is poetry is poetry, where the middle poetry is both end and beginning. And the whole work may be valued for the word put in here and there, always inflexible, a binding cord for structure as realized thought motive. Always the precious repetition for the joy of recognition.

It is valid, particularly in the larger forms, epic,

drama, the film, also, to create happenings of the same

firmness of structure as that of reality. To give the

elements new functions and then certainly, to make

use of them instead of the comfortable improvisations of floating inspiration. To knit the net of relations tightly and clearly. To be bound by conventions you develop yourself but not by those of others.

With such possibilities for richness, ordinary, interpretations and antitheses such as tragically- and comically must be oversimplifications. The whole value in the connection tax-taxering [ dachshund-tax assessment] does not lie in the humorous effect which can result from the unexpected connecting.

Another form of magic with linguistic means is the conventionally seen arbitrary dictation of new meanings for letters, words, sentences or fragments: let us say that in this table all the "I's" represent "sickness," the more "I's" the more difficult-or in this fragment the word "sickness" represents "all sounds, prize stones"-or all words devoid of their own meanings represent "coldness."

You can also go one step in this direction by putting well-known words in such realized strange connections that you undermine the reader's security in the holy context between the word and its meaning and make him feel that conventional meanings are quite as much or quite as little arbitrary as the dictated new meanings. This is no more remarkable than is the case with Povel Ramel Swedish actor: the man who suffered from stage fright among other things and told us that his temperature taken rectally was from the stage of himself [rampen/rumpan], so that-hearing both through the situation and the similarity between the words-we discover a new meaning for the word ramp [stage].

You can't say that the well-known in the strange connection arouses fertile insecurity about the identity between word and apparition in everyone- it may arouse a quite fertile interest in the form itself, if the meanings for the reader are meaningless and he has such a great appetite that lie goes on looking for values. At first many meanings will sound meaningless, particularly amusing or touching, neither forbodingly meaningful nor diffusely sonorous.

Not least because they contain unfairly dealt with words. The unfairly, dealt with words are those which, despite the enormous expansion of the poetic vocabulary during the last century, are not yet considered able to keep themselves dry on the poet's copy sheets. "Salesmen," "excitement," "Clubs," "mine," "horribly," "whisk," "men," "dozen," "glands." These words can, of course, be found, but how often when compared with the old guard. Reading the dictionary is quite as exploratory for the language artist as is turning the pages of a handbook about insects, car motors, or tissues of the body is for the artist.

Meanings can also sound meaningless because they have been constructed in another way. It is valid not only to mix the word order, but to meet the necessities in terms of all the habitual mechanics of sentences or grammatical constructions; and as thinking is dependent upon language, every attack aimed at valid language form will be an enrichment of the worn-out paths of thought, a link in the evolution of language -of thinking, which always occurs on the every day, literary and scientific levels.

Ideas to renew grammatical structures are bound to emerge if you make comparisons with foreign languages, with Chinese, for instance, with its classless words and meaning derived from word order, or with the unexpected and shaded possibilities for expression in the languages of many primitive people. Perhaps it is more important and in any case easier, because of its accessibility, to examine the language of the mentally ill. If, for example, you examine the tests of manic-depressives, you find effects-certainly not meant to be artistic-the connecting of logical resemblances (contaminations), pure soundlikeness associations, modeling with the material of words (neologisms) and more or less rhythmical repetitions (perseverances).

Another way is to see what there is to keep in language found purely mechanically without the use of reading directions or a series system of words and meanings. This will be to break through the frontiers, very slowly to that which means something to you. We can obtain unexpected values from-as we -now see it-the most amputated and kneaded (fragmentized) word elements and phrases.

SQUEEZE the language material: that is what can he titled concrete. Do not squeeze the whole structure only: as soon as possible begin with the smallest elements, letters and words. Throw the letters around as in anagrams. Repeat the letters in words; lard with foreign words, gä-elva-rna [djävlarna = devils]; with foreign letters, ahaanadalaianaga for handling, compare with pig latin and other secret languages; vowel glissandos gäaeiouuåwrna. Of course also "lettered," newly--discovered words. Abbreviations as new word building, exactly as in everyday language, we certainly have Mimömolan [the law of least resistance]. Always it is a question of making new form of the material and not of being formed by it. This fundamental concrete principle can be most beautifully illustrated by Pierre Schaeffer's key experience during his search for concrete music: he had on tapes seconds of locomotive sounds, but he was not satisfied only to connect one sound to another, even if the connection itself was unusual. Instead he extracted a smaIl fragment of the locomotive sound and repeated it with a change of musical pitch; he then went back to the first again and so to the second, etc. so there was a change. He had created a n interference with the material itseIf by means of separation: the elements were not new: the newly-formed context yielded a new material.

From this it will be clear that what I have called literary concretion and non-figurative art is not a style-it is partly a way for the reader to experience word art, primarily poetry-partly for the poet a release, a declaration of the right of all language material and working means. Literature created from this starting point stands neither in oppositional nor parallel relationship to lettrisme or dadaism or surrealism.

Lettrisme: usual "representing" and the "lettristic" words can be experienced as both form and content, "representing" giving a stronger experience of content and a weaker experience of form, "lettristic , vice versa; a difference of degree.

From the standpoint of the result itself, surrealistic poetry can be seen to share certain resemblances with the tables. But there is a difference of starting point which must ultimately influence the results: the concrete reality of my tables does not stand in any kind of opposition to the reality of environment: neither as sublimation of dream or as myth for the future but as an organic part of the reality in which I live with its potentialities for life and evolution.

The coquettish or desperate grimace and even more dadaistic nihilism can be fertile if you see the artistic result, again it is the starting point that separates: I can find no reason to talk about grimace and denial, I have no feeling of fuss, of exceptional condition, that is the normal thing. A constructive dadaism and so none at all.

Having used the word concrete in these contexts, I have related it more to concrete music than to art concretism in its narrow meaning. In addition the concrete working poet is, of course, related to formalities and language-kneaders of all times, the Greeks, Rabelais, Gertrude Stein, Schwitters, Artaud and many others. And he considers as venerated portal figures not only the Owl in Winnie the Pooh but also Carrol's Humpty Dumpty who considers every question a riddle and dictates impenetrable meanings to the words.

Tr. Karen Loevgren, Mary Ellen Solt

From Bord-Dikter 1952-55

top

[mihrunnisasultans]

Ann Rosalind Jones begins an essay on the early-modern European women poets Louise Labé and Veronica Franco by saying: “A study of two women poets should open by acknowledging that to be a woman writer at all during the sixteenth century was to be an exception.“It is certainly true that the woman writer/poet was exceptional, but it is also true that the early-modern period was a time of burgeoning interest in those women who did write and had written in the past as well as in the potential of women to engage meaningfully in literary and intellectual pursuits usually associated with men. In Europe, including the Ottoman Empire, the medieval tradition rested heavily on ancient and misogynistic foundations, foundations that provided ample proofs, both “scientific” and religious, for the physical and intellectual inferiority of women. Yet, by the late Renaissance, such theories, however dear they may have been to the classicizing humanists, were seriously challenged by some decidedly noninferior women and some men who began to question the received wisdom. The bitter conflict between ancient wisdom and modern experience in this regard is already apparent in some aspects of the work of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75). For example, in his younger days, his 'Elegy of Lady Fiammetta' (ca. 1343–45), a novelistic account of the psychology of betrayed love, is composed in the first-person voice of a woman who claims to be speaking only to women. This represents a clear break from the tradition of Petrarch and Dante, in whose poetry the woman is a mere topic of description, an unattainable object residing on the margins of verse, made present only by the words of the talented poet. Setting aside the transvestite (or androgynous) actuality of a male author playing a woman’s part, Boccaccio allows Lady Fiammetta to speak for herself, thus giving her reality and depth of character that the Lauras and the Beatrices lack. But, some ten years later, the same Boccaccio would author the Corbaccio, an attack on women that Causa-Steindler calls “one of the most virulently misogynous writings of all times.”Then, in 1361, Boccaccio would follow this exercise in misogyny with an apology, the 'De claris mulieribus', one of the first examples of early-modern defenses of women, and one of few that goes beyond praising “feminine” virtues such as patience, faith, morality, and rentleness to argue that women might just have a significant role to play in public, civic life. The contradictions in Boccaccio’s work and thought seem to reverberate down through the early-modern period. As we come to the sixteenth century, significant works by women and writings by both men and women arguing against the putative inferiority of women were matched (or more than matched) by a spate of antiwoman and antifeminist tracts and essays. This conflict itself is evidence of a growing interest in the actualities of women’s lives and women’s roles in an age when women were growing more visible on the public cultural stage. The problem women’s visibility presents for early-modern culture stems in part from the widespread notion that a woman’s virtue resides precisely in her invisibility and silence, expressed as modesty. For example, one of the better-known early-modern conduct books, the 'De re uxoria' by Francesco Barbaro (1398–1454), admonishes women concerning speech as follows: “When place and occasion offer, let them speak to the point so briefly that they may be thought reluctant rather than eager to open their mouths. By silence indeed women achieve the fame of eloquence.” Barbaro also links a woman’s speech with a woman’s body when approving the actions of a Roman noblewoman who concealed her bare arm from the sight of a man: “It is proper, however that not only arms but indeed the speech of women never be made public: for the speech of a noblewoman can be no less dangerous than the nakedness of her limbs.” This is precisely parallel to the Muslim notion of a woman as ‘avrat, or “private [part of the] body that is required to be covered,” the voice being considered here a body part. 'The Mirrhor of Modestie', Thomas Salter’s 1579 plagiaristic translation of Giovanni Bruto’s 1555 'La institutione di una fanciulla nata nobilmente', also advises young women on proper womanly reticence: “In this wise shee shall make election and choise of that whiche she ought to keep silent setting a lawe to her self, to do the one [i.e., listen] and exchue the other [i.e., speaking], for she ought to know that the use of the toung is to be used soberly and discretly, for to that ende nature, that wise woorkewoman ordained the toung to bee inclosed as with a hedge within twoo rowes of teeth.” Certainly, the societal imposition of cultural veils was not limited to the Islamic East. In fact, it is the absence, invisibility, and SILENCE—the veiling, to be exact—of the actual beloved that grounds the Petrarchan re-presentation of her as a (carnally inaccessible) paragon of beauty and virtue. Where the beloved is both present and speaking, where she acts in the same cultural arena, where she argues for her own self-presentation, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the dominant fictions of a Petrarchan beloved. In a sense, the woman stands naked (uncovered) and obviates the need for description or representation.

Walter G. Andrews, Mehmet Kalpaklı in “The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society”    

[5questions]

Richard Wehrenberg

Richard Wehrenberg was born in Akron, Ohio and is the author of Abracadabrachrysanthemum (2018), Hands (2015), and River (2014), co-written with Ross Gay. Their work has been published in The Academy of American Poets, Peach Mag, Bad Nudes, Monster House Press, & elsewhere. They are a poet, writer, artist, & designer living in Bloomington, Indiana.

I want to start with the cover. I admire its minimalism but also the way that minimalism allows the title to speak for itself, carrying the reader along as they go to the next page. What are some of your favorite book designs? How has your own design aesthetics changed since you first started designing chapbooks and websites over ten years ago? Do you have any sort of codified process for your design work?

I perceive Text as Image and Image as Text, in a kind of infinite stirring/reworking. My aesthetic/process for design feels necessarily influenced by how my specific body-form perceives/reads the world, via its various miracles and supposed ‘deficiencies’—ie. having one barely-able-to-see (left) eye and one incredibly-over-achieving (right) eye, as well as having benign hand tremors (ie. my hands shake, inexplicably). I understand designing as the praxis of ‘de-signing' (ie. removing the signs from) this Earth/traditions/meanings/images. To quote one of my fav poets, Mahmoud Darwish—“I love your love / freed from itself and its signs,” which to me means: I love you ‘best’ when we shed the layers/masks/images that bury us in stories, when we dwell in our original and base-form—which of course has to be, for me—Love—the desire to see the world as un-riven, as One, despite everything working against the infinite forms love embodies. I feel my design aesthetic as ‘spiritual,’ or at least to me it feels like it springs enigmatically from a spiritual impulse/condition/base. All to say—my style/praxis is mysterious, even to myself, and my design depends on this kind of unknowability/improvisation. For Abracadabrachrysanthemum (and Three Crises by Bella Bravo, which share almost identical design elements), I viewed the circle on the covers to be a kind of gravitational wormhole into the book’s work, like you implied. A simple entranceway that has, like a planet or black hole, its own gravity to pull/cull others in, to merge and connect worlds. As far as design influences—I love love love Quemadura’s work (who you probably know as Wave Books’ designer.) I remember seeing their stark, simple, text-based covers as a younger poet/designer and being moved by space they allow for the text (exterior and interior) to become its own image/meaning apart from other visual suggestions. Also, Mary Austin Speaker’s work—who does design for Milkweed Editions—is always so precise, gorgeous, and enchanting. Outside of the poem-world, I am constantly inspired by fellow Bloomington designers/friends Aaron Denton and Sharnayla. The beauty they channel is astounding. Since I began designing, I feel that I’ve just become better and faster at designing, and my core aesthetic has mostly stayed the same. Being self-taught, you kind of just pick up little preferences, skills, and potentialities randomly along the path of work. I’m in a constant state of knowledge-acquisition re design and thus my process is really just experimentation. One codified process I do have is to meditate on a book’s content, to summon its image by intentionally dwelling on it within an unconscious states of meditation, dream, trance, etc. Usually I can call up a color palette, or image/font/et al that each individual book/design is calling for via these means. I believe in this kind of prayer/listening in my work, and I cite the unconscious as my main source of artistic capacity and production. I’ve also dreamed book covers before. That’s the best.

Many of the poems in this collection have geographic allusion, descriptive precision, and a general sense of place becoming character. This reminds me in many ways of your book RIVER, co-authored with Ross Gay. While that was prose and this is poetry, this is something I have noticed in your writing. How would you describe your aesthetic connection to geography? nature? environment? This book seems to expand beyond America in ways previous writing of yours doesn’t...

I can’t not attempt to constantly locate my Self in this World—can’t not see/feel/attempt to understand where/how/who/why I am in relation to ‘others’—to the land, rivers, oceans, to other animals, to the incredible manifold instantiations of plants, to the water with which without we would vanish, to all the ostensibly separate “I’s” on this shared Earth/consciousness/World surviving, dwelling, praying, creating—Being. I am an empath and embed/imbibe my surroundings almost automatically/unconsciously into myself. I become wherever I am. And thus its violences and gorgeousnesses alike become my own. And thus I speak for them, to them, of them, with them, in service and toward the healing of them/us/I/we. I unbecome my self to reset my churning and lumbering around this planet, to geographize ‘my’ position within this unpositioned House we find our selves. I am also quite of the mind that we are indeed both Here and Not Here. This Not Here is completely devoid of the drama of the body/ego, which we so often encounter and identify with today (and have since arriving on Earth.) My body, it’s specific forms and desires, languages and impulses, with yours, in conflict with theirs, with the scarcity, the low amount, the abundance, the never-ending forsaken nothing-everything, all of it, all the time, ever, ever, never-enough or always-too-much, the never-quite-right. You compared to me, thine in yours with mine of we. In spirit realm, there is no time and ID like we think here. Both Here and Not Here are real/valid places—the corporeal realm and the spirit realm—and I know, at least for now, I live in both places. I realized recently one of my main hopes for my writing is for it to re-embed the divine into the every day, re-pair it with the quotidian—to reunite these worlds-torn. What I mean is: I identify heavily with wherever I am in this 3D reality called life, and also identify heavily with the spirit realm as an (un)geographic place where I also reside. Over-identification with either realm leads to misery/suffering or disassociation/location, to paraphrase A Course In Miracles.

There is a sense of unity between the voice of these poems and everything else in the world, seen best, in my opinion, in “Signifying Brown Bear” wherein a stuffed animal becomes a virtual tunnel into all sorts of real human and existential experiences. Do you think something fundamental has changed in contemporary consumer society from ancient or medieval or even early modern societies, in which we have too many outlets for our emotions and experiences? Maybe too many is good (whatever "good" means)? In this poem, the stuffed bear almost represents your own yearning to connect as fully as you already are with universe around you. It has many of the conceits of a love poem and, at times, a tongue-in-cheek tone. In the end, the poem is what makes us think. You have turned a mirror on the reader. Was this your intention? How do you decide when to write in second-person versus first person etc.? Is any of this interpretation at all on point?  In “Signifying Brown Bear,” I am referring to an actual brown bear (ie. Ursus arctos) and the poem is just kind of about how people/entities who I become close with can begin to feel like sweet-tender-almost-cryptozoological-creatures to me and I want to also just be a sweet-tender-almost-cryptozoological-creature—or hell, I’ll settle for even a plant or a rock—back to them. Anything but this warbling, incomplete, stammering-maunderer of a human being! (Exaggeration.) I do not want my humanity at times—my human-being-ing—which has been categorized, documented, and shrink-wrapped for societal use and relation, who is part of the decimation of Earth via capital. I want the freedom (and I’m sure we could say unfreedom) of the brown bear who is in relation to the Sycamore by the river, and the salmon floating above the stones, the water gliding over, ever-thinning rock into sand granules—slowly—and back again—and back. I don’t want to be (and can’t be, is perhaps my thesis) relegated to the realm of signifiers and signs imposed via any of the manifold categorization machines we navigate on the daily to obfuscate these kind of otherworldly, ancient connections I feel as Real. To decimate that last paragraph—I also believe in becoming fully-embodied/present in the form we are in in this life, too. So, it’s confusing, this ever-always-transforming-ing perceptioning. The confusion about what energy/thing I am and what you are is a little about what that poem is about, too. I was reading Agamben’s The Use of Bodies and came across this ancient Greek word, poiesis, which appears in the poem and means, “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.” I love that idea, and think it is what we are here to do, in part. So often for me the unprecedented-something we are trying to bring into existence is ourselves and the art/energy we carry in us must be made into song. I want to always make the reader aware of their presence in my writing—to me writing is a collective act and readers are always existent, even if they never ‘read’ your work. The imagined, the dead, the unborn, the spiritually uncanonized, the already-gone-never-was reader, writer, seeker, be-er. I switch between tense often and freely, because in poetry, at least for me, we feel/fall into each word/line we write and there’s less of a need to be ‘coherent’ in the sense of the popular notion of storytelling/fiction, which (I might have another thesis here) feels like a symptom of capitalism, too. Of course it feels really nice to have a coherent story. I love television and pop culture. I want to write for television. I want to be perceived as coherent. But I want to say too: the ‘incoherence’ of poetry is a kind of coherence, a prayer toward a ‘new’ form, if you will, despite being so old itself. Poetry coheres to a perhaps more experimental way of telling a story, a precedentless next-ing, and this variation is vital—these unforeseen forms, stories, ways of being. We are a species that evolves, and because the mouth/mind is the site of evolution now, I am playing accordingly.

What ended up happening with MHP?  Why did you decide to stop active involvement in it? What are you doing now in terms of day-to-day life? Monster House Press has evolved through many forms. In 2010, it began, semi-naively, as a collective publisher of zines and chapbooks in the eponymous punk house. It then expanded and evolved into a project I was maintaining, mostly on my own, from 2012-2016 in Bloomington, Indiana. In the summer of 2016, MHP rose again as a officially collective project—an amorphous mass, as we liked to call it—primarily because the workload had become unsustainable for me to do on my own, and we were doing more and more, gaining recognition, et cetera. We decided to lay MHP to rest at the end of the 2018, as many of us involved in keeping it going are moving onto graduate school and/or starting new projects/lives. It felt apt to end this specific instantiation in my career-form of publishing, as I have moved away from the punk/DIY scene from which it was born, and the name itself has too become divorced from its origin and who I/we was/were then. I’m sure I’ll always be editing, publishing, reading, designing and helping steward others’ work in this world, as that impulse is something part and parcel of my being, this collaboration; however, the terms and boundaries within this specific modality as MHP have expired to me. In my day-to-day life, I am a freelance graphic designer, artist, editor, and writer. I usually sit at my house with my dog, working on whatever project I have in my docket at the time, or go out to a coffee or tea house to do work. I also just finished auditing a graduate poetry workshop called Joy & Collaboration with Ross Gay, which was, in a word, divine—and I currently spend my days/time helping out with the growing at a communal greenhouse as well as generally just reading/writing/watching/listening to the Earth/Universe, hoping to be of service, use, and care.

What future projects are you working on? Do you still play music with organized groups? Have you thought of writing long-form fiction?

I’m hoping to start my MFA in Poetry next year. As far as writing projects—I’m writing a collection of sonnets about my alcoholism/being an alcoholic in the United States. (I’ve been sober for 5 years now.) The sonnets are these kind of little, tender love-songs to my alcoholic/former self (who I can never fully extinguish) which—I hope—also reckon with and help shed light on addiction, malevolent masculinity/whiteness, and which also seek to forgive and release—to heal. I also have this big, kind of far off ditty of a dream to open a Poetry Center one day, in the Midwest ideally, kind of a little like Poets House in NYC, where events, workshops, reading, writing, and magic can happen. A hub for poetics/healing/joy/collaboration. There will probably be an herbal/plant element too, somehow, as I love working with/growing plants. And music! I haven’t played music in an organized group in a while, but enjoy being able to play piano and saxophone here and there, when I can, however that happens. I helped transpose, sing, and record a score for a little art movie project, along with Ross Gay and Lauren Harrison, which was super delightful. Music is the literal heart of the world, imo. I listened to 36 days of music this year, ie. for 1/10 of the year I was listening to music, which was kind of staggering and incredible for me to realize. I love writing long and short form fiction, but have found it removes me from the world too intensely, which, I feel I am supposed to stay more rooted/involved in the World in a proactive sense, so I tend to write poetry and other forms over fiction. I am interested in the hybrid essay form—with poetry hidden inside—and creating/seeking new hybridized forms. There’s so much potential for greatness—and so much to come.

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Black Dog Day by Brian Burt

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In Black Dog Day, Brian Burt‘s precisely crafted and plainspoken poems trace a journey along the “trellis of connection” in search of the “pure present tense” offered by the daily example of the poet’s black dog. A rejoinder to a world in which social media snark and a never-ending 24-hour news cycle are incessantly clamoring to narrow our world while purporting to widen it, Burt’s poems invite us to turn our attention elsewhere — to a local world in which the most important current events take place in the arc of the seasons, the rhythms of our gardens and forests, and among those we love. Sometimes surprising, sometimes intimate, and always thoughtful, each quietly graceful poem shows us ways to find our place in the world immediately around us.

Brian Burt is the author of the poetry collection, Past Continuous (2015). His poems and photographs have appeared in a variety of online and print publications. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Black Dog Day by Brian Burt

When news cycles blister, when our phones light up announcing riots and deadly new strains, how can we locate our equilibrium? In Black Dog Day, Brian Burt writes his way to an answer: “My black dog leads me down the snow-packed path.” Fortunately, the reader can follow as both poet and hound seek out a way of being “pure present tense” amidst the mess and beauty of the world. Along the path we “bless our web of wind…that weft of crows,” we note the splendor of the sugar maples and a bird’s “two-toned call: one note up, one note down.” With delicate description and intimate music, Burt has crafted a book of modern pastorals, reminding us that even in the time of iPhones and plagues, the land and the word can still replenish the spirit.

–Kirun Kapur, editor, Beloit Poetry Journal, and author of Women in the Waiting Room

In Brian Burt’s clear, attentive poems, the big black dog who accompanies the poet (and us) is a steady ambassador for the “pure present tense,” pushing open a door to bound down the stairs each early morning, setting in motion a rhythm that resonates internally throughout the day. Attuned to the balance between self and dog, Burt reveals a deep comfort that comes from the recognition of the largely unseen life that exists alongside the noise of our human lives, such as “the trellis of connection” made by birdsong, “maple branches lacing/upwards with nothing/but sky and crow between,” and the “thing elusive as a scent/that only dogs can smell.” While an examination of the daily self can be unsparing, it is the black dog’s nonjudgmental—and happily oblivious—presence that tugs the poet back to a peaceful state. At the core of these eloquent poems are tenderness and gratitude for the natural world the black dog guides us through, one where “nothing here belongs to us.”

–Amy M. Clark, author of Roundabout and Stray Home

Quiet and thoughtful, and always surprising, the poems in Brian Burt’s Black Dog Day mark the ways that every season “builds moment to moment / an only-moving, an always moving / trellis of connection…” Just as care for a dog puts us closer to nature, Burt shows us that the daily cycles of life and love, of routine walks in the woods, even simple family dinners hold all we need to celebrate what’s dear and fleeting.

–Mike Perrow, author of Five Sequences for the Country at Night

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