A wild step

 

Rolling Camera Inside Sound

Another anti-capitalist poem.

So You Think You Can Death

‘For if the Idea of Beauty appears only in dispersed form among many works, each one nevertheless aims uncompromisingly to express the whole of beauty, claims it in its singularity and can never admit its dispersal without annulling itself. Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works, in the unity of the arts and of art, but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing.’   – Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

‘One cares for the story more than life, more than for oneself. The story is the supreme good. We are the proprietors of hell. The story is the only thing that can be taken away from us. The risk is that our own act of property will be taken away from us. The real hell would be to lose the book of hell, [ . . . ] the work of art, the only thing not disfigured, that is all of humankind. Save my book, take my life.’   — Hélène Cixous, Volleys of Humanities (Cornell University, September 21st 2011)

‘I’ve never found (except in the depressing “literary scene” sense) poetry to be a competition. Don’t you, if you find someone’s work interesting, recommend it to your friends? Organic (or perhaps now viral) growth. There’s no tape you break after which you can relax. When we were doing Goliard Press we sold (not immediately) between 400 and 700 copies of each book. At that time the “real” publishers printed at most 250 copies. But we were the “small press”. I always remember something Val said around that time: “It seems to me fame is just a load of arseholes thinking you’re all right.” ’  — Tom Raworth, Misosensitive

view from bedroom window

view from bedroom window

bit of Main Street, Vancouver

better-than-most-billboards

New poem, ‘Cuteness is a Landscape’, at Intercapillary Space.

Buy Caribou = support Occupy Oakland

No need for fairtrade Galaxy chocolate in a candlelit bath. Now you, the poetry reader, can indulge yourself while simultaneously bathing in the warm waters of the knowledge that your wanton luxury is aiding a good cause. For the next month Bad Press will be donating all US dollar proceeds made from sales of Caribou to Occupy Oakland, to support them in building a new social centre, convergence centre and headquarters for the Occupy Oakland movement (here is their site). They’re more reliable than ‘fairtrade’ cocoa plantations. GO HERE to buy the love poems.

Bad Press: subjectivity liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity!

CARIBOU

Bad Press (so liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity it’s unreal)

IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE
* *  n e w ! * *

CARIBOU, by Amy De’Ath

A cerebrally serpentine collection of love poems re-working the lyric into a silken girder that will dizzy you with echoes of itself ALL AFTERNOON: in short, YES.

Caribou whizzes its readers from the ‘Fast Eddy’ of East London to the ‘Vertigo Valley’ of West Canada. “Now I am conducive to everything” writes Amy De’Ath and she means it, through her wonderfully sassy lyric ‘I’ that negotiates the rapids and gulps at the cliff edge with never a flicker of introspective self-importance. These poems are fleet-footed and fancy-free. They love to dance but they know the depths they skip across, the brow that beetles, the heart that almost disintegrates. So they are an example to us.

– John Wilkinson

Accelerates from fast break scatter into pocketa pocketa: a love careen. “This thing-ting, thinking! … this out-of-sync wonkybeat,” this poetry knows its game too well not to bash the balls off the table. Go on, De’Ath, “boom brighter than the moon.”

– Cathy Wagner

£5 / $9 at http://badpress.infinology.net/ : please hit the first DONATE button and send us £5 if you are in the UK or EU / hit the 2nd one and send us $9 if you are in the US or Canada

Who am I a Poem?

Hélène, Lisa, Debbie, Frédérique . . .

The plural exists at the beginning, says Cixous, with the ‘me who begins through you’. In a 1997 interview she cites Shakespeare: ‘Ourselves we do not owe’ (Twelfth Night, I.V.) , and, in a reminder that we do not own or know ourselves, speaks about the mystery of the expression of the self, that which insists, in language, upon the ‘self’ (or in English more possessively, upon ‘myself’); the person we imagine in order to approach or appropriate ourselves. But ‘I’ don’t exist without ‘you’, she says. ‘I do not have without you and I am not without you, I is not without you; I am born of you’. In our encounter with the other, we are altered and disaltered:

If one were able to radiograph the encounter with you, he, she, if one were able to make the spectre of your encounter appear, one would see incredible instantaneous mutations . . .  Except that generally, before or during the encounter, one arms oneself, one puts down roots violently so as not to be too shaken by the other.

     (Cixous, ‘In the beginnings, there were many . . .’ 1997)

If it’s possible that the other is a poem, and a poem-other that issues from me (that is, ‘my-self’, who is also born of you and any number of signifiers in the minds of others), what happens between me and a poem? What does my ‘own’ poem do to me? Tom Raworth, in an interview on PennSound, admits to having no plan in his writing, and mentions the thrill of not knowing where the poem will go. I stand (teetering!) on the brink of my own poem. Is this when everything becomes possible? I think about this in the context of my status as a woman.

Lisa Robertson asks, ‘How could a subject construct temporary agencies, when the social-sexual axis would always have already cast her outside of authority, power, agency?’ (Robertson, PhillyTalks). Robertson is suspicious of the Lyric which will ‘Say self because it can’ (14, The Weather), but along with Cixous she is careful to mention the pragmatic need for the idea of the self:

Cixous:  ‘I understand on the one hand that a person has a duty to examine themself, to weigh and measure themself, I ought to reply as scrupulously as possible with my ready-prepared verbal gestures. And that’s what I am trying to do.’

Robertson: ‘I don’t know whether what “I” experience is “myself”, but to some extent, in order to be useful, I have to suspend disbelief’. (PhillyTalks).

In Debbie: an Epic, Robertson writes a self-reflexive, redoubled Lyric — with a clue in the title, etc. — and in The Weather she repeats, ‘Give me hackneyed words because / they are good.’ (14). They are good and bad, like chips and mayonnaise, and I want to melt into them, half-gratuitously, in the course of writing a poem which erupts from lived experience and is capable of spontaneity, which listens to and gathers happy ‘accident’, which is an invention that brings with it the experience of not being what I believe to be, and that makes room for a language which speaks more vividly than me.

The poem as creation of an other, and a temporary agency:

‘The text I write is an object of desire to me. [ . . . ] It is precisely as if I had made more than another body with my own body.’

(Cixous, ‘When I do not write it is as if I had died’, 1978)

which alters the self (who is nevertheless full of humour, here):

‘CONTEMPORARIES!

Vocables caused a change in my organs

therefore vocables I sought’

(Robertson, Debbie, line 482)

The poem I am writing is transformative; it reveals to me that I am not who I think I am; I’m in addition someone else. ‘When a girl steps forward, she does not leave herself behind,’says Robertson. Instead, ‘she becomes several, and with a fidelity both passionate and discriminate.’

I remember a tender example of this plurality in Frédérique, a character in Jacques Rivette’s 1971 film OUT1, played by Juliet Berto. Frédérique, boyish and lovely (though also, a ‘flirtatious, working-class hustler’ as described by Jonathan Rosenbaum), weaves into and between the many other characters in the film and they are all in some way touched and intrigued by her: her presence and manner evoke long loving gazes in some and wry, condescending smiles in others. In a gesture which reminds me of Kathy Acker’s depiction, in her essay ‘Seeing Gender’, of the girl-pirate (who is unspeakable, and so runs into the language of others, the language of books, to make the impossible possible), she disguises herself as a boy in an attempt to bribe some money. In another scene, she is inexplicably beaten up by a thuggish acquaintance, but pickpockets him in the process. She’s naive, sneaky, brave, passionate, she gives of herself to varying degrees depending on the situation.

French feminism’s assertion that women’s experience is constituted in language — rather than reflected by it — ties into this idea of multiple selves as well as other traits of feminine writing: those texts which are uneconomical, polylogical, fragmented, that explore the body as discourse, operate via a ‘feminine dyslogic’ and re-inscribe a ‘feminine’ subjectivity. ‘All poets are girls’, says Alice Notley, and I wonder which of those things it’s necessary to become first in order to enable the other, or if it’s both at the same time. Cixous has often mentioned ‘the poets’ (meaning: the girls?) in her writing – Derrida, Stendhal, Balzac included.

What’s a girl to do? In her relationship to an economy and an (at times transcendent) idea of the social that she has no control over, a system which assimilates her feelings, appropriates her body and demotes her in almost every walk of life (even, yes!, in poetry – and for more to get angry about, see Kristin Prevallet’s Writing Is Never by Itself Alone: Six Mini-Essays on Relational Investigative Poetics), it becomes necessary, for a girl, to take what she has been given and make it into what she needs. From Robertson’s ‘Essay on Heaven’: ‘when winter closes in on a girl she needs the richest possible decoration. She needs rest. She needs enormous eschatological bouquets.’ It’s possible for a girl to write this herself of course, since‘what is fact is not necessarily human,’ (Robertson), and that’s where I encounter my selves, in a place, in a poem, in you.

If one really wants to surrender to the encounter, then one finds oneself altered. There are surprises. We will be denatured renatured by the other. In the wake of Shakespeare, I would add: I would really like to know myself but I do not know myself, I do not own my-self, I’m even the person who knows me the least well. (Cixous, 1997).

Frédérique and Etienne play chess in OUT1 by Jacques Rivette

In Case of Sleep

 

Surrey Poetry Festival

Big Announcement: the first Surrey Poetry Festival, hosted by the University of Surrey, will take place on Saturday 21st May.

The day will feature readings, talks, and installations by:

Sophie Robinson
Tim Atkins
Peter Gizzi
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Emily Critchley
Robert Hampson
Jonty Tiplady
Justin Katko
Elizabeth Guthrie
Holly Pester
Edmund Hardy
Joe Luna
Nat Raha
Jennifer Cooke
Sarah Kelly
David Ashford
Nick Spicer
Amy De’Ath

WHERE: The Angel Posting House and Livery, 91, High Street, Guildford, Surrey, GU1 3DP
WHEN: 11am – 8pm, Saturday 21st May 2011

£6 / £4 concessions
including refreshments & lunch

The University of Surrey is located in Guildford, a 35-minute train ride from London Waterloo station. You can find directions from Google here: http://tinyurl.com/6jbqywr
For more details please email a.de’ath@surrey.ac.uk

On International Women’s Day

“It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to to philosophico-theoretical  domination. It will be conceived  of only by subjects who are breakers  of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.

… We are in no way obliged to deposit our lives in the banks of lack, to consider the constitution of the subject in terms of a drama manglingly restaged, to reinstate again and again the religion of the father. Because we don’t want that. We don’t fawn around the supreme hole. We have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the negative. The feminine (as the poets suspected) affirms: ‘ … And yes,’ says Molly, carrying Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing; ‘I said yes, I will Yes.’”

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975

adults’ feet and their children’s feet are

tangled around like those of       fen larks
in the fine steely wires which run to and fro between

love and economics

affections must not support the rent

I. neglect. the house

Denise Riley, ‘Affections Must Not’, 1978

“…shelves” “of books” “all the books there
were:” “The books were decayed matter,” “black & moldy” “Came apart”
“in my hands” “All the books were” “black rot” “Were like mummies”
“More body of” “the tyrant” “It is all his body” “The world is” “his mummy”

Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette, 1996

[. . .] Our facades are so
Minor. What would I begin to say
If his words were
My poem. I am preoccupied with grace
And have started to speak expensively – as in
Have joys
Which look like choice
Ill–matched to its consequence
As laughter to a fall – bad memory
Poorly researched life
The men’s
Cocks
And their faces
As we do so
Fall upwards

Lisa Robertson, The Men, 2006

Your girlfriend is
a fox. She
fucks foxgloves
to death

Marianne Morris, So Few Richards, So Many Dicks, 2010

so do words come up like little bits of baby-puke