that-unsound: November 2007

30.11.07

Jacket interview with Jane Joritz-Nakagawa- innovative women poets

http://jacketmagazine.com/34/nakagawa-iv-hogue-frost.shtml

Cynthia Hogue and Elisabeth Frost in conversation with
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa author of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews

is not magazine

http://www.isnotmagazine.org/

ideas catalogue

http://20gp.ovh.net/~ideascat/about.html

Elizabeth Bishops unpublished erotic poems

Elizabeth Bishop’s unpublished poems with lively annotations

http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/

ELIZABETH BISHOP
Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments
Edited and annotated by ALICE QUINN
Carcanet Press £16.95

My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I’ve grown accustomed to?
– Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it’s true.
It’s just the common case;
there’s nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.

Alice Quinn, the charismatic and sometimes controversial poetry editor of The New Yorker, now Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America as well, has proved herself an impeccable and courageous critic and scholar of modern poetry with the appearance of Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box, her more than- annotated edition of the unpublished poems of Elizabeth Bishop.

Two (poignant, erotic) poems salvaged or rescued by the poet-critic Lloyd Schwartz were published in The New Yorker in 1991 in the context of his article ‘Annals of Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop and Brazil’. A dozen other previously unpublished Bishop poems appeared in The New Yorker in the course of the 1990s and early in this decade; others surfaced in American Poetry Review, The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books, all, we now know, the fruit of Alice Quinn’s ongoing research, with the permission of Bishop’s literary executor, the life-partner of her last decade.

Readers quoted and copied them; clipped them out; pasted them in notebooks; wondered how they had arrived at the journals and what their eventual disposition might be. Either Elizabeth Bishop was alive in Nova Scotia sending poems to magazines (would that it were true) or there was a body of her work extant and under examination that was much larger than the published books revealed.

29.11.07

Ms Salvaggio syncopat'n sound and Gertrude Stein

Syncopate is a musical term and means to shift the normal accent, usually by stressing normally unaccented beats, like when musicians do a different version of a song and they lengthen notes that were originally short. Hence syncopation syncopative syncopatable syncopatability insyncopatability insyncopatabilitation etc

I'm busy writing an essay on Gertrude Stein and Sounded Language

A sentence has been heard … now listen. Stein

There being some connection between liking and listening. Stein

There is a sound and obliqueness more obliqueness leads to harmony in hesitation. Stein

Ruth Salvaggio in her text The Sounds of Feminist Theory suggests that we pay a new close, closer attention to the sound of language – something she insists is neither voice, nor the spoken word, nor metaphor… ‘I mean the actual effects of sounding, wavering language in critical and theoretical writing- a distinctive turn towards the oral within the panorama of contemporary thought’. This place of resonance she tells us, will ‘instigate a new resounding language (that will) alter what we (can) hear and see and know’(S133).

I am reading Gertrude Stein as Feminist Theory and a theory about this sounding. Stein whilst not a feminist is a central to…feminist theory in terms of language, in that it offers an ‘indulgence in the transmutive potential of words, their ability to affirm and question and resist and endlessly suggest meanings, to be used for everything they are worth, and more’ (S5) her writing it can be argued is written as such but… I am vitally interested in work that ‘crosses over and beyond linguistic border, fusing and refusing the boundaries’ and as a visual artist I have come to feel after a 40 year engagement with the practice, like Salvaggio, that the ‘metaphors of visibility in women’s text will only go so far in helping us follow the changing and refracting properties of language as a medium’ in potential. The ‘possible meanings generated in a mobile language and epistemology question simplistic links between vision and knowledge, turn away from the idea that writing is a mere ‘transition’ of truth and note how language is continual altering what we see and therefore what we know.’ Steins work vibrates with ‘sounded oralities’…

Dupless echoes this ‘language does not lie still there is no permanent referent for words rather language suggests, evokes and resonates….

I want to talk and talk and talk to you about Gertrude Stein and her talking to you about you and not you in talking...(extract from in progress)

25.11.07

Manifesting Literary Feminisms:Drafts, Grafts, Nexus and Faultlines Conference

Literary Feminism Conference in Melbourne 13-15 Dec 07.
I'm giving two papers
A little glossary of big whoppers-feminist experimentalisms
and Gertrude Stein and Sounding the Bright Ineffable

Caroline Bergvall reading/sounded pets

Bergvall reading more pets
From Upenn... thankyou

a more-cat
a more-dog dog
a more-horse
a more-rat
a more-canary
a more-snake
a more-hair
a more-rabbit
a more-turtle

The poem goes on to complicate itself with chains of words

a more-turtle cat
a more-turtle-more-cat dog
a more-dog-more-cat dog

And so on. (Fig 86-87)

Also eclat download able from ubu web

20.11.07

blazevox verses 'being published'

Good post by Jocylin Chapman re BlazeVOX and the post-avant and self publishing. The ins and outs of new/emerging publishing options for writers...
http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/2007/11/jlyn-chapman-blazevox-and-publishing.html

blazevox really interesting publishing happening
http://www.blazevox.org/

Boston Comment discussion of post-avant and experimental definitions
http://www.bostoncomment.com/debate.html

18.11.07

xxperimental literature questions for 'women' by Joanna Drucker

How would you theorize about your work?
How does your [poetry] already articulate a theoretical position?
What attitude do you have toward theoretical and critical writing?
Do you find conventions of critical/theoretical writing inherently masculinist,
or masculinist by association?
What is the relation you posit between your gender and your [poetic] writing practice?
What is the relation between your gender and your attitude toward, or use of, or resistance to theory and/or theorizing?
Joanna Drucker

more moore

mary-tyler-moore cunt show

see www.majenamafe.com for more

comedy/transgression in womens experimental writing

I'm making a few notes here about the role of comedy in women's experimental (xxperimental) writing. I've been thinking how it acts as a transgressive model and a point of departure for language frames/meanings etc. Always interested in the limits of language. The tie between speech and conduct is bordered by comedy and moral indignation....comedy does not have the same ethical standards as everyday life...and thats an opening in the frame to me.

Comedy is also a series of lampoons/routines with no necessary or probable connection between them...much like experimental work.

Aristotle said comedy was the imitation of inferior people, and women are the most common theme in comedy.

When a woman speaks comedy herself she is thought of as doubly indecent. The lewd joke by her is the burlesque.. a farce-slapstick-the hilarious-improbably absurd character becomes a joke itself, spectacle and sound are lifted high, perhaps even past the importance of logos (word)
Think of Cary Grant and Hepburn Screwball film of 1940's.

Comedy though is also a firm denial of the underlying principle of tragedy.

Comedy offends. The question of aesthetic offense is interesting, who is offended and why do they choose to be offended? Is there a negative aesthetics, and what are its limits? The Greeks understood comedy as the 'Gods view' of life, unfortunately because of the loss of Aristotle's Comedy western civilization only has his Tragedies to shape our frames of being from, and since the middle ages, through the renaissance, right down to the current novel frame, narratives tragedy dominates.

The monotheistic view of one god, one book, one view, one voice is turned on its head by the 'other' any other and the fool- comedy... comedy is the fool. Comedy is in relation to authority the many, its other...

And what is off stage/off scene is itchly...more/than

'whats the difference between a circus and a strip club...
the circus only has a bunch of cunning stunts'

Comedy uses dry or realistic humor:
cartoonist humor
funny words/language
funny objects
lampoon
romance gone wrong ie pain
satire
the black
the ribald
it uses conflict finding the ridiculous and play in obstacles or situations, it exaggerates when? where?
it uses negative aesthetics, ugliness, as a property of the object or the person or the situation

Comedy also circles around itself, finding the joke in being offended, the desire to avoid offense- which is a common trope and the avoiding of causing offense.

Still womens bodies are 'the' most offensive subject matter ... cunt...is rated the most offensive word/place in language.

I'm very interested in these and other linkage between comedy and xxperimental writing something I'm pursuing...the humor in Stein; 'No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense innocence in no sense no sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense and delight and not in no sense and delight and not, no sense in no sense innocence and delight'...the droll humor of Ronnell in Stupidity a very good read on the said subject; Scalapino work so dry it almost cracks /open...Carol Maso having a bit of a laugh at herself... The Australian writer Ania Walwicz in Scrambler... 'you jerk hid in what was said wouldn't you just a fine thing for her what she wants to do you just use said that she can't you won't give them plenty of i'm untended for king what does out this on a jiff a great greater greta thing just you in come back to me the then said rings for her things were gone just a laugh...'

shifty women

http://glumbert.com/wii/view.php?name=womenfilm

17.11.07

Gertrude Stein resources on line

Stein resources by Category

Articles

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Gertrude Stein Quotes

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stein-hejinian

To include Stein’s patriarchal poetry within the realm of feminine ecriture and to give a reading of Stein that will permit itself to turn around and be read by Stein, would be of great value... Lynn Hejinian

Technorati profile

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lipstick of noise

Poetry is the Lipstick of Noise
poetry and sound recordings

third factories links

Third Factory thankyou

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vermin fated jays

from Cathy Park Hong Dance Dance Revolution Norton 2007

"Now samsy, grab un gun. BB down de riving ravens,
de vermin fatted jays, y jade headed mallards who wit
insolence nest en botany o our #3 prize-winnim plants,
who dae nest en hearts o Russkies sculpt en shurbbery".

http://www.collegenews.org/x5808.xml
NEW YORK, N.Y., June 25, 2006 -- Barnard College recently announced that poet Adrienne Rich has chosen Cathy Park Hong and her work “Dance Dance Revolution” as the winner of the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize. The Prize, awarded jointly by Women Poets at Barnard and the publisher W.W. Norton & Company, includes publication of the work in April 2007 and a free public reading at Barnard.

The Work:

“Dance Dance Revolution” is a book-length sequence of poems spoken in two voices, as Rich describes: “The Guide is a former South Korean dissident from the Kwangju uprising of 1980 (comparable to Tiananmen Square, brutally repressed with the support of the U.S.). She speaks a fluid international language called Desert Creole, which draws, the poem tells us, from 600 emigré language groups including Caribbean patois, Asian ‘pidgin,’ Spanish, Latin, German and Middle English. She is interviewed by the Historian, a Korean-American scholar raised in Sierra Leone, who annotates the Guide’s commentaries in standard English. There is a personal connection between the two, which is gradually revealed. The interviews take place in a planned city called The Desert (reminiscent of Dubai or Las Vegas) where replicas of major world cities have been built as tourist resorts, offering every luxury. The Guide has ended up, after her release from political prison, as a tourist guide in the St. Petersburg Hotel. The time of the poem is 2010.”

Rich, one of America’s most distinguished poets and influential feminist theorists, praises Hong’s manuscript for “the mixture of imagination, language, and historical consciousness.” The Guide, she writes, “speaks as one of those migrant people the world over whose past has been ruptured or erased by political violence, who plays whatever role she must in the world of the global economy, using language as subversion and disguise.” Hong’s work, she adds, “is passionate, artful, worldly. It makes a reader feel and think simultaneously, and rather then implying a nihilistic or negative vision of the future, it leaves this reader, at least, revitalized.”

16.11.07

voice-sounding

Voice itself, isn't just a voice--it's also content.

Helene Cixous: Live Theory

Cixous's 'ecriture feminine' changed everything for writing. This book published in 2004 by Ian Blyth and Susan Sellers introduces her work and life and interplays each against the other 'a-bouncingly' that resinates both ways...creating work that is theory and not theory at the same time...
Her emphasis is on poetic writing not being on the destination but about 'the illumination that is the journey'. Cixous' work moves away from gender-specific formulations, instead emphasizing a particular libidinal economy... one that creating a writing that avoids both appropriation and annihilation.
I'm wondering now what is beyond feminine ecriture and Language what intertextualities are coming through now especially since the shift from Lacan to Melanie Klein. Blogs of course are intertextual!

Helene Cixous, from her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa":

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.

limits

I have a big interest in outsider texts, founds and or
finds...This piece is a terrible/heartfelt so raw.

So called' outsiders' bless their/our souls
have alot of room to work/write/be in....

Emma Hauk's (the other one is by??)
works, above, are incredibly moving,
This piece has 'darling come soon'
written over and over and over and over on it
These two pieces belong together I think. or not.
They both about big stuff.

soundings

Soundings....the sounds in language and language or experimental writing
are a source of big interest to me. As a frame for experience that is less mediated than written text, I am interested in exploring more of what can be shifted, slipped into and opened out in language though a concentration on the sounds in it.

Ruth Salvaggio in The Sound of Feminist Theory suggests that we pay attention to the sound of language -- something she insists is neither "voice," nor the spoken word, nor metaphor: "I mean the actual effects of sounding, wavering language in critical and theoretical writing -- a distinctive turn toward the oral within the panorama of contemporary thought". Her project is to trace these effects through feminist critical and theoretical writings, which she believes are particularly attuned to the resonances and possibilities of language. Feminist theory, she argues, offers an "indulgence in the transmutive potential of words, their ability to affirm and question and resist and endlessly suggest meanings, to be used for everything they are worth, and more"
I'm interested in seeing it explored in theory yes yes, more please, but also in texts themselves and 'other ' language pieces ie film/sound works. I've been making sound recordings of voice clearings...small films. Interested in seeing how these can be expanded.

I am not deaf-forgetting

Repository and Critical Artists Books Online

Found this fantastic and critical artists books online web...
http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/index.html
An online repository of facsimiles, meta-data and criticism. Joanna Drucker Against Fiction is great but so are most every 'other'. Really worth a look into. I've been making artist books for a while now and find the freedom to shape the look of the whole thing really opens me to thinking what is possible for extending writing.

13.11.07

mouth stuff

click here...
Rafael Rozendaal, Much Better Than This, 2006

12.11.07

x grrrl

Is xxperimental a better term for this area of writing, experimental is problematic so is innovative, so is contemporary... we need a new word.

cow-grrrl

'call out' for women experimental writers

Hi, I've decided to take this interest/blog of mine a bit further... within 24 hours I have had a surprising amount of feedback to this site, so I've decided to go a step further.

I'm would like to put out the call to women who write with an experimental/
innovative/
avant-garde/
post-modern
framework...(I know these terms are problematic, and each term needs an essay or two written on what I mean-but they will do for now) to see who we are and what we are doing. This is both a larger international call and a local one...as Emily Kngwarreye said I paint "the whole lot".

An invitation to make some links between us and us ...
The US leads as the place for this type of exploration into language/writing by women…but I’m pretty determined though to get a community of like minded exploration started here and connected to the writing ideas coming out of the US.

This work needs good conversation, and lots of it and that’s what’s so lacking in the Australian literary scene. Isolation is like silence and so not very helpful. And not the truth (what ever that is) Anyway its not flowing...

I’m thinking that experimental women’s writing coming from the margins of the margins (here) might be able to contribute to the fruitful project, I would like to build connections between us if possible… Any leads… contacts, conferences, connections and comments oh so gratefully collected here…Cheers Majena

ps..."This is emily dressed up...Emily turned the aesthetics of Aboriginal art inside out (or more appropriately outside in). Her revolutionary breakthrough involved a radical change in emphasis—in making the iconography of her stories of secondary importance to their "overall" abstraction. Emily choose to highlight the “emotional content” of her Dreaming stories rather than their specifics, suffusing both symbols and structure beneath sensual passages of dots. The grid of lines, which had served as the bones of her earlier paintings, was gradually obscured altogether, but remained as the inner logic of these middle period compositions". http://www.aboriginal-art.com/desert_pages/utopia

30.11.07

29.11.07

25.11.07

20.11.07

18.11.07

17.11.07

Stein resources by Category

16.11.07

13.11.07

12.11.07

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