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krahka · 5 years

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The KleskizhAUs and their Poetic Styles

Under read more because lomg

SWTOR Kleskizhae

Ridiculous Sith Juggernaut. Excessively proud of his Sith ancestry but also ridiculously light side and somehow doesn’t see this as a problem. Loves lightsabers, loves the Empire but is a little less clear on whether he likes the Empire as an institution or the Empire as the people, and hint, it’s the people, he’ll pick the people if he had to.

Poetry: ALL CAPS HAIKUS FREE VERSE ASTRONOMY METAPHORS EXTREMELY VIOLENT REFERENCES TO ANCIENT SITH HISTORY BEAUTIFUL WORDS BEATEN STRAIGHT OUT OF HIS HEART OF DARK PASSION

DS!SWTOR Kleskizhae

Ridiculous and awful Sith Juggernaut. Believes himself morally and genetically superior to all others. Delights in toying with his inferiors, especially in breaking their hearts with his charm and facade of kindness.

Poetry: Flowery and romantic and flattering. More or less copies of ancient Sith poems, but with the words changed a bit. They’re mostly for showing off how cultured he is and how much he loves you babe, so he doesn’t put in much effort.

ESO Kleskizhae

Altmer Battlemage. A scion of the Direnni but not on great terms with his family due to his allegiance to the Aldmeri Dominion and his marrying a Bosmer because of Spinner shenanigans. Ambassador of the Queen and definitely not one of her Eyes nosir. Got pressganged into the Buoyant Armigers after impressing Vivec by exemplifying all of hir favorite virtues and vices just by accident.

Poetry: Sonnets. Ballads. Sexually explicit but it’s so purple that you can hardly tell just how sexually explicit it really is. Mostly about his own adventures and the people he knows. Melodramatic as fuck. The stuff he wrote when Vivec specifically was taking an interest in him is his best work, since he starts getting more experimental and tones down the silliness without losing that red hot emotional core that really elevates the verse to something that so many people try and fail to replicate in the future that it’s become its own genre.

DS!ESO Kleskizhae

Altmer Battlemage what dabbles in necromancy. Believes himself the rightful king of all of High Rock with the Bretons as his rebellious subjects. Allied with Mannimarco because he promised him that when Planemeld happened, he could have his ancestral holdings all to himself, with all the people there living only to glorify him. The kinda guy you end up killing in the Daggerfall Covenant quests or in a Balfiera focused dungeon DLC.

Poetry: Pretty similar to light side ESO!Kleskizhae, but if he thinks you didn’t appreciate his work he’ll torture you until you do. Try and critique it and he’ll just plain murder you and raise your corpse to grovel for his forgiveness and admit that you were wrong. Also his poetry is his annoying boss mechanic somehow. Didn’t read the books in his dungeon? Too bad because that’s how you defeat him.

GW2 Klejskizae

Norn Herald. Skald, champion of Wolf, Lightbringer of the Order of Whispers. A Delight unto all people of Tyria! Your new best friend who is not using your friendship with him to learn your secrets! Come and listen to him channel the spirits and the Legends next Dragon Bash!

Poetry: Actually more into prose. Veddas. Stories about heroes, exaggerated for effect. Tales that he keeps in his mind that he tells differently each time he’s asked to tell it, depending on what he thinks his audience needs to hear. The poetry tends to be more personal, often taking the form of prayers to the Spirits that are between him and them. Also will write songs, also about heroes, with calls to action for the Pact.

TES!Specifically Klejskizae

Nord Skaald. Traveling yeller. Delighter of audiences all throughout Tamriel. Follower of the Old Ways. Probably also in the Blades.

Poetry: SCREAMING TAVERN SONGS. Great heroes, sometimes gets kicked out of taverns in Skyrim because he’s performing songs about non-Nord heroes but how can you not be excited by EVERYONE

SWTOR!Specifically Klejskizae

Mandalorian what will scream battle poems in your ear as he faces you in glorious hand to hand combat. Has some very weird ideas of what being Mandalorian is, but they’re closer to reality than his Sith version’s ideas of being Sith.

Poetry: You thought Sith Kleskizhae’s poetry was gory and violent? You haven’t heard Mando Klejskizae. They are ridiculous. Everything ends with lovers embracing for the last time as they die in battle and their death is described in excruciating detail.

FFXIV Kleskizhae

Ishgardian adventurer. Dragoony Bard. Got kicked out for being way too scandalous for the theocracy and for talking too much about how he thought that maybe we should just smooch the Dragons?

Poetry: The poetry isn’t why he’s not liked back in Ishgard, though that poetry was a means to transmit his unpopular and scandalous ideas and activities. The poetry specifically is why he’s distrusted in Gridania after he met an elemental and challenged it to a rap battle and it went very poorly. (Kleskizhae won and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise or that that’s not the point and there is no winning because he definitely won)

West Coast Fallout Klaus K. Zheng

Paladin of the Brotherhood of Steel. Sort of into the whole BoS thing of keeping dangerous tech out of people’s hands but also he’s into protecting people in any way he can, since they must protect those who will inherit the past, yes? That is what we’re doing, right? Right?

Poetry: He found a book of poems about Arthurian legends and they changed his life, as did Grognak the Barbarian which he’s sure is in the same canon. He’s also read a bunch of Shakespeare and only sort of understands it. So yeah, sonnets that are Shakespeare ripoffs. Casting modern topics into medieval terms. Sometimes it’ll get weird and his BoS worldview will come in and make them anachronistic but it’s unintentional because he just wants to write like the knights of yore.

East Coast Fallout Klaus K. Zheng

Enclave soldier, later deserter once he sees that oh shit killing everyone wasn’t supposed to be what they were going to do! He wasn’t listening to the quiet part! Ends up aiding synths because it pisses off the BoS and also saves lives. Still believes in America but it’s one that maybe never existed.

Poetry: The Enclave did preserve a lot of good American literature in their databanks, though they’re kinda sketchy about distributing it to their soldiers since even before 2077 they realized that a lot of the American canon contains like, anti-war, anti-corporate ideas and they couldn’t have that in their new society. He read Leaves of Grass once and it blew his mind. He might just surrender to the Brotherhood if they let him have access to their books, because he needs those. But also he might not because they would probably kill him and he’s also spending his post-Raven Rock time helping synths out of the Institute and that’s something they’d kill him for. And probably also kill a lot of other people if they realized that the Railroad had ex-Enclave in there. And the Institute doesn’t care for the humanities, which is why they had to create machines to teach them how to be human and then proceed to do such terrible things to the humans they’ve created; because they are less machine than they are and they resent them for it.

Modern Vlogger Klaus K. Zheng

Relationship advice vlogger, specifically as a counter-voice to all those shitty misogynist PUAs that are targeting lonely straight men. Also here for the lonely women and the lonely queers since he’s a queer man himself.

Poetry: He’s got a Master’s in Poetry and he feels it was time well spent, even if he didn’t care as much for academia as he did for the writing and the reading. One of the rewards for donating to his Patreon at a higher tier is a short poem written just for you about whatever subject you wish. (Assuming that it’s not extremely objectionable. He’ll gladly write poems about all sorts of sex acts, but he won’t write one about the virtues of white power.)

HZD Kleskizhae

Carja Warrior. Participated in the Red Raids because that was what the will of the Sun was but he couldn’t take the violence and the genocide and ended up joining with Sun-Prince Avad to overthrow the murderous king literally as soon as he could. Has been on a tour of goodwill ever since.

Poetry: Overuses the words “glinting”, “scintillating”, “resplendent”, “radiant”, “brilliant” and other words that mean A LOT OF LIGHT because he’s really into writing ridiculous songs about the Sun. A lot more personal and emotional than a lot of Carja poetry, since it’s more about love than about praising the Sun or the King. It’s a new dawn, and what the world needs is love’s shining rays to heal her wounds. With the help of some Oseram who wanted to promote the newly invented phonograph, manages to become the first real pop star after the apocalypse.

DA Kleskizhae

Tevinter Battlemage. Was sent off to the front lines against the Qunari to keep from embarrassing his family and his master. Accidentally ended up embarrassing them anyway.

Poetry: So he’s really into bringing up the Old Gods in his poems. He doesn’t worship them, he’s a good Andrastian, but you know how in the Renaissance everyone was a huge Greeceaboo? Yeah, it’s like that.

WtA Klaus K. Zheng

Fianna Galliard. He’s a werewolf poet who sings ballads of his pack’s glorious battles and lifts their spirits in the name of Gaia and Stag!

Poetry: He’s got a soft spot for dirty limericks. All of the Kleskizhaes will make improv poems upon request when they’re drunk enough but Fianna!Klaus is the master of the drunken on-the-spot poem. Like they get way better when he’s drunk and they’re improvised, as opposed to the usual thing where they’re charmingly bad.

VtM Klaus K. Zheng

Toreador. Got the vampire bug some time in the Victorian era, I dunno if he was actually British or what.

Poetry: Lord Byron himself once called his poems “a bit maudlin.” His sire was certainly fond of his work, but if he had more time in his peak living creative years he would have probably been a better known figure in the Romantic movement. As it is he’s fairly irrelevant and forgotten by all but a few intense scholars of the period, and even they consider him a minor figure.

Shadowrun Klaus K. Zheng

Elven Street Samurai. Just wants to make the world a better place through the power of love and also katanas. Probably unfortunately involved with Aztechnology which is gonna end badly for him probably.

Poetry: Machines and corporations have not yet conquered the metahuman soul, and that is why he writes. Has been banned from a couple of Runner BBSs for constantly posting about his latest runs in the form of epic poem, and that’s not what these boards are for, @GLORIOUSSAMURAI, please turn off your caps lock

Star Trek Kleskizhae

Romulan Tactical Officer. Fought in the Dominion War, joined the Romulan Republic after Romulus asplode, because they wouldn’t let him quietly desert and because he believes in the true Romulan spirit that can never be repressed!

Poetry: He’s trying to revive ancient pre-Awakening Vulcan poetic traditions whilst failing to recognize that lots of it doesn’t work in the modern Romulan language. He’s always been super into poetry but after the destruction of Romulus, he becomes obsessed with writing the perfect series of poems to describe it for the future, so that people will remember what it’s like long after everyone who remembers it is dead. He hasn’t been successful yet and it’s upsetting him but he can’t just not do it. He owes it to the dead.

Bionicle Kleskizhae

He's a proud Skakdi warlord of Fire who is trying his best to unite his proud and noble people against the wicked deprivations of the Makuta and might also be in the Order of Mata Nui because sometimes Kleskizhae is a spy? But always he is very loud.

Poetry: Extremely long and elaborate war chants with 40 verses that he’s trying to get his guys to chant into battle but no one else but him can remember it all and he keeps adding more verses. But also he’s written love poetry that’s gone all the way around Greg and made romance canon again! He’s done it! With the chiseling of the tablets he’s made love real!

#oc: kleskizhae #all screaming together in perfect harmony #long post

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thelonguepuree · 5 years

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While there are, in general, some flawed arguments in Poetic Artifice, it is remarkably flexible, especially in its anticipation of the sort of bad Naturalization that "postmodernism" itself has created, in which the marginal, the excessive, the fractured and the irrational have all found their way toward the clarity of general understanding, some of it actually as easily acquired as the "confessional" rubrics that the experimental branch of poets were once poised to attack (the "Ellipticist" writers, who are often seen as taking once "avant-garde" styles and utilizing them in rather comfortable verse are, perhaps, the result of such a lack of complex reading/writing practices in contemporary poetry). In the book, Forrest-Thomson uses one of her own poems as examples of Artifice, and even reconstructs a newspaper article, using such common tactics of Artifice as unusual capitalization (in a "Futurist" manner), jarring line breaks and random quotation marks, in the process of an argument. Her work collected in the Collected Poems and Translations are as technical and ambitious in their theoretical intentions, but many of the poems also involve process-oriented techniques, though rarely with the free-for-all quality of a Cage or Jackson Mac Low (her Dada is never so ebullient or tied to process). For example, her poem "Zettel" is based on quotes from Wittgenstein’s work of that name, and though it is difficult to quote from the poem without making it appear no different from many poems that use Wittgenstein’s language as its fundamental vocabulary, there is something more controlled, exacting and exciting in her short poem, perhaps because there were few writing like that in England at the time (she also shares some cultural assumptions with writers of the "Cambridge" variety, such as Prynne and Wilkinson, hence a certain grounded, quasi-conservative streak that keeps her apart from, say, her French peers). "Zettel," like many of Forrest-Thomson’s poems, can be reminiscent of some of the writings of Christine Brooke-Rose, the English novelist and Pound scholar, in that much of the crisis of meaning (of "love," for example) is linked specifically with crises of reading. It is worth mentioning that Forrest-Thomson was the only woman poet included in the anthology of English poetry A Various Art, and one of the few, along with J.H. Prynne and perhaps Iain Sinclair, who appeared to engage with the most difficult traditions of modernism, and had any use for line or imagery that wasn’t entirely "naturalistic," or at least easily traceable line back to the concerns of Romanticism. Collected Poems contains writing that ranges from the lyrics of her first collection "Identi-Kit," published when she was twenty, to ventures in concrete poetry, some translations from the TelQuel writers (she had a special appreciation for Denis Roche), and her later books "Language-Games" and the posthumous "On the Periphery." One of her qualities — possibly to her detriment as a poet — is that she is very literal, with an almost Johnsonian sense of the established meanings for words, not unlike another poet who is also interested in the non-assimilable parts of poems, Charles Bernstein, who quoted Poetic Artifice in the establishment of his own theory in the seminal essay "Artifice of Absorption." This may sound like a strange comparison, but it is often true that the most literally-minded poets — the least prone to visionary trances and libidinous improvisations — are those for whom literary disruption is the most earnestly engaged of practices. Indeed, some of Forrest-Thomson’s assertions — that "The ’meaning’ of a poem may have more to do with the ’intention’ to write a poem with reference to particular variants in convention than with the utterance itself," for example — might have been written about Bernstein’s practice, especially in books such as Rough Trades and Dark City, and some of her work in Collected Poems, especially those which use prose-like sentences along with parody, anticipate or influence his techniques.

Brian Kim Stefans on Veronica Forrest-Thomson in JACKET #14, 2001

#veronica forrest-thomson #brian kim stefans #jacket poetry #charles bernstein #artifice #poetic artifice #artifice of absorption #ludwig wittgenstein #zettel #contemporary poetry #experimental poetry #naturalization #language poetry

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attheexactlyrighttimeandplace · 5 years

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Read in October

This month brought to me a painful admission: the reason why i never get to reduce my physical tbr is not because i buy too much books but because i continue in parallel to borrow a lot of books from my local libraries!

I read library books in priority because i can only have them for a limited time but each time i return to the library, i take with me new books. There’s 12 libraries in my town, the choice is therefore so large that this habit to borrow, return and borrow again is like an endless loop.

I reached the point where i can’t buy more books for financial reasons, but i still wonder if i’ll ever get one day to read the ones i own since the libraries will always have new books that i’ll read first...

Unless i find a way to stop myself to go to the library. But how the hell does one do that?

Completed (favourites in bold): Heart of the Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang, Un Monde sans Rivage by Hélène Gaudy.

3 books about exploration which took me to different time and places: from a crossing during the end of the 19th century on the Congo river, the second largest river in Africa to the Arctic at the same period, to a parallel contemporary Earth where the unexpected meeting with Aliens from outer space change the understanding of language and the perception of the time of humanity.

I loved Heart of Darkness so deeply that i already know that i will reread it soon, in a different translation. I decided to delay my decision to watch Apocalypse Now because i feel that it might disturb the strong connection that i feel with the book, by introducing a different point of view on the story.

The short stories from the collection Stories of your life are variably successfull in term of interest and quality. The best one was Story of your Life. It was also my favourite for obvious reasons: it was a beautiful meditation on the power of language, memory and time written at a contemplative pace, filled with a serene and yet melancholic atmosphere. I enjoyed it so much i watched the film made by Denis Villeneuve: The Arrival is a philosophical experience as much as as science fiction work and the best film ever made on the subject of a meeting with aliens.

Un Monde sans Rivage gave me mixed feelings: the book has no scientifical or historical value but the language was everything. Its prose is gorgeous, poetic and musical with a lot of correspondances between the images created by the ethereal photographies from the Andrée, Frænkel and Strindberg expedition (discovered miraculously intact after a thaw), and the words used by the explorators to tell their trip (in their journals found at the same place). The author tried mostly to fill in the blanks: to recreate what the men weren’t in capacity to explain and weren’t “allowed” to tell because the posterity was going to catch up on them, even after their death. Sometimes it felt like an exciting sensorial experimentation, other times it felt like a meaningless wandering without a goal (which is exactly what the expedition became after awhile when the explorators were lost for good in the white desert). At some point filling this virtual museum of their last moments and last thoughts became obsessionel and tactless, especially when it lead to an unreasonable breach in their privacy: few chapters were devoted to the sexual relationship between Strindberg and his fiancée, an intrusion no surprising coming from a french author but still very irritating. Those useless intimate stories took a lot of place, too much for a book that could have already easily lose 100 pages.

Still reading:

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen: Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer prize. I’m not enthralled or impressed so far and even feel like i’m ready to give up at times. I lack interest in the characters and the plot offers little too: i thought it was a spy thriller but it looks like rather like an historical fiction. The first pages are so far a recollection of the last days that the narrator spent in Vietnam before the communists took control of the country and that he seems determined to describe in details. So either it’s really boring or it’s not the right time for me to read it...

Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff: Trump is a scary man, like really scary but what’s even scarier is to discover that he’s not the only one of his kind. At various degrees, the people who support him in the political, financial and media worlds are also monsters but they manage to get away with it because they have a better control of their public image.

Ten reasons for the sadness of thought by Georges Steiner: i keep my comments for later when i read more of it.

Books bought:

3 french books on the sociology of education: about the unequalities of school success between the children of poor families and rich families, the myth of the meritocracy and the gap between the culture required by the educational institutions to succeed at school and the cultural environment at home of poor families.

For my 4 years old niece who wants to learn ballet dance : the Tallulah series by Marilyn Singer because the illustrations by Alexandra Boiger are incredibly sweet and expressive with its muted colours (i bought the 3 books mostly for her work), and the relationship between Tallulah and her little brother who is learning ballet dance too is a very endearing subplot.

#on my nightstand #currently reading #booklr #reading journal october 2019

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dillydedalus · 5 years

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what i read in july

THAT’S MORE LIKE IT aka i’m finally out of the (relative) reading slump for good & my bro james joyce was there

men explain things to me, rebecca solnit the original mansplaining essay is great, and still scarily relevant; the others in this collection (most on feminist issues) are also quite good; some aspects are a bit dated & problematic so be aware of that. 2.5/5

erschlagt die armen!, shumona sinha (tr. from french, not available in english) short but very impactful novella about a young french woman, originally from india, who works as an interpreter in the asylum system and becomes more & more broken by this system of inhumane bureaucracy and suffering, until she snaps and hits a migrant over the head with a wine bottle. full of alienation and misery and beautiful but disturbing language - the title translates to ‘beat the poor to death’ so like. yeah. 3.5/5

fire & blood: a history of the targaryen family I, george r r martin look, it’s a 700-page-long fake history book about a fictional ruling dynasty in a fictional world, and i’m just That Obsessed & Desperate about asoiaf (and i don’t even care about the targs That Much). anyway, now i know more about the targs than any ruling family from, you know, real history, which is like, whatever. this is pretty enjoyable if you are That Obsessed, although i will say that some bits are much better than others (there are some dry dull years even in everyone’s fav overly dramatic dragon-riding incest-loving family) and the misogyny really is. a lot. too much. way too much. BUT i did really like Good Best Queen Alysanne (her husband king joe harris is alright too i guess) and i found my new westerosi otp, cregan stark/aly blackwood, who both have Big Dick Energy off the fucking charts. 3.5/5 (+0.5 points for cregan and aly’s combined BDE)

the old drift, namwali serpell hugely ambitious sprawling postcolonial nation-building novel about zambia, told thru three generations of three families, as well as a chorus of mosquitoes (consistently the best & smartest parts). there is A LOT going on, in terms of characters, of plot points, of references to history (the zambian space programme) and literature (finally my knowledge of heart of darkness paid off) and thematically, and honestly it was a bit too much, a bit too tangled & fragmented & drifty, and in the end i probably admire this book more than i liked it, but serpell’s writing is incredibly smart and funny and full of electrical sparks 3.5/5

a severed head, iris murdoch the original love dodecahedron (not that i counted). iris murdoch is fucking WILD and i love her for it. this is a strange darkly funny little farce about some rich well-educated londoners and their bizarre & rather convoluted love lives. not as grandiosely wild as the sea the sea, but fun nevertheless. 3/5

midnight in chernobyl, adam higginbotham jumping on the hype bandwagon caused by the hbo series (very weird to call the current fascination with chernobyl a hype bandwagon but you know). interesting & well-written & accessible (tho the science is still totally beyond me) & gets you to care about the people involved. lots of human failure, lots of human greatness, set against the background of the almost eldritch threat of radioactivity (look up the elephant foot & see if you don’t get chills), and acute radiation syndrome which is THE MOST TERRIFYING THING ON EARTH . 3.5/5

normal people, sally rooney honestly this is incredibly engrossing & absorbing once you get used to how rooney completely ignores ‘show don’t tell’ (it works!), i pretty much read the whole thing in one slow workday (boss makes a dollar, i make a dime so i read books on my phone on company time, also i genuinely had nothing to do). i also think rooney is really good at precisely capturing the ~millenial experience in a way that feels very true, especially the transition from school to uni. BUT i really disliked the ending, the book never engages with the political themes it introduces (esp. class and gender) as deeply as it could and the bdsm stuff never really gets TIED UP LOL. so overall idk: 3.5/5

störfall: nachrichten eines tages, christa wolf quiet reflective undramatic little book narrated by a woman waiting to hear about the outcome of her brother’s brain surgery on the day of the catastrophe at chernobyl - throughout the day she puts down her thoughts about her brother and the events unfolding at chernobyl, as well as the double uncertainty she is trying to cope with. really interesting to read such an immediate reaction to chernobyl (the book came out less than a year after chernobyl). 2.5/5

the man in the high castle, philip k dick it was fine? quick & entertaining alternative history where the axis powers win the war, some interesting bits of worldbuilding (like the draining of the mediterranean which was apparently a real idea in the early 20th century?) but overall it’s just felt a bit disjointed & unsatisfying to me. 2.5/5

fugitive pieces, anne michaels very poetic & thoughtful novel about the holocaust, grief, remembrance & the difference between history and memory, intergenerational trauma, love, geology and the weather. i’m not sure how much this comes together as a novel, but it is absolutely beautifully written (the author is a poet as well) and very affective. 3.5/5

american innovations, rivka galchen short collection of bizarre & often funny short stories about neurotic women whose furniture flies away, or who grow an extra breast, or who are maybe too occupied with financial details. very vague & very precise at once, which seems to be the thing with these sort of collections. 3/5

fool’s assassin (fitz & the fool #1), robin hobb YAASS i’m back in the realm of the elderlings!!! i thought this was one of the weaker installments in the series - i still enjoyed it a lot, and Feelings were had, but it just doesn’t quite fit together pacing-wise & some of the characterisation struck me as off (can i get some nuance for shun & lant please?) and tbh fitz is at peak Selfcentred Dumbass Levels & it drove me up the fucking wall. molly, nettle & bee deserve better. still, completely HYPE for the rest of the trilogy. 3.5/5

JAMES JOYCE JULY

note: i decided not to read dubliners bc it’s my least fav of joyce’s major works & too bleak & repetitive for my mood right now AND while i planned not to reread finnegans wake bc……. it’s finnegans wake…. i kinda do want to read it now (but i also. really don’t.) so idk yet.

a portrait of the artist as a young man, james joyce y’all. i read this book at least once a year between the ages of 15 and 19, it’s beyond formative, it is burnt into my brain, and reading it now several years later it is still everything, soaring and searing (that searing clarity of truth, thanks burgess) and poetic and dirty, and stephen is baby, and a pretentious self-important little prick and i love him & i am him (or was him as only a pretentious self-important teenage girl reading joyce can be him - because this truly is a book that should be read in your late teens when you feel everything as intensely and world-endingly and severely as my boy stephen does and every new experience feels like the world changing). anyway i love this book & i love stephen dedalus, bird-like, hawk-like, knife-blade, aloof, alienated, severe and stern, a poet-priest-prophet if he could ever get over himself, baby baby baby. 5/5

exiles, james joyce well. there’s a reason joyce is known as a novelist. this is….. a failed experiment, maybe. a fairly boring play about an adulterous love-square and uh… love beyond morality and possession maybe??? about how much it would suck for joyce to return to ireland??? and tbh it’s not terribly interesting. 2/5

travesties, tom stoppard a wild funny irreverent & smart antic comedy inspired by the fact that during ww1, james joyce, lenin, and dadaist tristan tzara were all in neutral zurich, more or less simultaneously; they probably never met, but in this play they do, as dadaist poetry, socialist art critique, and a james joyce high on his own genius & in desperate need of some cash while writing ulysses, AND the importance of being earnest (joyce is putting on a production of it) all collide in the memories of henry carr, who played algernon & later sued joyce over money (tru facts). not my fav stoppard (that’s arcadia) but it’s funny & fizzy & smart & combines many many things that i love. 4/5

ulysses, james joyce look i’m not really going to tell y’all anything new about ulysses, but it really has everything, it’s warm & human(e) & cerebral & difficult & funny & sad & healing & i always get a lot out of it even tho there’s bits (a lot of them) i’ll never wrap my head around. ultimate affirmation of humanity or whatever. also stephen dedalus is baby. 5/5

dedalus, chris mccabe the fact that this book (sequel to ulysses about what stephen dedalus might have done the next day) exists and was published ON MY BIRTHDAY is proof that the universe loves me.

anyway this is very very good, very very clever, extremely good at stephen (less good at bloom but his parts are still good), engages w/ ulysses, portrait & hamlet (& others) very cleverly & does some cool meta and experimental shit. y’all it has stephen talking to a contemporary therapist about how he’s stuck in joyce’s text which is all about joyce & very little about whoever stephen is when he’s not joyce’s alter ego/affectionate but slightly amused look at younger self and ithaca is an interview w/ the author about how his relationship to his dad influenced his response to ulysses and I’M INTO IT. the oxen of the sun chapter replaces the whole ‘gestation of english prose’ w/ just slightly rewriting the first pages of about 10 novels published between ulysses and now & it does lolita w/ “bloom, thorn of stephen’s sleep, light in his eyes. his sire, his son’ and i lit. screamed. anyway i don’t want to give this 5 stars (yet) bc i think some of the experimental stuff ended up a bit gimmicky & didn’t add that much to the text but fuck. that’s my boy & i want to reread it right now. 4.5/5 ALSO it’s a crime no literary weirdo woman has written ‘a portrait of the artist’s sister’ about delia ‘dilly’ dedalus, shadow of stephen’s mind, quick far & daring, teaching herself french from a 3rd hand primer while her father drinks the nonexistent family fortune away and her older brother is getting drunk on a beach & starting fights w/ soldiers bc he’s a smartarse

#the books i read #long post

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the-end-of-art · 6 years

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Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism

POETRY IS THE ART OF PREJUDICE: An interview with Jack Gilbert

(Note: Originally transcribed from a tape-recorded conversation between Jack Gilbert and Gordon Lish, at Gilbert’s San Francisco apartment, July 18, 1962)

LISH: In your poem “Quality Is a Kind of Exile” you mention a lady asking what poets are like between poems. If the question were asked specifically about you and you had to give a prose answer, what would you say?

GILBERT: I’d be evasive. It’s the sort of question that can only make a fool of you.

LISH: But if you had to answer?

GILBERT: If I had to? Well, I’m a little like a mongrel dog, I guess. Not the sickly kind, or the savage or woe-begone kind. But the shorthaired, off-white type you still sometimes see trotting along in the city. Obviously on his own. The kind that survives.

LISH: Not a lap-dog?

GILBERT: Wait. Let’s not get this started off wrong, full of terse clever answers. It was my fault; that sounds pretty precious about the dog. I didn’t mean it like that, but it’s a hard question to answer quickly. I just mean that I’m not respectable. I’m thirty-seven years old and a kind of failure. I don’t really have an occupation. Most of the time I wander around looking at the trees. Or the concrete. And trying to understand and to have my life. And love. Kind of an urban Walden. I’ve never worked at a job more than six months at a time in my whole life. And most of those were in steel mills or washing dishes or selling Fuller Brushes. I’ve evaded all the adult responsibilities of marriage, a home, a car, a regular job, children, furniture, a bank account for emergencies, pipes, guns, and all the rest. While other people have been coping with their responsibilities as husbands and citizens and PhD’s, I’ve been off looking at the sea and trying to write a poem. Or living in the mountains. Or on the Lower East Side.

LISH: But you’re not part of the Beat Movement?

GILBERT: God, no! And I don’t go in for freakish behavior nor esoteric knowledge.

LISH: What do you conceive your world to be then? What audience do you write for, for example?

GILBERT: I suspect I’m like most poets in that I write with a vague audience in mind made up of a few friends multiplied and a bunch of heroes—most of whom are dead.

LISH: But certainly some poets have a more general public in mind?

GILBERT: Maybe so, but remember that the contemporary artist’s audience is not the same one aimed at by Edwardians and Victorians. One of the things that defines modern poetry is its separation from a general audience. Not because the poet wants it that way, but because what he wants to do pushes him beyond the scope of the bus driver.

LISH: All poets?

GILBERT: Well, just about all serious poets today are beyond the reader of good will who is inexperienced in current literature. It used to be there was usually something for anyone with a minimum education. If you listened to music, you could wait for the tune to come around again. Today you’d wait a long time. Or in painting, you could enjoy the way a lemon peel was imitated or be moved by the scene of a young boy saying goodbye to his mother before going off to the big city. You might not know anything about painting, but you’d remember when your boy Walter went off. In poetry you could enjoy the sense of beauty without any idea of the meaning—the lovely, hypnotic beauty-bath. But poets aren’t trying to do this anymore. Nor good composers, nor sculptors, nor novelists, nor architects. They are trying to do something different, and it involves the nature of poetry and the audience both.

LISH: What specifically is this difference?

GILBERT: In the old days, poets tried to create beauty, and to please. Most of them, anyway. Today, the major talents aren’t interested in creating beauty—not in the ordinary sense, and certainly not in the sense of providing recreation. Poetry before the First World War was usually an elevating experience taken dutifully after a good meal in the better homes; rather like going to church each Sunday to sit worshipful and empty-headed. Instead of providing instant-uplift or a passive sense of nobility, the poets now are trying to interest and disturb.

LISH: Surely this kind of poetry has been with us a long time.

GILBERT: I don’t mean it’s a new thing. However, I doubt if it’s ever been so predominant. And there is a difference between the serious art of today and art in the past in that our art is harder to misuse. You look at the painting elements in a painting today or you go home. You read contemporary poems as poetry, and actively, or you leave it alone.

LISH: I assume this would be your answer to the accusation of limiting your readers by the geographical, historical, mythological, and personal references in your poems.

GILBERT: It depends. I don’t believe in poems as cross-word puzzles—poems created as victims of the New Criticism. There should be a public level of the poem available to an educated reader who is willing to contribute a fair amount of thinking. On the other hand, there are some things you have a right to expect him to look up. Helot, for example, if he doesn’t know. But if a poem has too much of this, its function breaks down—becomes a game of scholarship.

LISH: Or of vanity.

GILBERT: Especially of vanity. Not always, though. Not all poets who go in for this sort of thing are trying to create the illusion of profundity by an illicit obscurity. Some are entirely sincere. Just as some of the surrealists are, or the word-manipulators, the logomaniacs.

LISH: Are you equating the pedant poets with the surrealists and the logomaniacs? Aren’t some of these people legitimately experimental poets?

GILBERT: Of course. But I’m tired of the kind of experimental poetry we’ve been getting. I don’t say it’s not poetry. There isn’t any one correct way to write poetry. Poetry is a word like love: an endless confusion of different things all warped into one word because no vocabulary of discrimination exists. So I’m not saying my way of writing poetry is the way. But I am admitting my weariness with the great body of poetry which is nothing more than a curious manipulation of words, what Kenneth Tynan has called literary masturbation—a sterile effort to force words to breed. After one or two pages of surrealistic poetry my mind just stubbornly refuses to be polite. Wallace Stevens put it very well when he said that the trouble with surrealism is that it invents rather than discovers. It’s a kind of trick anybody can learn who has imagination. You just throw your mind slightly out of focus so everything seems different. Or better yet, you learn to set your mind wrong so that each item is mechanically related to an inappropriate neighbor. It’s great when you’re starting out in poetry and words are a kind of fascination. But how can a poet sustain an interest in this kind of thing. Wait a minute, I was just reading something by Samuel Johnson. Here it is: “The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted.”

LISH: And yet your poetry isn’t devoid of experiment. For example, I’ve noticed in your poetry a peculiar distortion of line—as if the language were strange to you, new—especially this poem “The Poetry Line”.

GILBERT: All good poets today try to wrench the language, to freshen it. But my main concern with form is different. I’m concerned with how to make poems work. I think any group of my poems will show a range of solutions. Many poets have one or two ways to write a poem. The poem to them is like a cake-decorator where you put your different materials into the same bag each time and squeeze. The cake will be decorated differently each time, but the method is the same. My greatest difficulty is not finding subjects or language or conceits, but in finding the poem.

LISH: This would be a preoccupation with form rather than language then?

GILBERT: Yes, but obviously not form in the sense of sonnets or sestinas. In fact, I think the major esthetic problem in the 20th century is the attempt to escape Form with a capital Fto form in lower case. At the beginning of the century with the idea of Art for Art’s sake, with the influence of Flaubert, with the distaste for a world in which falsification had become standard, many poets went in for what Yeats called technical sincerity. They found truth in an esthetic technology. Recently poets (and artists in the other arts) have become discontent with Form as an object. They no longer are content to create a pretty, well-made thing. They want to make a poem that extends beyond the museum of perfection. Often they don’t particularly care how it looks—if it’s shaggy or messy or incomplete or exaggerated—as long as it has the effect on the reader that the poet intends. In fact, he may deliberately include the anti-poetic in order to prevent misunderstanding. He doesn’t want the reader coming along collecting jeweled phrases. I’ve talked to a number of the best writers working today about this. Some at length, like Pound, or some just briefly, like Saul Bellow, and I’ve found over and over that they want to escape the inhibiting quality of Form as a hieratic, imposed felicity. They want to devise a form that allows them to do things. Pound expressed it by saying his greatest contribution to younger poets was enabling them to get things back into poems—to make historical references, for example. This recurring groping for an open form can be traced through the whole history of European literature.

LISH: But your poetry shows considerable concern with form in a more direct sense.

GILBERT: Sure. Any poet must be concerned with it. I would expect any poem of mine to meet all the tests of craftsmanship. And obviously form in this sense can never be separated from the other concern. And still, in some peculiar way, they are separate. No one has ever been able to say exactly how, but it is nevertheless true that a preoccupation with the formal construct produces a lesser poetry. Primary poetry deals with life. This is, of course, the most old-fashioned of positions. It has been repeatedly denounced by all the best modern critics like Northrop Frye, Warren and Wellek, Wimsett, and the rest. I always have the feeling they are annoyed that poems are written by people instead of being spontaneously generated out of the accumulations of books in the great solemn libraries. It’s an inconvenience. They remind me of the people who confuse technology with sex.

LISH: How does your attitude affect your poetry?

GILBERT: I am far more concerned with content than most poets, I think. I assume I manage all the technical elements adequately, of course. But usually my poems are caused by and impulse to communicate some part of my life rather than to please. I don’t want the reader to finish the poem and say how lovely it was. I want him to be disturbed. Even miserable. I don’t envy Spenser the slightest bit. I do envy the man who wrote Lear. And yet…it’s so hard to get it straight. At the same time I am always deeply concerned with the poem as a made thing. Always. Like something chopped out of stone that won’t weaken. But not as a decoration. Not a recreation. There are two kinds of poetry finally. The kind that gives delight, and the kind that does something else. Delight is fine. But in Lear or Oedipus there is something else. It’s a delight, too, but of a kind so different that it is misleading to use the same word. The first is recreation; the second change man. It is a grave misunderstanding to come from a performance of Lear concerned primarily with technical felicities. Ideally, one should cry at a good performance of Lear. If the critic can’t cry, he should be unfrocked.

LISH: Doesn’t this kind of approach set you apart from a lot of contemporary poets?

GILBERT: Maybe so, but an awful lot of the poems I see published remind me of the correspondence between Marx and Engels. Engels was always writing elaborate letters filled with ingenious, painstaking comments on Marx’s theories equating them mechanically with some current scientific thought. And Marx (or the reader) kept writing back, Dear Fred, please send the money.

LISH: But you go beyond just insistence on a relation to life in your poems. You seem preoccupied with moral values. Isn’t it true that most contemporary poets no longer accept the ideal of right and wrong?

GILBERT: Who knows? Surely it’s an exaggeration to say most. But it is true that a great many poets now shy away from this kind of subject in favor of a kind of genre verse. Partially I think this is the result of a moral paralysis that is current. But isn’t it also because they don’t have a sufficient motivation for writing? Isn’t a great part of poetry now being produced to support an established reputation? The poet is actually tired of poetry, but he must turn out poems to qualify for prizes, grants, and academic positions. What’s he going to do? He manufactures verse. And it’s a lot easier to deal with a small subject when you’re getting by on merely careful technique. And if he’s a man teaching at a university, as he probably is, and married to a wife he courted years ago, and has several quite healthy children…what’s he going to make his poems out of? He makes them out of books or he makes them out of the incidents of a normal, commonplace life. If he goes sailing off Long Island on Sunday afternoon and he wants to write a poem after dinner, he will probably write a poem about sailing off Long Island.

LISH: A small poem?

GILBERT: Oh, he’ll mention Charon at the end to make it seem big, but he is probably tired after a long day and he contents himself with making a respectable poem rather than trying to do anything to the reader. He’s unlikely to be what the Elizabethans admired so much, an over-reacher. You aren’t likely to get a big-boned poem straining its limits.

LISH: And you think this is the case with most poets today?

GILBERT: It seems to be true of most poetry today. Probably it has always been true of most poets. And it is only fair to say that all poets would like to write great poetry. It is also true, though, that if ninety-nine percent of the poets writing today stopped publishing, it would not be a loss. It might not even be noticed. We are in danger today of the kind of misguided tact that has so hampered modern British poetry. A kind of insidious conspiracy of courtesy. If there could be a truly unmalicious literary pogrom, it would do more for American literature than even making them publish anonymously. Or how about another way? You know how in the Congressional Record they have all those speeches that were never actually delivered in Congress? They save everybody’s time by waiving the reading and just print it so the people back home can see it and be satisfied their Congressman is making his voice heard. Suppose we publish a huge book called The Very Finest American Poetry of 1962? Everyone will waive the poems being actually published anywhere except in those thousands of pages of unreadable tiny print. And each poem who sends in something will automatically be issued a certificate saying he has published so-and-so many poems in 1962, and they have been declared to be the very finest of the year. It will be signed by all the right people. Then the poet can just turn this over to the head of his department when culling time comes around. The reward of promotion will be for the greatest number of certificates—and these will be given for assiduity, just as now. And he can get duplicates to send his mother, or to show his wife’s friends, or to send to the Fulbright and Guggenheim and Ford people. Or to have lying around when he has a girl up he’s trying to make.

LISH: Do you think these people who are involved in poetry to further their careers or who make mild poems out of trivial material are dangerous to the reader?

GILBERT: Mostly in being dangerous to themselves and other poets—in that they reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable. They pretend poetry is just like everything else, only fixed up funny. Like sex. Everybody understands now that sex isn’t really dirty. A little odd at times, but certainly nothing to be disturbed about. Like the sensible books on technique say. And it’s good for you. Rosy, reasonable sex. Well, it isdirty. And fantastically intimate. A kind of insanity. Of course, they often feel the same way about insanity. It’s kind of like the common cold now. And they can’t get over the secret feeling that their friend really knows, at the bottom, how silly he’s being. Someone once said to Blake that after all when he looked at the sun he saw a bright copper penny like the rest of us. Blake replied that when he looked at the sun he saw a choir of singing angels.

LISH: You feel the poets really don’t know the difference?

GILBERT: Who knows anything about poets? But I remember talking recently to a poet who teaches at the University of California who kept saying how it’s all nonsense to criticize professors for not having enough life in their poems. Take him for example, he said. One of his favorite things was to go walking up and down the main street of Oakland at night. Now I’m not making fun of him. He is quite intelligent and talented, and he sincerely believes he’s getting close to the brute reality of non-academic life walking up and down there in Oakland. It’s admirable that he wants to reach reality, but it scares me to think a man so intelligent can become so insulated that he isn’t even aware how far he is from the demon world of actuality.

LISH: What poets do you think are in touch with that demon world?

GILBERT: First let me take back that bit about the “demon world.” It sounds like the dark-world-of-unnamable-evil out of somebody like Huysmans or Lovecraft. And let me say that most poets have had contact with the world beyond the academy and domesticity when they were young or in the army or on their year tour of Europe. But how many of them have recently lived for any time really with hunger or corruption or danger or ecstasy or madness or the alien or romance or physical labor or poverty or anything? Or evil? Directly, I mean.

LISH: All right, but what poets do you admire?

GILBERT: In the world, or writing in English, or just in America.

LISH: Let’s say just American.

GILBERT: It’s hard to answer. I admire some things in many, many poets. You remember in The Lost Weekend how the guy is hurrying down the street full of ain and he sees a new book by F. Scott Fitzgerald in a window and he stops and crouches down to read what he can of the two pages that are half open? In the middle of his hurry and unhappiness? Well, I’ll tell you the people I’d crouch down like that to read. Pound and Eliot, of course. And Williams. And Frost. And Auden, if I’m allowed both him and Eliot. And Marianne Moore. Lowell and Duncan and Wilbur and Creeley. Shapiro and once upon a time Ginsberg. And Laura Ulewicz and Richard Hazley and Gerald Stern and William Anderson and Jean McLean. And others I’ll think of later. It’s a fine century for poetry.

LISH: Doesn’t that contradict what you were saying before?

GILBERT: I hope not. It’s exactly because I think we are in one of the great centuries for poetry that I feel so strongly. The last fifty years has been a golden age for English poetry. But it’s a constant race against being inundated with proficiency. We are in danger from a glut of mediocrity of an extraordinary high calibre. The problem is to write the poems that matter. Too many poets are concerned with poems as art objects. It’s a clever kind of juggling. It’s beautiful, and very difficult, and even admirable. But it mustn’t usurp the center of poetry. We will never get people like Chaucer or Villon or Dylan Thomas or Baudelaire or Blake or Homer or Sophocles or Shakespeare by making merely beautiful things. We’ll get them only from a poetry that is significantly involved with life. And I don’t mean domestic life. Certainly the poetry must also be technically competent, but the important thing is to exceed this. So many poets now seem to aim at the adequate poem rather than the important one.

LISH: Doesn’t this dearth of important poetry at the moment owe, in part, to the feeling of many poets that life no longer holds significant subjects? What do you, for example, consider significant material?

GILBERT: All the conventional subjects for poetry. Love, death, man, virtue, nature, magnitude, excellence, evil, suffering, courage, morality. What is the good life. What is honor. Who am I.

LISH: But isn’t that just the point? Aren’t the conventional subjects too confused and wearied from a surfeit of examination and the blurring of values?

GILBERT: That’s why poets shirk.

LISH: They try something more manageable?

GILBERT: Not only that, but they don’t have enough experience or involvement to try the other. It’s what I was saying before. Most of the poets are trying to earn a living and support a family. That usually means teaching school. And after a while, it means teaching school comes first. Poetry comes second. You meet very few poets whose lives are devoted primarily to writing poetry. The may love poetry, and respect it; they may be competent, well-trained, well-meaning, good people. But you don’t become a great poet in your spare time. Besides, nice guys seldom write exciting poetry.

LISH: But even if that’s true, doesn’t part of the reluctance to deal with large moral problems come from the complexity of the problems today—obsessed with relativism, wanting to be fair, to be objective? No longer understanding all of anything, especially the major values?

GILBERT: That’s true, but it’s exactly why poetry is crucial now. Poetry and the novel have largely taken over the function of philosophy for us. Philosophy is locked up in epistemology and can’t get out. No philosopher asks any more: What is the good life? What is justice? They deal with technical problems about cognition and even more with a kind of verbal paraphernalia. Poetry seems almost the only device we have for persisting at problems without their being mysteriously transformed into an abstract game. It seems almost our only escape from the blind alley of sophistication where comparative anthropology and psychiatry have led us, seeing that there are so many sides to any question that it is impossible to have convictions. Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice. Prose is rational and fair. It works out an idea and gives all the evidence. Poetry doesn’t. It doesn’t argue, it demonstrates.

LISH: Then you do see absolutes. That is out of fashion, isn’t it?

GILBERT: I think most good poets see absolutes, but they mistrust themselves because they think they’re not being fair. Well, poetry isn’t fair. Poetry, at it’s best, doesn’t try to be fair. Poetry is one-sided, and being one-sided, it can say what truth is. As the art of prejudice, poetry eludes the modern situation where everything seems true and nothing seems to matter very much. The poet has a way of thinking that, peculiarly, breaks through the ambush of qualification and gets to the other side where you so often can see the truth all along but can’t find your way through the jungle of intellectual ceremony.

LISH: Somehow this seems a lot like the attitude of the Beat poets.

GILBERT: Well, it is true that one of the reasons the Beat Movement got so much attention (outside of their gift for publicity) was that their intellectual crudity helped them to break through the impasse of sophistication and establish some contact with subjects that mattered in a real world. Just as the Italian Renaissance was possible partly because the people in Florence were provincial. It could never have happened in Byzantium.

LISH: You say the beats were intellectually crude.

GILBERT: Yes, but that doesn’t mean dumb. Let me make it clear that I’m not attacking them. It’s pointless for people to keep kicking them now when the whole thing is in such disrepute. Five years ago, people in the universities hated the movement but were secretly fascinated. Now they are genuinely contemptuous and indifferent. It is useless to attack it or defend it now on doctrinaire grounds. It’s more important to evaluate it; not only fairly, but with knowledge. It was the most important literary movement of a quarter century in America. Why did all that talent and opportunity come to so little?

LISH: Why, then?

GILBERT: Mostly because of inadequate character and the repudiation of intelligence. Most of the poets in the movement are incapable of maturity. Any examination of the work of, say, Ginsberg and Corso (and Kerouac in prose) show a failure to grow. In fact, they are dedicated to the opposite. They apotheosize all the infantile qualities: impulsiveness, resentment of discipline, incapacity for self-discipline, short attention span with a consequent preoccupation with the moment, mistrust of authority and order, egocentricity, and all the rest. At first this gave their work the freshness and energy that’s usual when gifted children start out in any field: poetry, tennis, science, music, chess, whatever. But it also has a similar tendency to come to nothing. To predictably pass through a stage of exaggeration and a kind of hysteria, followed by bitterness, and finally a withered passivity. They are like those insects that get arrested at the larvae stage. I forget their name. They have all the parts, but they just don’t continue. If you want a case in point, read the interviews involving Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs in the Journal for the Protection of All Beings. It’s sad and rather frightening to see people of such native talent ending up in such juvenility. And it’s not just in that one example. Almost anything they do now shows it. Look at Ginsberg’s piece in Pa’lante where he’s approaching middle age lost in a hopeless confusion of the most elementary philosophical problems.

LISH: And you say this failure of character goes along with the repudiation of intelligence?

GILBERT: Yes, in favor of some kind of intuition. I think intelligence has produced almost everything that is noble in man. Of course, when I say intelligence, I don’t mean just syllogistic logic. I mean the total capacity for perception and understanding available to man. Logic, intuition, gestalt, common sense, empathy, and all the rest. They want to rely on primitive, clumsy impulsiveness alone. Anyone who has lived where intelligence hasbeen replaced by intuition (such as Apulia or Mexico or India) knows how quickly life becomes diminished to something close to the animal. These people feel more at ease in those conditions. They evade the complexity life really has; and they can escape awareness of themselves into sensation. When you realize how little these people like being themselves, you begin to understand why they want to escape consciousness.

LISH: But I thought the idea was to arrive at a greater awareness of the self. And to be more open to love.

GILBERT: They talk a lot about love, but they experience almost none. Neither for people nor the world. Their natural condition is unhappiness. And because they have so little genuine appetite for the world, they go in constant fear of boredom. That’s why they are quiet so little. After all, there is something radically wrong when you have to go to always more violent and stranger devices to get a response. A man who delights in the world isn’t so dependent on drugs and alcohol and novelty. And the sad thing is that even so they manage to squeeze our always less response. If you’ve been to any of their parties, you must have noticed how much it was like an hysterical woman straining for an orgasm synthetically. And the poetry is the same. Almost none of it stands up under rereading. In the first place, it all ends up sounding curiously anonymous. And in the second place, despite the cult of energy, all that violence of language and image seems curiously slack after six months. The poems just don’t wear well.

LISH: None of it?

GILBERT: Certainly some remains. Parts of Howl and Kaddish, for example. And besides, it depends on who you mean when you refer to the Beat Movement. It’s as Procrustean a word as academic. I certainly am not talking about Creeley or Duncan or Olson. And I think Whalen and Snyder will produce important poetry. But for the rest, if you travel around America, you find the reputations of five years ago washed up like great dying whales. And beginning to stink.

LISH: There’s that figure whales. Whales and elephants and Alcibiades. What precisely do you mean by whales?

GILBERT: You know without my telling you that no poet means precisely anything. It’s not a one-to-one relation. That’s allegory. It means a lot of things. For one, it’s the impossibly literal world. And it’s what you can’t reduce to the human scale. For me, trying to think about a whale, that endlessness down in that infinity of depth, in darkness, moving around—with a mind inside it…

LISH: Doing things.

GILBERT: Yes, and silent. I can’t make any adjustment to it. Like Lawrence said: “I said to my heart, who are these? / And my heart couldn’t own them.” He was talking about fish. And he says someplace else in the poem: “There are limits / To you my heart; / And to the one God / Fish are beyond me.” Whales in this sense, the sudden sense of the alien nature of the universe not translatable into human terms. But what particularly interests me is the sense of magnitude. It’s out of scale, and not just physically. It threatens my life, the formulations on which I operate. I have to redo my mind. There’s a poem by Rilke where he goes along describing a statue. All of a sudden, for no reason, he breaks off and says: You must change your life. When I think about whales, it’s the same in a way. Or elephants or love.

LISH: Or Alcibiades, evidently.

GILBERT: Or Alcibiades. He was the Golden Boy of 4th century Athenian culture. Pericles was his guardian, Plato his teacher. A fine athlete, a brilliant general, handsome, marvelously intelligent, popular, everything. A summation of the Golden Age. And what happened? He went bad. He was vain, treacherous, selfish, sacrilegious, debauched, dishonest, and a traitor twice over. His aid to the enemy during the Syracuse campaign destroyed Athens. Just about the finest product of the most notable civilization man has accomplished, and it turned out like that. This haunts me like the whales. Like the irrational East haunted the Greeks. Like the irrational still frightens the French. It is so much the problem today. It is so often our most endowed people who go wrong—become corrupt, sexually distorted, criminal, mad. I don’t mean just because of irrationality, or course. You might just as well call it Evil as it has been so often called to simplify things. But whatever the name, it is clear that Cordelia has little relevance for us except as a lost Eden. What concerns our time is Goneril. That’s why insanity, homosexuality, and semi-criminality are so common among poets. These prevent him from escaping into the obliviousness of normal life. Especially in modern times, the poet often has a built-in inability to succeed, so he is forced to associate with whales.

LISH: And you intend to continue to live with them by choice?

GILBERT: Well, I’m not crazy, queer, or crooked (Ai! Is there any group I haven’t offended?)…anyhow, I don’t know about it being by choice. Certainly after this interview I’m not likely to be tempted by either the universities or the foundations. It’s a choice in that I prefer whales and love and the rest; but then Heraclides said a man’s fate is his character. In any case, I intend to go on wandering around having my life and watching for whales—willingly. And with delight.

LISH: One final thing. Before the Yale printing of Views of Jeopardy, you were almost completely unpublished and unknown, weren’t you?

GILBERT: Before sending the manuscript to Yale, I had submitted poems to editors only twice in the twenty years I’d been writing poetry.

LISH: And now you have been nominated for next year’s Pulitzer Prize competition.

GILBERT: That’s true. And it makes me happy in a shamelessly uncomplicated way. To be nominated, I mean. I’m thinking of writing a poem, though, called “How It Feels to Be Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize Competition the Season Robert Frost Published His First Book in Fifteen Years.”

(https://unsaidmagazine.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/jack-gilbert-interviewed-by-gordon-lish-1962-from-issue-one-of-genesis-west-part-one/)

#Jack Gilbert #Gordon Lish #poem #poet #poetry

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douglascatesrenovatedspirits · 7 years

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The Erotic, Carnal Festivities Are Not Without, And Other Erotic/Carnal Musings, Poetry, Erotica, Autobiography, Commentary And General Writings (Also Of An Erotic Nature)

1. The Fucking Festivities Are NOT Without: A Carnal Lamenting Poem

Without the great, high-fenced, golden-walled, circumvallatory and mighty city am I, wishing to come in.The grand, brass-fastened, iron-hinged wooden door; the great gate of the entering in of the city, this portal is closed and shut fast and tight.Yet, beyond its thick, xyloidal fastness, I hear the faint tones of truly dulcet music,and those noises of carousing……And, even fainter than the almost inaudible pulsation of rhythmic, saltant sounds,comes the evermore dulcet and mellifluous, influential noises of grand, uninhibited sexuality.And the romps thereof…The city is the abode and origin and treasure-house of great sex,it is the only place in the entire world whereat is this practiced;And, I am left alone, without, with no one to love or even fuck me.*It is a grandiosely glorious city of pornographic achievement and fulfillment and abandon and I cannot get in.The festivities are not without.*

2.A Lamentation; Of The Yearning And Plea For Understanding of The Would-Be Sexual Adventurer: Of The Absolutely Dire Necessity For A Viable Entree To The World of Sex (Of Which Presently He Is Without)

It is a shame that I can’t, apparently, use my inexperience, eagerness, want/desire/need, willingness, lustfulness, insatiability and/or erstwhile unfulfillment and dissatisfaction as an entree to a world of unlimited, unfettered, uninhibited, satisfying sexual expression, fulfillment, exploration/experimentation, delight, enjoyment, adventure, playfulness and revelry-of which I desperately want to be a part-due to the seemingly cliquey, expectant nature of this quasi-caste system. It is a world wherein only the experienced gain more experience; the already sexually adventurous gains more sexual adventures; the sated receive and achieve satisfaction; the fulfilled get fulfillment; it is the club where everybody already knows everybody and no one new is ever admitted-the old hand, the expert, the diehard get more. Experience level, apparently, determines everything and, unfortunately, the whole thing boils down, ultimately, to the little more than a kind of a primarily sexual sort of gluttony and selfishness. Owing to the seeming fact that roughly 90% of the sexually playful, the sexually adventurous and the sexually exciting and theatrical and fun are ultimately little less than sexually uncharitable and stingy, apparently; the would-be, hoped-for, up-and-coming sexual adventurer-the neophyte and tyro to the wonderful world of sexual adventuring-must seek for the rare and inestimably priceless boon of much-needed sexual generosity (as well as patience and understanding) among an apparently very limited, ever-diminishing few. They are few, they are far-between, they are fleeting and they are rare: the rarest of the rare breeds: the sexual adventurer who, when it comes to sex, is still essentially self-involved and gluttonous, but who also possesses knowledge, patience, understanding, generosity, kindness and charity-at least, of a predominantly sexual variety. I am of the very unfortunate class and clan of those who are struggling, striving for some form of true sexual achievement, but yet who are sexually inexperienced, sexually poor, sexually honest, and who wish, in time, to become sexual adventurers and have loving, friendly, patient, instructive, sharing, XXX-minded, sexy outlets for all their sexual creativity and antics. It is hard, it is very difficult, to be this person, unless relatively young, for none of your fellow (yet far more advanced) sexual adventurers take you seriously, and, worse yet, most seem to be patently indifferent as to your plight. Among other things, they are apparently deficient in certain kinds of sympathy, understanding and empathy; and they have, most of them, little to no desire to help the sexual sufferer, who, but for the entree to their sexually stimulating, boundless world and life, would be not only a grand sexual adventurer, and always up for and open to the task of sexual adventuring, but perhaps the greatest fuck and fucker of all time! Because, somewhat sadly, even lacking most of the majority of the life sexual, I find that, in the end, the very best thing about being an adult is adultery/fornication!

3.Raunchy Requests, Decadent Directions: A XXX Love Poem Erotica

Spit upon my phallus, my love that thou might make it sufficiently lubricious for the pleasureable proceedings, the adventuresome,frolicsome sexcapades to follow; Rub that succulent and salivary,taut and stony, pulsing phallus with thy fisted hand;wherewith the up and down, side-to-side motions thou shalt make shall excite me,my love, and prepare me for the strenuous sexual exercise to come; Open wide thy loving, wet, glossy, soft and supple mouth to receive this, my rock-hard penis;Let me fondle thy womanly parts:thy rich, full, proud, firm breasts; and the juicy pinkness in and around your shaven nether region;Let that selfsame become moist so that……

4. What I Want To Get Out of Life (And This Site): Basically, I just want to get to know someone and discover what brings them joy and try to work together with them to reach a goal to satisfy each other’s needs.That’s just basically it.

5.Help Fulfill My Host of Sexual Fantasies……

Please help fulfill my host of sexual fantasies…….especially if you look like Kianna Dior, Jayden James, Alektra Blue, Luci Thai, Annie Cruz, Lisa Ann, Mika Tan and/or Ava Devine! lol. I mean: I am a bit of an amateur and a bit inexperienced, I want to do this as a means to broaden my sexual horizons, spice up my lackluster/nonexistent sex/love life, experiment and explore, to wallow, bask, REVEL in my sexuality, my heterosexuality-and to do XXX/pornographic stuff! lol) Like, within the XXX/pornographic/heterosexual realm, I am open to and willing to do almost anything…..and I do mean ANYTHING! ;) I just hope I can find some similar-minded, willing, open, uninhibited, passionate, XXX-minded, pornographic, sexy local women, Asian or not, who can help me live out my fantasies and make my sex dreams cum true! :)

6.With The Yearning Of An Over or Undersexed Teenager:Of The Town To Which Lovelorn Men (And Women) Repair And, Ephemerally, Reside In- An Erotic, Essayistic, Explanatory Prose-Poem:

When one has found that they, perhaps by the reckoning of some cynics, have shortsightedly fallen in love and lust with she with whom they want to be, she whom is perfect for them and who seems, in every way, made for them, predestined and meant-for-each-other, fated to and needing to be together;And some ironic and horrid twist of fate occurs, and someone or something (and/or some cruel and vile and ironic yet temporary fickle turn of mind occurs) interferes and proves to be a stumbling block to that near-perfect arrangement, which, in time, would become perfected, legitimized and fully realized (and all that is now tampered with and ceased); and when this train is dreadfully, drastically, ephemerally derailed,from the smoking, mangled mass one crawls forth, cradling their bloodied and dislocated limbs, and is saddened and bereft of true love; and then, for better or worse, somewhat unfortunately, the only to fill up and expedite the interim before which they might see and be with and love each other again, is to have an extended layover in * Fuck Town!

*Speaking of The Great City of The Power and Ensnarement Of The Pleasures Of The Flesh (The Great Prison-City): A Practice In Biblical/Poetical/Historical/Prophetical/Homiletic/Legal Summary Writing:

I do not lock myself up in the great prison that is also the grand city of the wretched and damned, neither do I do so willingly nor with thought of action of plan to account the days spent lodged therein and thereat as being justly counted from this day unto time indefinite; It is a temporary abode, this stately, vast and many-castled, walled and palatial city of imprisonment. I estimate that it is a snare; even so do I appraise and surmise it as a marshy city of possibly perpetual ensnarement. (Or, failing that thereof, peradventure ‘tis a city of enslavement, whereat is practiced the profane and abject “ideal”-the false and wicked ideal-of servile reverence and enthrallment to the power and magnificent entrancement of the pleasures of the flesh.) The city is the city, verily, of the utter folly of the pleasures of the flesh, and an ensnarement; a veritable ensnarement and entrapment; yet still do I wish to gain admission into it, this august and pleasuring city, and but for a little while, during the time of my bereavement of love and lovelornness, dwell therein, carousing and rejoicing with it’s damned and cynical denizens.

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infinityskitchen · 5 years

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Mouth Trap by Rebbecca Brown: Prose-Poem Magic

Mouth Trap Review Rebbecca Brown is a wordsmith, and her 2018 poetry book, Mouth Trap (Arc Pair Press), is a tantalizing example of Brown’s alchemic language. This collection holds 42 prose-poems that explore emotions, the natural world, and the human condition through lyricism and language-play. Arguably, Brown fits into the poetic niche occupied by Jose Angel Araguz and Daniil Kharms as her wit and surreal images transform the ordinary into the unexpected and the soulful. Mouth Trap seems to be an experiment in transformation and magic, evoking imagery that not only sucks us into the collection but also wiggles into our mind.

Published in a world overcome by social divisiveness and ecological destruction, Mouth Trap paints portraits of people and landscapes that exhume unspoken feelings. Brown plays with form, sound, image, and meaning, certainly connecting her readers in duende.

Federico Garcia Lorca, a 20th century Spanish poet, described duende as passion, a raw emotion that connects the writing, the author, and the audience in a shared understanding. This is what Mouth Trap is—a passion that pass through language-play, soundscapes, and images to grip the reader in a hidden world.

1. Mouth Trap and Lyric Essays Brown pushes the prose-poem form to its limits. The pieces “What I Did and Did Not Do,” “The Seven Little Sinsters,” and “Squall” are something more than prose-poems. Running across several pages, these pieces edge toward lyric essay, converting emotionally charged meditations into consequences, growth, and reflection.

I found “Squall” particularly powerful. In the middle of this lyric essay, the speaker inserts a ten-stanza poem dedicated to the listener. This meta-poem, that is a poem within a poem, looks and reads more like a “traditional” poem. Here are the first few lines of this metapoem:

“the crack daze the cup, shatters determined during

grains fusing toward temporary stasis. we both understand

the nature of this—those minute fractures, the future” (68).

See the alliteration, the enjambment, the symbolism, and gentle finality? This internal poem gives the speaker a chance to express their sentiments in a form that is synonyms with emotions: poetry. We see the speaker’s passion. We read it in the prose-poem and then within the poem’s internal poem. We feel it being massaged into our souls. I guess its duende wrapped in poetic experimentation.

2. Music and Language What else is spectacular about Mouth Trap? Brown’s word-play and soundscapes, of course!

There are tongue-tying yet musically sweet lines—like “bearded, wren and warbling, paraphyletic, the blood of pasts are carefully collected in honeyeaters” in the poem “Landscapes with Family.”

There is dialogue riddled with rhythm and alliteration— “What do you think the wood would want without the sun to slash them green?” in “Heat is Heat.”

And there are images sharpened by onomatopoeias and language-play— “he duct tapes the chuck back to flesh and finger figures blood will stop thump thumpthump to finish. He continues work watching for rattlesnakes minding the thump thumpthump of blood pound” in the poem “Shedding.”

Language and music-of-the-line sugar images, the meditations, the surrealism. They trap readers with mouthfuls of music.

3. Is It Really That Great? Mouth Trap is a Venus flytrap, except we are the flies who are gladly swallowed up by Brown’s enticing magic and music. This collection will satisfy anyone obsessed with prose-poetry, images brimming with sounds, and lyricism mixed precise observations into transformation. Arc Pair Press released a second edition of Brown’s book in 2019, so join Brown in a tangled web of emotions

Arranging Mouth Trap I emailed Brown a few weeks ago, asking her how she went about putting Mouth Trap together. Like with most poetry collection, the pieces in Mouth Trap were written over a long period of time and compiled later on.

But why write such lyric prose-poetry to start with? Brown shares that:

“my original intent was to create a number of short prose poems written from a variety of subject positions, which also included the natural world as a refractive, self-aware lens. What Mouth Trap became in the process of collecting so many divergent works, including a few lyrical essays and what I initially intended as a children’s book, is a hybrid work that emphasizes unique ways of seeing attuned to the limitations of a potentially confining solipsism.”

Solipsism: a noun describing the view that the self is the only thing truly existing. Mouth Trap is full of self-reflective lyricism firmly standing in natural imagery. This pairing, between nature and solipsism, concretizes the collection, grounding readers in wild hallucinations.

I asked Brown about the arrangement of poems in Mouth Trap. After all, there has to be some sort of rhyme or reason. According to Brown, the arrangement of Mouth Trap seeks to illustrate how musicality is the optimal way of exploring emotions and personal experiences, especially those in tension with the external world.

The collection’s overall focus turns toward nature with a block of poem whose titles begins with “Landscapes.” They illustrate a tension between the outer world and selfhood, setting the stage for the final section “that calls attention to the book’s constructedness with ‘Self-Portratis’” beginning the titles, according to Brown. Here then internal and the external are paired, placed beside each other.

This is Brown’s “attempt at exposing the artificiality of the collection,” an attempt aware that “cyclical shifts and resurgence associated with nature might present a challenge to a perceived artistic finitude.” This awareness dips Mouth Trap into duende as it considers finality and authenticity.

Brown’s Inspirations Whatever pushes boundaries inspires Brown because such experiments evoke surprises or discomforts that spurs action and change.

That said, Brown is drawn to texts aware of language’s possibilities and challenges. Such attentiveness adds dynamism and emotion to the page and “makes [her] writerly heart pleasurably ache” at the logical illogic.

She’s also “inspired by work that is lyrically dark and sufficiently unsettling in both form and content.” Along this line, Brown often finds herself pulled toward solitude and loneliness whenever they are laced with desire. Brown is quick to explain that this desire does not refer to wanting something material; rather, it is the “force itself in its raw and jabbering electrical pursuit of meaningful connections” that traps Brown.

Advice, Advice, Advice I absolutely love the advice Brown has for aspiring poets. She suggests poets escape expectations and or established patterns. They must explore possibilities and be authentic to the writing, to their language, and to the form.

Here is her sound advice:

“I’ve always found it interesting to think of writing in conversation with failure as opposed to writing towards what is conventionally thought of as success. In other words, what is possible often comes in unexpected forms; don’t limit the imaginable with familiar patterns or paradigms. While your writing is always responsive to and informed by the unique historical moment that you are a part of, it is also an assemblage of past influences. In turn, whom you might influence may not always be apparent to you, so you may as well write as if it’s the first and last thing you’ll ever do.

Where to get Mouth Trap Get Rebbecca Brown’s Mouth Trap from Arc Pair Press or Amazon Also available on the Kindle app.

Check out Brown’s other book, They Became Her, here.

—

Huge thanks for Rebbecca Brown for taking to time to answer my questions as well as dedicating her energy to creating this poetic masterpiece.

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beaubourgtheatre-blog · 5 years

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Free Fall Course Catalog

Freeing the Natural Voice (12 Weeks)

Instructor: Grace Kennedy

Sundays October 27 to January 12. 12pm-3pm

This course is designed for the singer, the actor, and anyone who wishes to strengthen and develop a deeper connection to their vocal instrument. Using Kristin Linklater’s text, Freeing the Natural Voice, this intermediate level course requires the utmost presence of body and mind for the 2 hour duration of the class, and asks that participants attend no fewer than 8 out of the 12 classes taking care to arrive before or on time. By the end of the 12 week course, participants will acquire concrete tools and exercises used to warm-up, strengthen, and liberate the voice, and can expect to hone their vocal instrument and increase its capacity to articulate and express thoughts and feelings in professional and personal contexts. Registration is required.

Grace Kennedy entered the world screaming and hasn’t stopped since. She can be found filling theaters, music venues, the French Quarter and the atmosphere of New Orleans with a truly liberated voice.

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Making Strong Choices: An Actor’s Workshop (4 Weeks)

Instructor: Samantha Beaulieu

Saturdays November 2 - 23. 10am-12pm

Making Strong Choices: An Actor's Workshop will cover the importance of making strong choices in auditions and performances. Students will be expected to select a monologue to perform and explore making strong choices and creating moments through their piece. Each student will have the opportunity to perform their monologue in front of the class, and receive notes and adjustments. For the final class, students can invite friends and family for a showing of their pieces and a discussion of what they learned.

Samantha Beaulieu is an award-winning actress and a filmmaker from New Orleans who works in film, television and theatre. In 2010 Samantha won Gambit’s Big Easy Theater Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for her portrayal of Ruth Younger in the award winning play A Raisin in the Sun. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communications from Clark Atlanta University, and a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota.

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Get It Written: Creative Writing (8 Weeks)

Instructor: Té V. Smith

Saturdays November 2 - December 21. 11am-1pm

There's a quote "Don't get it right, get it written." You want to write . . . and you’re facing a blank page, daring you to cover it. Sometimes we need a nudge out of fears of perfection to get us to start writing at all, and this weekly class will offer many activities that you can use on your own (or with friends!). We’ll use a series of directed exercises designed to get you writing quality material now. We’ll also discuss key points of craft, learn from one another’s work and draw lessons from published examples. Whether you’re starting out and learning the basics, or an experienced writer looking to invigorate your practice, this class is designed to offer you fresh ideas and starting points. You can expect to generate new pieces–work that can form the basis for stories, essays, poems, and novels to come. Our goal: to start writing and keep writing.

Té V. Smith is a Nigerian American writer who focuses on the themes of healthy masculinity, mental health, and education reform. He has written two books, a collection of poetry & prose, 'Here We Are, Reflections of A God Gone Mad' (2017 R.H. Austin Publishing) and a Young Adult novel, 'Exit Ticket' (2019 Field Order Press). His work has been published in or are forthcoming in Tin House, Kingdoms In The Wild, Black Girl In Ohm, Blackbird and more.

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Embodied Nature Poetry (7 Weeks)

Instructor: Tim Kooken

Saturdays November 2 - December 14. 2pm-3:30pm

Nature has long been subject of poetic investigation. Many of the somatic arts reflect rhythms and flows of nature. This class will explore conceptual and real objects of nature in both embodied and linguistic practice in order to write from an expanded perspective. We will create poems, read poems, share observations through group techniques, and use somatic, performative, and linguistic tools to embody and represent nature. (Involves physical contact & group work)

Explorations in Walking with Qigong (7 Weeks)

Instructor: Tim Kooken

Mondays November 4 - December 16. 9am-10am

Cultivate healthy movement habits out of formal walking meditations. Qigong walking involves a heavy focus on balance, core strength, energy flow, and proprioception. This class will introduce Qigong to students with an aim towards stronger balance and spatial awareness. (Involves physical contact & group work) Registration Suggested / Drop-ins Welcome.

Tim is a certified medical-based Qigong and Aikido teacher, performer, poet, and playwright. Their work involves a focus on somatic investigation, philosophical investigation, abstraction, rhythm, and nature.

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Intro to Photography (8 Weeks)

Instructor: Aaron Sarles

Sundays November 3 - December 22. 11:00am-12:30pm

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals and core concepts of photography, providing a historical overview and theoretical groundwork, with a particular emphasis on moving beyond the traditional Western Male paradigm approach to the medium. Classes will focus on aesthetics, history, composition, the camera, lenses, light, and post processing, with the final class consisting of a guided photo walk during which students can directly apply all that they have learned.

It is preferred that students each have their own camera, but it is not required. A phone camera is sufficient.

Aaron Sarles is a portrait, fashion, and editorial photographer living in New Orleans.

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Conceptual Counterpoint (4 Weeks)

Instructor: Michael Mason

Mondays November 4 - 25. 8pm-9pm

Through discussion and hands-on experimentation we will seek to find a way to better our understanding of the world using the musical concept of Counterpoint and how it is translatable to various aspects of life. Having musical knowledge is not required but certainly doesn't hurt. The concepts discussed will get pretty complicated but it's my goal to arrive at the concepts together so hopefully it won't be too difficult. Students will gain an increased awareness of the forces of counterpoint that affect our everyday lives. They will gain a better understanding of music in general and will leave with enhanced active listening skills.

Michael Mason is a guitarist, composer, and educator living and working in New Orleans. He cut his baby teeth on a toy & plastic guitar, doing his best to recreate the rock and roll and folk dreams that fell out of his boyhood radio and into his head. He found his way to NOCCA, where he plunged headfirst into the deep end of jazz, which studies he continued at UNO, ultimately receiving his B.A. in jazz composition from the Berklee College of Music.

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Introduction to Music Theory (4 Weeks)

Instructor: Zachary Pine

Mondays November 4 - 25. 6pm-8pm

Students will gain or improve skills in reading and writing Western musical notation. The material is introductory; no prior experience with music theory is required although familiarity with a musical instrument or voice will be an advantage for students. Additionally, they will acquire a foundational vocabulary of musical terminology.

Zachary Pine is a composer and teacher in New Orleans with a studio-practice where he creates popular music using computer-driven tools.

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Scene Study Workshop (6 Weeks)

Instructor: Bennett Kirschner

Wednesdays November 6 - December 11. 12pm-2pm

Participants will work on a short, realist scene (approx. 10-15 minutes) with one or two partners. Using essential Stanislavskian concepts such as action, objective, and given circumstance to interpret and embody their text, participants will move through the process of scene study, beginning with text analysis and leading up to defined, repeatable blocking. The class will culminate with a performance that is open to the public.

Bennett Kirschner is the founding Artistic Director of Intramural Theater, a New Orleans based theatre company that has been producing original, site-specific works since 2014. He received his MFA in Playwriting from the University of New Orleans in 2019.

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Kinesthetic Realignment Workshop (4 Weeks)

Instructor: Rachel Nelson

Saturdays November 9 - December 7. 4pm-5:30pm

Using the seven main chakras, we will move through the body's main energy centers, freeing tension, finding legibility, and increasing awareness. This is a great class for performers, as well as anybody looking to deepen their relationship with their body. Will include some movement and some journaling. No experience necessary.

Rachel is a professor at Hollins University and Bard College who has taught and directed around the country. She is especially interested in using theater as a way expand social justice work in our communities and liberation in our bodies.

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Imagining Sound Workshop (2 Weeks)

Instructor: Justin Peake

Mondays December 9 & 16. 6-8pm

Imagining Sound is a series of two meetings with an attention to the variety of images and sensations that accompany the sounds which surround us. It is an experiment in imagination, memory, and stillness. By playfully exploring the multisensorial aspects of sonic and musical experience we might be able to expand and augment our approaches to composition to expand beyond music's ethereal nature and perhaps discover a more metaphorical, unified or inclusive language for describing our experiences of sonic phenomena. This class is open to all current and aspiring listeners. Justin Peake is a drummer, sound composer, improviser, and experimental media artist based in New Orleans, LA. His music incorporates acoustic and electronic elements often using his own interactive software instruments. A graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), he focuses on software for variably structured improvisation in performance. He has released music on the Moodgadget, Ghostly International, Ears & Eyes, and Articulated Works labels

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Known Mass: Collective Intelligence Movement Workshop + Performance (4 Weeks)

Instructor: Ann Glaviano

Sundays December 29 - January 19. 4pm-7pm

Performance January 19th at 7:30 pm

This project is open to participants aged 18+ who are interested in practicing individual and ensemble devising processes and performance skills. Both trained dancers/physical performers and “pedestrians” with no specialized movement practice are welcome. Together we will build an ensemble movement-based performance piece using scored improvisation (a rehearsed, open structure) and set material. At the end of our fourth meeting, we will offer a public performance.

To participate in this workshop you must commit to all four meetings. Spots are limited; email [email protected] to sign up; you will receive confirmation of your enrollment by December 15. If you can’t commit to all meetings but you would like to participate in a future workshop, sign up for notification at https://annglaviano.com/monthly-newsletter/.

Ann Glaviano is a writer, dance-maker, DJ, and native New Orleanian. Since 2013 Ann has directed a performance project called Known Mass, aesthetically and ethically motivated by devised theatre and DIY punk traditions. She has also improvised with Hannibal Buress, danced with the New Orleans Ballet Theatre, choreographed for Hulu, and performed in a dystopic faux-corporate durational art installation in Dresden. Her dance film 01_fieldrecording premiered in 2019 at Highways (Los Angeles).

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jam2289 · 5 years

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On the Path to Story Analysis, Scene Analysis, and Sentence Analysis

Science is a test of facts. Art is an exploration of values. They are different realms of experience, knowledge, and insight. Writing fiction is an art. Creating stories is the most important art. It's infinitely complex. We need a framework to understand both the meaning that we can pull from existent stories and how to create new stories. I've studied many, and like all conceptual frameworks, I've found that I need to build my own.

I think there are three important levels to focus on if you're writing stories: sentence, scene, and story. I am going to briefly introduce three sources for each of these that I'm trying to integrate and adapt into my own system.

Do we want to start at the top or bottom? Let's start at the top, with story, and we'll work our way down. Remember, this is a general overview so all of these books will contain a lot of good info that I'm not going to cover.

There is a great little ebook by Martin Turner called "The One Basic Plot". It's been on my most liked books list for years. That list is linked on my about page. I just emailed with Martin today to clarify something. He responded right away. Good guy.

The basic idea is that a compelling story is a double reversal. A story without a reversal is like someone tries to do something and they do it. That's boring. A story with a single reversal is like a person tries to do something. They get close, but they fail. That's a tragedy, it could go the other way too. A double reversal is when someone is trying to do something, they are getting close, then it looks like they are going to lose everything, then they win. This can play out over a long story and out in smaller sections in a story.

Another great idea from Turner's book is of colliding narratives. That's where you have two stories that aren't compatible with each other. This is often the hero and the villain, but it can take different variations.

I have some adaptations of this, which is one of the great things about it. Turner made an incredibly flexible framework to work within that you can layer more complexity into, which is what my adaptation does.

That's entirely oversimplified, but let's move to the next book about story structure.

Jordan Peterson is my favorite living psychologist. "Maps of Meaning" is one of five books on this list that I haven't read straight through. When I was a kid I always started at the beginning and read every book straight through. Now, I read what I want when I want to, in the way that I want to. When you're reading non-fiction, find what you need. You can also take Peterson's entire Maps of Meaning course at the University of Toronto for free online, right on Youtube.

The basic idea here is that there is a part of the world that is known and a part of the world that is unknown to a knower. Those are the three elements: knower, known, unknown. The knower seeks to extract order from chaos. That's the job of the hero for society.

I combine this with my own conception of the true essence of a story. I did a deep dive into that in my article "What Is a Story?" here: http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/04/what-is-story.html

and followed it up with "Story, Drama, Conflict, and Suspense" here: http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/04/story-drama-conflict-and-suspense.html

My two useful insights were:

- - - - - - -

A story is the representation of a change, or set of changes, resulting in a steady state.

Drama is the potential or actual change to a thing of value, in its value.

- - - - - - -

If we work on pulling my definition of story and Peterson's ideas about chaos and order together we get something like a story telling about a dramatic change from a state of order, to chaos, to a new order. Notice that I'm just including Turner's idea about the double reversal here rather than exploring single reversals like order to chaos or chaos to order.

But, what is order and chaos. I think the perspective needs to be from the point of view of the knower. From the knower's point of view order is when predictions and expectations are fairly accurate over time. Chaos is when predictions and expectations are inaccurate, false, wrong, pointless, etc. So we move from a state of predictable order with accurate expectations, to unpredictable chaos with inaccurate expectations, to a new state of predictable order with accurate expectations.

That's interesting stuff.

Next, we have "The Story Grid" by Shawn Coyne. There is a lot in that book. It's an entire system in itself. Coyne is the only person with two books on this list, and he really only has two books. The key insight that I'm referencing here is his emphasis on genre conventions and obligatory scenes.

Basically, when someone picks up a murder mystery there has to be certain things. These are things that people are expecting. If you don't include them you will violate their expectations and they won't like it. There has to be a scene where they find a murder victim. There has to be a red herring where you follow a false lead because a clue leads you in that direction. There has to be a scene where the murderer is revealed. And a number of other things. And this is different for the different genres. The importance of expectations in all areas of life is hard to overstate.

Alright. Those are the three books covering story structure. It's both a lot and not very much. Mostly, not very much since I skipped most of the stuff in all three of those books, and it's only three books out of a countless number. I'm trying to whittle down to the key insights that I can use, combine, and adapt to create something better. So we don't need to cover everything, especially since this article is just the beginning of a lifetime pursuit.

Next, let's look at scenes. A scene is a unit of story. Exact definitions of scenes are hard to find. It's only a slightly fuzzy concept. It's something like a unit of story connected by space/time where there's a set of connected actions that result in a value change. That's the best idea I have off the top of my head. People mostly determine what a scene is by feel. I'll probably work on creating a better definition in the future, but that's not the task right now.

"A Practical Handbook for the Actor" has six authors: Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael, Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, and Scott Zigler. Oddly enough, it's a small book, less than 100 pages. It's based on a seminar put on by David Mamet, W. H. Macy, and Gregory Mosher.

They use a three step scene analysis method that I like. I think it might even be useful for life.

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1. What is the character literally doing?

2. What is the essential action of what the character is doing in this scene?

3. What is that action like to me? It's as if...

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Now we'll look at how Rober McKee does scene analysis from his book "Story". I'll include a couple of quotes to define and explain things a bit.

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Step One: Define Conflict

First ask, who drives the scene, motivates it, and makes it happen?

What does he (or it) want?

What forces of antagonism block this desire?

What do the forces of antagonism want?

(Use the infinitive for the verb.)

Step Two: Note Opening Value

Identify the value at stake in the scene and note its charge, positive or negative, at the opening of the scene.

Step Three: Break the Scene into Beats

A beat is an exchange of action/reaction in character behavior. Look carefully at the scene's first action on two levels: outwardly, in terms of what the character seems to be doing, and, more important, look beneath the surface to what he is actually doing.

(Use a gerund for the verb.)

Step Four: Note Closing Value and Compare with Opening Value

At the end of the scene, examine the value-charged condition of the character's situation and describe it in positive/negative terms.

Step Five: Survey Beats and Locate Turning Point

...locate the moment when the major gap opens between expectation and result, turning the scene to its changed end values.

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In "Pride and Prejudice: The Story Grid Edition" Shawn Coyne does his scene analysis 61 times. Here's the basic idea.

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A story event is an active change of life value for one or more characters as a result of conflict (one character's desires clash with another's).

A working scene contains at least one story event.

1. What are the characters literally doing?

2. What is the essential action of what the characters are doing in this scene?

3. What life value has changed for one or more of the characters in the scene?

4. Which life value should I highlight on my story grid spreadsheet?

Highlight the value that best tracks the scene-by-scene progress of the global value at stake.

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You can see how Coyne has used ideas from both of the previous books.

The last subject for this article, sentences. Don't worry, we are just going to skim lightly over this area for now.

"The Brilliance Breakthrough" by Eugene Schwartz is an odd book. He throws out all of grammar and then recreates his own system based on image words and connecting words. It's a different way of thinking about language. It goes well with my idea of the semantic square, which I still haven't written an article about yet. The focus is on communication rather than language.

"The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker is a fairly classic take on linguistics, probably the best modern take. His chapter on arcs of coherence seems like it might be useful to dive into and explore with experimentation.

Technically, this idea comes from Tzvetan Todorov in his book "The Poetics of Prose", but the genius Jerome Bruner made it better in his book "Actual Minds, Possible Worlds". The general idea is that you can transform a sentence from a simple statement to being psychologically active in six basic ways, and six more complex ways. I am just going to list examples here based on the statement: x commits a crime. The possibilities are much greater than these examples.

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Mode: x must commit a crime.

Intention: x plans to commit a crime.

Result: x succeeds in committing a crime.

Manner: x is keen to commit a crime.

Aspect: x is beginning to commit a crime.

Status: x is not committing a crime.

Appearance: x pretends he has committed a crime.

Knowledge: x learns y has committed a crime.

Supposition: x foresees he will commit a crime.

Description: x reports he has committed a crime.

Subjectification: x thinks he has committed a crime.

Attitude: x enjoys committing a crime.

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I definitely need to explore that more.

That's the idea, if you can write good sentences that make good scenes that make good stories then you have mastered writing. It's a process that would take the rest of an immortal's life.

I will need to take these things and apply them to digging into a story. Then I'll need to try to use them in adjusting my own writing.

The story that I apply them to needs to be short, or it will take a long time to go through each iteration. The more iterations I can go through the faster my learning curve will be. Jerome Bruner used the short stories from James Joyce's collection "Dubliners". I'm thinking about using "Cain and Able" first. It's short, powerful, and ancient. Then maybe "There's No Such Thing as a Dragon" by Jack Kent because it's amazing and short, and fun.

For my own writing, when I play with these ideas I could do a completely original story, or I could play with something like a fairytale. You can write a fairytale in a lot of different ways. I can't remember which writer recommended it, but some famous one. They recommended doing it to get a feel for the genres. For instance, take "The Three Little Pigs" and write it as an action story, then a murder mystery, then a romance (somehow?), then a western, etc. It's a cool idea.

That's a project for a different day.

________________________________________________

Read more of what Jeff deems worthy of attention at: http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

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mimosaeyes · 6 years

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The 4th Quarterly Book Recs!

previous installations | Goodreads account

Welcome to the end of 2018. This year, I read 104 books (an average of 2 each week; manageable and satisfyingly neat). But I read several of them multiple times, either for essay-writing purposes, or procrastination / obsession reasons. Or both. If you count re-reads, my total is 124, which... mildly alarms me.

I joined Goodreads this year, and apparently they generate this little graphic of your year in books...? Here’s mine. What a lark. At the start of this year, I set myself a Reading Challenge goal of 80 books, but soon found I had to up it to 100. Next year, though, I will be spending more time reading for my Honours Thesis, so I’m setting the goal (measuring mostly leisure reading) much lower.

Under the cut you’ll find 5 titles listed from this quarter’s reading, along with spoiler-free excerpts from my existing ‘reviews’ on Goodreads; they’re just impressionistic commentary, really. I’ve included trigger warnings in my full reviews, and indicated here which books might contain such material. I list these warnings not to sensationalise the novel(s), but for your safety.

See you in the new year!

New favourites (in alphabetical order)

Circe by Madeline Miller (full review below)

Binged it all in (close to) one sitting, felt greedy and thirsty, like I was lapping away at nectar. I've read The Song of Achilles, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but Madeline Miller's lucid, poetic, at times heart-throbbing prose just blew me away. Somehow she's able to convey a sense of the world of myth and epic, yet speak transparently to a contemporary consciousness. Stunning. Thrilling. I don't have the words.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (full review here, including trigger warnings)

Eleanor's wounds are not raw but cauterised: they are no longer actively bleeding, but they still hurt. This book is about her finally acknowledging that, and doing something about it. (Perhaps that resonates a little too much with me, especially this year.) I liked that it wasn't a Hallmark card, Lifetime movie type of narrative, which I was afraid it was becoming initially.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (full review here)

Humorous, harrowing, and I wish I had another 'h' word to alliterate, but all I can think is: moving. I enjoyed reading about Winterson's attitudes toward her religion and the community that betrayed her. I admit I didn't understand some of the more experimental spiels, but that only makes me want to revisit this book at some point...

Neat discoveries

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman (full review here; I got a bit obsessed with this fluffy series)

The plot premise to this series allows for some of my favourite things: espionage, period dress, multiple universes, books, and the potential for playing with incongruities/anachronisms/fun set pieces. Cogman manages to combine a level of nuance achievable in the best fantasy novels (and less so in filmic media, in my personal opinion) with cinematic moments of tension and climactic action. I enjoyed, too, the little literary allusions and grammar jokes peppered throughout.

三体 / The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (full review here; I’m bilingual enough to read it in the original Chinese, but I stuck to English for my review)

Liu Cixin has a vivid imagination, both conceptually and cinematically, if the latter makes any sense. I flip-flopped about the structure and narrative style (embedded perspectives and voices). I like that Liu Cixin sets up, then unfolds, all these questions and mysteries, but the pace does sag a little in parts. Then again, perhaps I've been ruined by Hollywood's affixing of action-movie pacing to the science fiction genre. This story does a better job at... at taking place in the real world. I think that's how I'd articulate it.

#mqbr #mimo reads

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kin-collective · 6 years

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By Essence Harden -- 8.8.18

(An edited version of this interview originally appeared in Performa Magazine, August 2018)

keyon gaskin is an artist at the inter- of disciplines and positions. Corporeal poetics, gestural manipulations, and discursive shouts inform gaskin’s take at performance art, black social/dance, sound, and theatre. The tentative arrangement of gaskin’s time-based work shatters relationships not merely between perceived audience and artist but curator and gallery, land and architecture, trust and supposition. Preferring to not qualify their work (gaskin’s artist statement reads “keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials”) the assertion of what it is gaskin does is informed by the experiential spectatorship within gaskins work. gaskin is not here for entertainment (though they do entertain) rather their performative based art is a blustery and fervent trip where those echoes of the subjective experience reverberate in the room with them and after.

gaskin and I sat down to talk about their artistic practice on hot Los Angeles summer evening. This conversation begins with our discussion of my first experience attending gaskin’s piece “this is an interactive experience for you/.you are a community/.you are my material/.this is your prison/.leave when you want” part of the Hammer Museums weekend-long exhibition “At night the states” in January of 2017. In this work gaskin moved between the formal stage and the audience floor, arranging and rearranging furniture and people by gesture and voice. Wearing all black, gaskin would form lines of folks reminiscent of a tribunal, rings of people squeezing every closer together, and masses of bodies shifting and swaying to where gaskin seemingly desired. At times reciting prose or direction, at times tossing chairs or placing people, gaskin wound, bent, and graced his body throughout the ever-shifting space. Ending and beginning without fanfare (simply gaskin emerged and began movements at the pieces start time and said it was over when finished) gaskin spun a narrative between and with the audience, the Hammer, the room, and himself for close to an hour.

Our conversation begins here and explores the contents of gaskin’s work, probing moments, and his thoughts on artistry, mastery, and defiance.

Essence: My first experience of seeing you perform at the Hammer Museum in 2016 for “At Night the States.” Not only did I not know what to expect because you don’t qualify what you do with program text or curatorial statements, but once there I found myself simultaneously rolling with laughter and near tears. I think part of it was the intensity of the audience not knowing what to expect and how you moved around the room and engaged with the stage (in this performance you had chairs on the stage that we’re being moved around erratically at times and had audience members sitting on them at times). There was this great force with your movements throughout the room- asking and gesturing for our bodies [the audience] to be closer in proximity while you ground through the new, dense mass of people. There was an older white couple, some kids, and a lot of folks who I would not, in general, find myself sharing such tight and hectic quarters with which made me laugh and feel uncomfortable at the same time. The experience was really one of a collapsed space wherein expansion and intimacy seemed bound up in it.

What is your process with this kind of work? What was the process for this piece? It’s not black social dance, but it is absolutely black social dance, It’s not performance art but it’s absolutely performance art, it’s not theater, but it absolutely is.

keyon: i like that. Initially, i go back to when i started making solo performance pieces—i say “solo” which is funny because, while I’m the initiator, instigator, and primary performing figure, it's important to recognize the active role of the audience in my work. Early on, i realized that i like to center what's happening in that room at that particular moment; we can look at it as a microcosm—if not of the world then at least of art scenes or institutions. In performance, what's happening in the room is always indicative of larger social, political, historical ways of engagement.

i try to use the information in the room to highlight how those social structures are present. i think that my role is important, but it's also important just to have the space to be in tune with, and very much listening to, the room. With that older white couple, i didn't want to move them from the front row, and i made a point not to disturb them, but there was really violent action going on around them. They were a little shook, and everybody else moved farther away from them. It was this thing of seeing that couple, seeing where they were placed, seeing that there was space around them that i could engage in an action, and how that will bring something to light. And i think we all became aware of us differently. We became aware that they were sitting in the room, that they chose to sit in the front row. We became aware of the absence of bodies around them.

Essence: In my memory, they were on the stage, by virtue of the activity around them.

keyon: It highlights them no matter where they were in the room. you know, the stage is so not tired but also tired in a way. I’m not one to be like anything is dead necessarily, i think everything has space to be enlivened and the stage is doing work in whatever vein that it’s in. I don’t think theater has nothing to offer but the stage is so easily trope-ish, problematic, and indicative of oppressive systems of power. i also think a lot about how the stage centralizes focus, as opposed to a softening or opening of focus, what i think of as feminist gaze. What are you choosing to look at? Is it the most interesting thing in the room? Or is the thing that’s actually happening what’s happening on the stage or is it actually the person breathing heavily and making comments under their breath two rows back that you barely hear that are hopefully influencing your experience. i think I’m often trying to just highlight these other things.

And i’m not into mastery either. i’m always in that space of defiance when it comes to regulations, regimes, and boundaries. i have a multidisciplinary background in theater, art, and dance. All of these things are things that I have at some moment been much more invested in their “pure” form. i definitely studied theater, studied dance, and for years i was invested in learning as much art history, color theory, etc. as i could. i feel like it’s cool to invest in things and then be able to not hold that preciousness and allow these art forms to integrate into my experience and my body.

Essence: Yeah, because preciousness is precarious, right? And I don’t believe in, the notion that one does one thing for the entirety of their existence. You hit so many things I want to follow-up with so I’m going to work a little bit backward. You mentioned the troubling of spectatorship, macro, and micro-engagement, disentangling of borders and boundaries within disciplines and rupturing the seams that form them. Like the stitches in a pillow, you show us the binding that holds this discrete structure together, and then you rip it up and leaving us, including yourself, with the mess of what it means to create a kind of comfort in this disarray. And I’m so interested in how we think about going to something that’s being marketed as a performance, as spectators, and you being in their actively dispelling that.

I would love for you to talk to me more about that idea of troubled spectatorship, wherein the audience members and the institution are both implicated.

keyon: Well, first of all, everything is site-specific. i feel like it’s more of a thing in dance and theater where the stage is seen as this somehow universal or neutral space that you can take these things that you’ve made in a box somewhere else and just plant them and it just magically works with her. i don’t believe that because of all the things around space and place… what else was this building used for? Whose things inform what’s happening.

With making this abstract, experimental sort of work i can’t wholly know or predict what every person coming is bringing, and i’m not giving (via a curatorial or artist statement) a specific narrative for folks to follow so i know that everyone’s subjective experience is totally influencing whatever “it” is. This goes to the thing with spectatorship for me. It reminds me of something that i’ve been thinking about lately, which is objectivity is not real. As a theory or concept, i get it, and perhaps there are non-human being/s that are objective. i don’t think it’s humans. Everything we receive comes from the subjective and we can’t think beyond our own existence. So that layer of how i know that everybody’s coming with their subjective thing and everybody’s going to read what they read into it, especially because this is kind of abstract, experimental thing. Even if i am working in specific concepts, i’m not necessarily interested in folks needing to take note of those things. Which is why I don’t give a lot of language before my performances because i think that the experience that we have in that room, which is based on all of our subjective experiences, is what is informing the work as well. And though i understand that as the artist who’s invited people here, it’s my role to initiate, instigate, engage and provide an offering, and that offering can look as many different ways as there are different people, plus the multitude of ways as to do what we will with that material after we leave that room.

And that to me is the juice or the meat of it. That possibility, the potential that this thing that we’re engaging within this room right now can snowball or turn into or amalgamate or slip and leak into something else through our engagement with it, through having been in that room and now talking about it. Or sleeping on it and having some sort of dream that arises from that. Or having that experience inform how you tell your little cousin something three years down the road. That’s really the potential of anything that we’re doing.

Essence: Yes! It really feels like you’re remarking on the world. Being in the room with you, you, Keyon, are the initiator, but we in attendance are also the initiator for even coming to the performance in the first place. There’s a level of autonomy happening because you came.

keyon: Right! Exactly. Also, there’s this thing of responsibility. As though, “i’m responsible for you and what you receive now because you made a decision to come here tonight?” Whether you spent money or not, you made the decision to be here as well, and i am here offering something, whether you read it as an offering or not.

To get back to spectatorship and experimental abstract work, …this isn’t entertainment.

Essence: You will not be sitting here passively with your popcorn.

keyon: Exactly.

Essence: Try to have that popcorn, it’s going to get snatched out of someone’s hands!

keyon: Exactly. And now i will be having some, and we can talk about what it means for me to take your popcorn. i’m so here for those things coming up. i also love when something that happens that i didn’t expect. i work in improv, i set up structures—the score of that piece from The Hammer you’re talking about is actually the title of the piece. At that time it was called “this is a performance.” Now it’s called “this is an artwork/this is for you/you are a community/you are my material/ this is a prison leave/leave when you want.” That’s the only text that i give for the work. That poem is the score that i’m working from. i used that poem to come up with physical ways to engage those things. i’m starting with a specific thing, and it shows up with me moving bodies around and emphasizing other bodies. i’m highlighting the prison of the institution, the prison of us being here, the prison we trap ourselves in, and with each other.

i don’t like to talk about stuff too much because i feel like saying “this is a prison” to me leaves it open enough without trying to make these direct correlations between our institutions and the prison industrial complex, which feels absurd in some ways to make. i’m not saying that’s what’s happening here in the art industrial complex, but i am saying that having that word in your head and being in this space together thinking through or feeling that that can do something, can open us up to how we think about the space we’re in.

Essence: I think it’s interesting to think about the use of not only a poem as a score, or as a type of corporal reality which is so brilliant, but also the way of language. I’m thinking of Kristina Sharpe’s book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and the many ways of “wake” in thinking on and of black ontology– the space between and collapsed into a word.

I notice with your titles you have that forward slash spacing between groups of words (this is for you. / you are a community. / this is my performance. / you are my material. / this is a prison. / leave when you want.), and I’m thinking about that break, and the space in between language and the multiple meanings of a word like “prison”– to be in jail, to be imprisoned in your mind, a type of physicality. It’s a multitude of beings, and while we assume language to be particular and universal within many contexts, it’s actually your own assumptions that guide that assumption.

keyon: Thank you! That’s your own assumption. i’m talking about a de-centering of objectivity or objectivity as an impossibility. We need to deal with the fact that we’re coming to this world through our subjective experience. The more we can say, “okay, maybe i’m seeing it this way,” and acknowledge that we are seeing it one way and that it may not be the way it is, then we are more available to engage with one another across boundaries.

Essence: Even our colonizer language.

Keyon: Yep.

Essence: Or black folks constantly signifying and re-mapping language–from “kink” to “funk,” to “nasty”—meaning is remade.

keyon: Ha that part too! i mean i’m black and i love it. i like a lot of theorizing, black theory, and the critical race theory that’s happening now. i love that so much theory or the things that have come to me through theory are talking about the expansive nature of blackness. i just read Dawn Lundy Martin’s “A Black Poetics: Against Mastry,” and it was a trip. What i took from it was the correlation between blackness and the impossible, blackness to nothingness, and equating that to creativity. Mastery is to be bored. To know something so completely is to be bored. Creativity always comes out of a place of not knowing anything, and I don’t think that means being unfamiliar or wholly ignorant of it.

Essence: Right, but it does mean being uncomfortable.

keyon: Without a doubt. It means not knowing what the outcome is going to be. For my work, i may come in with a certain score but it’s important for me not to know who is going to be there. i have specifics that I’m working for, but it’s super important that i, as the person who has invited us here, do not know how this thing is going to turn out. That thing in my work you pointed to “is it this or is it that?” i don’t even know what it totally is. i often feel like i’m pulling from all of my experience, a lot of times from all of our experience–including the experience of the room–in ways that i couldn’t have known.

Once i was performing in a theater that used to be a horse stable, and i swear to God so much horse shit came up that night. It was the piece “it’s not a thing” that i’ve been doing forever, but i always adapt to specific spaces. It’s one of the pieces that i tap dance in, and i had this other collaboration with Sidony O’Neal called “Dead Thoroughbred,” so there was all this wild corollary coming up. Between horses and blackness, being sold, tamed, and broken, these sorts of things came up in the work that night. It wasn’t just me holding that either—i talked to other people after that didn’t know the history of the space, that had experienced things around horse-ness. i think that the room influenced that, and when i do that piece in other countries, there’s a part in that piece at the beginning where i talk to the audience and hire a translator in front of everybody. i bring $10 with me, and i’m like, “who’s willing to translate for me for $10?” The translator tends to have so much influence as well—these ways in which to work also escape me— to be able to throw all these things out, but also wrangle it all as well.

My friend visual/sound artist Adee Roberson talks about me being the trickster or the fool, and i identify with those roles. We think of the fool as cunning, and i think that coming at things from the side, you can get at something without holding the full responsibility of it. You’re like, “Oop, yep i said that” and now what happens, now where does that go? There’s something to that archetype that resonates with me.

Essence: Absolutely. The Fool is also the first card in the Tarot deck and has this primary social presence. I think of The Fool as the person who can talk trash to the King and remain in grace. And then the trickster through black folklore with this crafty genius level of intelligence—to be able to live, survive, and even thrive in a world where you’re abject. To survive by virtue of not being seen and holding up various mirrors, offering a reflection for someone else, society, or for a room. But then here you are gesturing, dancing, and performing beyond it, behind it, remaining just out of reach. One can try to pin you and your work down but you’re going to be wrong, and when you find yourself being wrong, you’re going to find yourself being seen and seeing your own reflection in that dance of mirrors.

keyon: Something else about The Fool is that it’s also someone who positioned as such, but makes the best of that position. i think about this so much about being “burdened” and overdetermined when it comes to black folks, queer folks, but primarily with black people, especially in America. Like, “oh, okay, if you want me down there then i’m going to not only make the most of that space, but i supersede what you even thought that was possible.”

Essence: And I’m unpinnable. Try as you may, you always fail.

You mentioned the exhibition I curated “black is a color” and your performance for the closing, which was beyond anything I could’ve ever hoped for. We had toured the gallery the day before, (the gallery had the main floor with artworks arranged on the walls with three smaller installations by artist Adee Roberson, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, and Texas Isaiah and a smaller, room behind it with a single installation by Azikiwe Mohammed. Upstairs were the administrative office and downstairs, in the basement, was another show (Alexander Rebe, Wax Chromatic) and you touched a few things and scanned the room asking if some areas like the stairwell or the desk were sturdy and that was that. I had no idea what you were going to do…only that I had faith in your artwork. Then the night of the performance hits and we’re all here and it’s happening and I’m like, “Oh, keyon is about to climb down the rail of this 15 or 17-foot high staircase,” and after that, it was just on. One of the first things that resonated for me was how blackness appeared in these disembodied forms—there was the cast iron skillet you were wielding, the black sweats you were wearing, and your black high heels—the way that blackness appears as a color.

keyon: And that’s that piece too. It’s also a rumination on the color black. So when you invited me to “black is a color,” i was like, “i have the perfect piece!”

Essence: I would love for you to talk specifically about it in the context of the Charlie James Gallery, but also, how has it formed at other locations?

keyon: That piece is called It’s not a thing. i should say that the piece develops through performance—i do a lot of performing of a thing; i think about a thing, i start with a concept or idea or something, etc. So it actually started with doing things that i didn’t want to do in performance or things that i have contention within performance.

Essence: Like what?

keyon: Like drag, dancing to music, using race as a specific material for making, using personal trauma or experience as material for making. These are all things that i have contention with, not to say that they’re tools that i don’t use, but they are things that i have contention with, primarily in contemporary art and performance. There’s a whole list of things that come out of the opening monologue…

Working with race as a material was one of the things i didn’t want to do that i started to trip out on and landed me with blackness— thinking about blackness, thinking about this thing of using personal material, lived experience, which i think we all do always. That’s the thing about subjectivity– everybody is making identity work. Damien Hirst is making very white male informed work, you know what i’m saying? This is the thing: we’re all making from our subjective lived experience, so my contention with it isn’t necessarily that i don’t want to be it, but that i don’t want to be pigeonholed.

Essence: In recognition of what tends to happen to black folks making work, when you say (or don’t say) anything about black people or being black, you’ll only be put into conversation with blackness as a ceiling, a limit, an unfixed homogeneous experience.

keyon: Exactly. And so yeah, i was on this trip on and about blackness. i started thinking about what we do culturally with the color black—black magic, black snow, black space, black holes, etc. i like minimal things, minimal aesthetics. i prefer to walk into the room with just my body and in it’s not a thing, it’s the literal hammer i walk in with. If i use objects, they all need to hold weight and have multiple layers of access. So the cast iron, for instance, is, to me, a literal black hole if you look at it. But i also think of it as a feminist weapon. i think about my grandmother threatening folks with hot grease out of the cast iron, or it being the first weapon she’d pick up if somebody came into the house.

i also think about movement a lot in that piece and the way that the movement affects my body and takes my body out of control. When i start with the cast iron skillet way up above my head and then swinging this thing down i’m at once handling it but it is simultaneously handling me. That’s just to say that all the objects i bring in need to have multiple layers of access and have a life or experience that can be witnessed– that i could just walk in and put the cast iron down and be like, let’s consider this skillet. We could go hard on it, there could be a lot to come out of that, you know?

Essence: Especially a cast iron for some reason, right? It feels like slavery and present life…it’s past/present and it has this multiplicity of use-value. When you were talking about your body being led by it as you also were leading it, I was thinking of earlier in our conversation when you spoke about moving chairs around the older white couple and the sense of discomfort that’s built in a room around brash movement.

When you hit the window at Charlie James Gallery with the cast iron, I assumed it wasn’t going to break. But, after I thought about it, I questioned myself about the security of your actions, like “why do I think keyon thinks this won’t break?”

keyon: i love messing with that relationship. We immediately give trust and respect to spaces by virtue of their existence, without asking why. Years ago i used to talk about the rules of engagement in art. What are these rules that we’re all agreeing to? But especially when we’re coming from a radical, queer, black perspective, and we know that we don’t trust this shit, so why don’t we challenge these rules? Why do we not challenge that when we come into a theater, we sit down and allow for whatever the person onstage is going to do? And trust that we won’t be harmed?

Why? Because the institution told you that you should? Because we assumed that this person wouldn’t do anything? So that role in challenging and questioning those norms (did i know the window would not break?) with people trusting me, without challenging what i was doing, since no one grabbed the skillet out of my hand. i’m always interested in troubling and challenging.

Essence: So much of your practice, what i’ve experienced at least, is about what you get out of the tension between bodies and space? And even in your biography or curatorial statement, or lack of them, the tension produced in a limited space, the possibility of productivity. i just love how much you mess with our senses, sensibility, and space that you offer via discomfort. How it’s a real opportunity for engagement.

i wanted to ask what, for you, is the purpose of an exhibition title, artist biography, or artist’s statement? i’ve been thinking about an earlier conversation we had where you described using a black box in lieu of an artist statement when responding to a galleries request.

keyon: My sister recently told me that she’s been coming into her own more, speaking up rather than staying quiet. She’s seen my work, and she knows me (I am a contrarian, I have no problem saying, “nope”) and she’s like, “it does feel good and empowering to use my voice and not to be so hurt when people are offended.” But she did ask me, “how do you do it? How do you keep holding that space?” I know it feels hard for her (and other folks especially black womxn) to make the room uncomfortable because it is truly uncomfortable feeling. It’s hard for people to disagree. But I’m not into group think. I was the president of my college Student Government Association and went in on them on my second week, and let them know, “people need to think for themselves and we’re not here to collectively agree with one another.”

Essence: This is what democracy looks like.

keyon: Yeah. And i do think that more voices, multiple voices taking the time to consider, to sit with things, and be uncomfortable actually reap a more holistic space. But i realize that part of my training and part of how i am is that i can hold that space…i can be the person who makes it difficult and uncomfortable, and i can sit in that and with that, and it doesn’t throw me. i think it’s generative, and i don’t think it gets offered enough. i do feel like since i can, and since i have the inclination to, i do. And again, i’m a contrarian, i am not one who’s here for someone saying, “this is the way it is because i said so.”

Essence: So the way that you use your artist bio or if you are curating your curatorial statement is a way of pushing back?

keyon: Exactly, they’re ways of challenging and pushing back at that thing. When i first did the bio thing i got so many artists being like, “Oh shit, that’s dope!” or “i wish i could do that” or “How do you do that?” For me, that felt super affirming that people needed that. People need to know that we don’t have to take the shit that they give us on their terms. For example, in institutions’ bio samples, they tell you flat out how they want you to present yourself, and there are no bones about it. People rarely question it? That’s wild.

This new piece is a self-portrait, but the title is the color lavender. Literally, i want it to be a block or swatch of the color lavender, or the title of the pieces is a swatch of lavender. Everybody gets a book when they come in the room with a little bit of lavender painted on the cover, and this is the title. It’s been difficult to make that happen with institutions, who say, “well we use words,” but in the age that we’re in, do you really? And even if someone has to put “a swatch of lavender” in brackets my having to fight with institutions about that, i feel like, is doing some work. Why are titles necessarily that way?

Institutions also ask, “well how are we going to get people here?” Those are rules you’ve made imagining how and why people attend shows. People come to things for a lot of different reasons. There are so many ways to get people to a thing. i’m not super invested in capitalism, i’m not invested in your organization making whatever amount of money tonight. i’m going to get paid the same amount, which sometimes that’s nothing or sometimes that’s the amount that you’ve agreed to pay me, which you already wrote that grant to get, baby. i don’t necessarily care if this house is packed right now. But I’m very invested in what’s happening in the room. i care about who comes to the room that night.

Essence: There are people who see a strip of the color lavender in the space of the exhibition title and say, “I want to go to this.”

keyon: Exactly. The black box thing, i’ve had several people who were not in the arts—a couple from Switzerland, quite a few people from Berlin and New York—who came up to me after that and said, “I didn’t know you, I didn’t know your work, but when I saw a program description that was a black box and no words, I knew I had to come to this.” And that’s what i’m talking about.

Essence: Right, who do you get? Who do you engage with? And how do you also respect your audience? To think that people might have some inkling of desire outside of the words you’ve written down. I think so much of what you’re talking about goes back to the idea that you will not get better or different things if you keep accepting what you’ve been given and imagining it as permanent.

keyon: Exactly. You helped me a little moment ago with a piece that i’ve been working on. It started with Alf actually, the show about the alien, and then it was about Alf and Jesus.

Essence: I always thought Alf was black.

keyon: i have a whole thing around Alf being black. They kept Alf in this backhouse where he would not come out if anyone else was over and while he wasn’t helping out necessarily he was around for the family’s morale. He was like this pet that was brown and an immigrant. i was thinking about it as these figures that actually do provide a lot, but that are also subjugated, oppressed and objectified. i think that’s why Jesus as a historical figure came up for me. Jesus was a savior of people and murdered for such beliefs, and then what we do posthumously, right? It’s crazy. Anyways this conversation is helping me gig through that more.

But getting back to what i was saying, i’m thinking about something Fred said in reference to Fannie Lou Hamer, which was that her practice was her statement and the statement is “refuse that which has been refused to you.” i think of this a lot when doing my bio.

i haven’t always had access to this world, being in my body, being how i am and not into professionalism. It has everything to do with being a radical punk, anti-professional, anti-capitalist and these sorts of things. So i’ve been refused this level of access the whole time, and now you want to access me. So no, you can get it how i decide to give it to you, but you can’t get it like you want it. Now what? You’re gonna have to take it as is or you won’t get it.

But i’m also not invested in my success, and this is also a big part of my practice that i feel like i have to hold onto. Look, i can die poor and nobody can know my work. i like living, i like my friends, i like eating, i am a very resourceful person, and I’ll be fine. i don’t need your institution to validate me.

Essence: Absolutely. People say that they don’t care, but the reality is that 90% percent of us do care, and I’ll put myself in there. I have to remind myself that if I want to do something quite outside institutional norms, then I will likely not be able to garner success economically in relation to an institution.

I think that we’re in a moment where the term radical, as in someone existence or in an image they take or the superfluous language they use to describe themselves/practice is in a particular type of vogue. However, there are no guarantees that one’s mere existence as black or queer person is somehow a project towards or of liberation. I’m much more interested in what is practiced, challenged and active in our existence. Not in Fannie Lou Hammer as a mere symbol but in her actual radical practice. I think the desired recklessness in your work, the way you engage with what it looks like to “not care” is such a profound move towards disinvestment.

It’s risky and uncomfortable, but still, the risk is necessary, and it’s actually something one can do. And the punishments vary for deciding to not belong or to pretend to belong, or to desire to belong, but there is a type of worth in it. It’s encouraging to my spirit to really ask, what does success look like?

keyon: i’m glad you asked the question because i’ve been grappling with the art world’s investment in failure which makes me wrestle with what we mean when we talk about success. If this idea of “failure” exists in a binary relationship with success, then this means that there are measures of success, which I don’t know if I really believe. i think this is the thing about making work and performance, that every time i make work, it’s not going to be something that everybody wants.

Essence: But is that then successful?

keyon: Is it or is it not? i don’t know. Or is it just what happened? And do we have to assign measures of value to things? i don’t judge this thing—this thing happened. That’s all I know, that it happened, and i feel all sorts of ways about it all of the time—whether it was well-attended or made money or black people were there or not. We can talk about things i desire out of a performance, and i don’t even know what that entirely is. i am about what happened and what is happening right now.

Essence: Presence.

keyon: What is supposed to be happening and what needed to happen right now. So i would never say it was a success or failure because it happened. It is what it was and i don’t need to judge it.

Essence: They do feel like moral qualifiers —one imagines their life trajectory bending towards justness and non-inherent values like economic wealth and capitalistic acceptance. If it’s not doing that, then we can lean on the hope of success a failure contingent upon the eventual success of the thing. What then does it look like to take up the task of living without a qualifier?

keyon: Because if it, one’s life, one’s work, is being measured on a scale of success or justness, then i’m so hopeless. This is also a big part of what i’m doing, i don’t have hope—i don’t think “success” is ever possible. The world we live in is so violent and heinous all of the time in everything that we do and have is born of it. We are sitting here with our phones and Apple computers to make this conversation happen, which i love and i’m so joyful about that, but it’s contingent upon various forms of abusive labor practices, including children in central Africa. How can that be a success?

And if you’re performing anywhere in the United States, guess what? You can never have a successful event because it’s happening in relation to Indigenous Americans genocide and displacement. Whether we acknowledge it or not in our daily lives, and i know it’s impossible to do that every moment of every day), but it is there. It just is.

We get these boxed in ways of looking at the world based on our society, and we make up ideas of success based on a limited version of what’s happening, and that’s just false to me and it feels foolish to do so. If i was judging on those scales, then i would have to talk about all of the ways that there’s no way the work could succeed because of all of the ways that it’s failed, outside of my control.

Photo by Iris Alonzo

#essenceharden #keyongaskin #interviews

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