Exercise for a disabled
practice
1. Imagine
your daily routine. What is something you do everyday that you take for
granted? A movement? A way of interacting with others in space? How is the
world around you constructed to accommodate this way of being in the world? How
does language facilitate this experience?
4.
Design
an exercise based on your daily routines—movement, language use, ways that you
engage your senses, etc. Instruct yourself (or a body similar to yours) on how
to make your environment unfamiliar. What constraints or procedures could
estrange the daily rhythms of how you interact with the world? How can you use
language to record or mediate this experience?
5.
Alternately,
imagine a way that your body/person is already constrained or disabled by your
environment. Design an exercise by which you (or one with a body similar
to yourself) can use this constraint to make art or writing. How can
writing/art accurately record/mediate/respond to ways you feel constrained by
your social environment? Physically, mentally, and otherwise.
Projectivism and Disability
Poetics
Charles Olson,
in “Projective Verse,” calls for poets to attend the particularity of their own
embodiment (breath, heartbeat, etc.) as source for the poem—its form. This is
one way to look at “P.V.”; Olson naturalizes the poem as a site of
extended embodiment. The poem is a measure of the person. He doesn’t mention whose
body would be measured, though we can assume it is a normative one.
What happens
when we look at Larry Eigner? [...] Eigner radicalizes Olson’s
observation/injunction that the poet is one who dances in their chair; in other
words, in place. That mobility (the dance) is an activity one performs on and
through the page.
As
[Michael] Davidson points out, Eigner’s work is intensely mobile (the grammar
constantly shifts, suggesting multiple pivots or possibilities in which to move
through the poem); whereas he spent much of his adult life confined to a
wheelchair as a result of cerebral palsy, contracted at birth.
Eigner is
often seen as a Projectivist poet, but what does his perceived projectivism
mean in relation to Olson? How does his work, as a work of a disabled
embodiment, radicalize Olson’s compositional prescriptions to extend
content through form (where we may take the person’s difficulties with an
ablest environment as the content in need/search of proper form).
My symptoms control the discourse.
--Jordan
Scott
My body is the problem.
--Amber
Di Pietra
Jordan
Scott and Amber Di Pietra are two poets who radicalize Olsonian-Eignerian
projectivism, where the poem becomes a site where their specific bodies extend
themselves linguistically/performatively in relation to a/an (ableist) built/social
environment.
Scott
says in an interview that he never writes about his stutter, opting instead to
write poems/scripts that will serve to enact speech dysfluency as a condition
or symptom of his specific embodiment.
Using
language that is difficult for him (and most people, for that matter) to
pronounce, the stutter becomes a constraint providing that language with a new
social value. As if a ‘failed’ virtuosity/elocution—or simply a non-absorbing
one—becomes virtuosic. If in sound poetry historically one attends the voice
alone—the voice as transmitter of an estranging content—Scott gives the voice
back to a body. The voice becomes body again. Not logocentric, but the
materialization of an irreducible presence.
[…]
Spontaneity: The difficulty of the script/poem—as
something recitable (customized, as such) for Scott’s condition—enables
spontaneity, surprise, suspense. A
difference between Scott and, say, Dada or Cage: that a physical condition is the
source of the aleatory (chance operations, etc.). Not the imposition of a
procedure. Discursion feeding back with the non-discursive (embodiment). Not a gestus, because Scott is not speaking
through a set of cultural codes per se. Gestus can only be under (or over)
determined. Is his an unalienated form of gestus? [Like all things
involuntary.]
Di Pietra/Leto’s
Waveform: A book of correspondence,
poems/writings in process, found texts, texts about [their] medical conditions,
theory…
What
strikes me is how both writers are seeking language forms appropriate to their
conditions—in Di Pietra case severe rheumatoid arthritis; in Leto’s,
Parkinson’s.
[…]
Through
their correspondence they are able to explore how their conditions necessitate
different definitions of the writer. The writer, in Di Pietra's case, who cannot
spend a lot of time in place, dancing in their chair, as it were.
Or, as
Di Pietra asks in Waveform [to
paraphrase]: What does it mean to insert one’s self in a genealogy of writers who
have rigorously questioned and mistrusted identity (“experimental writing,” the
avant-garde) when disability/activism often demands that one identify
themselves?
Pain as
constraint: Whereas Scott writes
through speech dysfluency, Di Pietra and Leto write through pain as (a visceral
form of) constraint. It is what forces them to write through a non-normative (non-ableist)
set of circumstances; it also becomes that which they are trying to not merely
describe or narrate, but essentialize through language (syntax, grammar). [Their
work asks] [w]hat is a language form for the often unnameable/undescribeable
experience of pain?
Constraint
of the social/built environment: Di Pietra/Leto are also searching for forms
that might accurately document and perform their experience of social
environments and institutions unaccommodating to their specific bodies. How to
foreground the language of these environments [which often involve legal and
social institutions]?
Not struggling – improving poetry through the
stutter – every mouth affected by limitations – limitation becomes useful,
beautiful – “what is the utterance?” – how is it arrived at (not just what he’s
saying) – the words he chose – [?] to pronouns – radical when read with such
particularity – “what a poor, crawling thing you are” – “it is part of my
existence to be a parasite to metaphors” – illogical, based on sound – each
word evokes the next – showing that each word controls the next – “we will meet
on the tongue” – philobytes – against communication – expressive code – lack of
articles : creates a rhythm – “it is free but not without limitations” – drugs
– makes you stutter – stutter as an undergoing – the reader undergoes the
stutter as a discipline[ed] force – mouth-writing – not hand-writing – how
deformalization can subject the poet to growth – the anatomy of a stutter
embracing a perceived disadvantage – what is
utterance? – foregrounds stutter – stuttering, to go through it – to be forced
to perform it – poked fun: “what a poor crawling thing you are” – a lot of the
words used purely to draw-out his stutter
[…]
Mis/hearing Poems:
1.
Listen
to an album or multiple albums with notoriously difficult to discern lyrics.
Transcribe the lyrics as you hear them. Fashion these misheard lyrics into a
poem.
2.
Go to a
busy intersection or place where you will hear multiple conversations occurring
simultaneously. Record what you hear, fashioning it into a poem.
3.
With the
volume off on a television set, attempt to provide speech for the characters.
Doing this with a familiar soundtrack, invent new narrative possibilities.
[Taxonomy] of criticism
Anti-criticism:
Criticism of criticism which functions against the typical uses of criticism for legitimation.
Motivated: A
criticism of desire. Situated through desire, passion, intense autobiography.
For a discourse:
Without ads. Magazines should serve as conversation. Magazines as archives of the present.
[Andrea] Fraser:
A more honest criticism. One that does not make claims for art that can’t live up to them.
[Claire] Bishop:
Resistance. Finding points of tension, places of antagonism. Doing the difficult thing, the wrong
thing. Speaking truth to… power?
Exodus (I):
Taking the conversation elsewhere. Outside the enclosures of art and performance institutions. Negation.
[Withdrawal] Creating spaces that will
have been vital—abandoning them.
Recovery: To
bring something out of submergence.
Exodus (II): Stop
writing criticism. Put this energy (of critical reflection) elsewhere. Apply it somewhere else, as creative
pressure.
Not me: ‘Crowdsourcing’
criticism. Publishing email (of others)/social media. Anything not me/’original’.
With: To make
work as the criticism. A critical hybrid. Demonstration, gesture. Composition as explanation. To
involve one’s self with the energies of
it.
Slow (I): Not
feeling the need to ‘keep up.’ With a processing. Feeling one can withdraw. (Walter Benjamin wrote that he
would read the books that were out-of- fashion, that none of his contemporaries were
reading.) The need to withdraw into a
reading practice. Other sources of stimulation.
Slow (II): To
keep writing about the same thing, same work. To see how your reaction to it changes. Time as a factor in
any critical writing.
Enactment: To
undergo the object/work. To do it. To undergo from a position of practice. To experience as a necessity—something
to help you live.
Fiona Templeton visit:
What if sound determines content?
What if sound is content?
Does the voice have a body?
“while to abandon is all my babe”
“that’s us that’s one interfacing myself with salt”
“speech that imitates writing is papery”
“thinking through speech” rather than “enactment of
speech”
use of tape recorder (like a countenance)—in O’Hara the
use of telephony
“both language and thought seemed to be inventing
themselves and each other”
silence—use of silence
birds of Scottish mouth music
Aaron Williamson—Hearing
Things
[…]
Somatically more truthful – mostly we don’t hear
ourselves speak
To have space, to have importance
[…]
Dana Ward visit:
nothing/silence
productive for poetry; “all poetry is language in time” – technology of verse –
enabling relational encounters that allow verse – corrupting verse – “time is a
made thing” – “time is constructed through capitalism” – Bordieu: “dead time” –
become an engineer – exercises that everyone can do – Joe Brainard’s “I
Remember” – imagined his life through a grammatical structure – “how capacious
can we make poetry?” – past a place where something isn’t allowed –
collectively write a work together – the work can have a social life
[…]
“the
thing about a voice…” in Notley – “voice” in creative writing classrooms –
Notley: to reclaim the idea of voice – voice is a thing with a recognizable set
of tendencies – Fred M.: “it admits of characterization” – yourself or sing it
yourself – music has a viral life – like a pop song, like obsession, became
obsessed with Fred’s voice – homage: to modulate a voice of another – Moxley’s Clampdown – “when voice is appropriated
and comes to live in our bodies it changes” – my love song to Fred’s poem –
“like the old world is dying; the near past is in flames” – Myles: “I want to
return words to the mouth” – “ the glory of loving someone in that way” – “I
don’t have God so I have this thing about friendship” – Nina: “Is your ideal
reader someone who knows Zizek and Jay Z?” – “I think about them [friends]
because the feeling I get from thinking about them improves my writing” – “It’s
more insulting to assume that people don’t get contextual clues” – “You become
a repertoire of others” – The dead… we’ve internalized them… we’re performing a
self through them – the way art leverages us toward each other – “Am I making
this art as a way to inflame these discourses?” “the erotics of self-branding”
– “the world is such an unusual world” – “proximity is ruthless (I’ll put it in
there if it’s close to me)” – “qualitative disequilibrium”
[…]
The
[transcriptive] Uncanny
The
difference between unheimlich/heimlich where they converge
etymologically in what has become “secret” or “hidden” by its very familiarity,
that it would seem of the home.
Uncanny,
what is uncanny relates a set of repressions, that which is sublimated in order
for subjection or civilization to take place. Related through the maternal body
and infantile processes.
What is
uncanny is that through which the repressed returns. Reminding us of our
primitive origins, but also that which we repress in order to survive.
Reminders of our mortality.
What is
the relationship of writing to speech [if] not an uncanny one?
Writing,
which is a kind of dead or inanimate speech, awaiting resurrection, surprising
us when it comes (back) to life, like a doll or automaton opening its eyes.
Transcription
reminds me of this relationship. The recurrence of words/language once familiar
to us become unfamiliar set down in arbitrary symbols. Encrypted as such.
By
something being torn from a continuum of living speech, it becomes familiar and
unfamiliar simultaneously, hidden (allegorical?) and yet something we have
encountered before.
