In Losing L’una Stephanie Strickland employs the words and character of the great 20th century mystic and social activist Simone Weil, creating a poetic of dense lyrical force. In the midst of this is the question of the feminine, the feminist. Strickland writes explicitly in the book of the patriarchal poetic (31) and, in the project, posits, what I take, to be a feminist reading practice for digital poetics, one that employs both the material work and the digital page non-hierarchically, an intervention into what is a male dominated aesthetic in avant poetic practices. How she does this is compelling and interesting: this presentation hopes to lay out an interpretation of Strickland’s possible aesthetic first through the outlining of a theoretic, and then a close reading of both the digital work and material book through this theoretic.
First, I think its necessary to justify the interpretation and theoretical model to be developed. One point of justification is in the text itself: in the poem “Actions at a point” (12) Strickland writes of Simone Weil abhorring coercion, in life and language, as a counterpoint to an Old Testament God that coerces, and in the end of this poem, abandons her. However for Strickland this abandonment of Weil by God is the beginning of the story, not the end in the early pages of Losing L'una. After, in the poem “Imagination” part 1, Strickland writes, “If a woman has to make/a violent effort/to behave as she would naturally be/” this is void, Nothing. However the poem states that this is a positive nothingness, better than an imagination that blocks the freedom of grace i.e. liberation from coercion. In the poem “Despite the Most Active Resistance” Strickland posits explicitly who or what is performing the coercion to language of both Weil and the feminine: she writes with a potent and unveiled political slant in her lineation, “patriarchal poetry: to love and reject” and later in that same poem that feminine articulation is like a purloined letter and “. . a sword/hangs over: one woman/” because of it. Further, in the long poem “Essay on Mis-labeling” Strickland invokes Simone Weil’s ethical views by stating “the only choice, the only human thing,/the conditions of a full life being the same /for all human beings, our vocation//in the world is to restore the sense/of a rightful self to those deprived of it.” What is compelling by this assertion is that it is coupled and identified with Gertrude Stein, lesbian and, in our time, seen as a foundation feminist poet in early literary Modernism.
I see this positing not only a rhetorical critique of patriarchal poetics as a whole, but a Weiling, in the sense of Simone Weil (an unveiling), of a dominate patriarchal ideology in digital poetics. How does she accomplish this? Critically, I see performing a number of maneuvers to arrive at a hermeneutics, an ecriture féminine in digital poetry: those maneuvers are as follows: 1. combining both physical book and digital piece (this exclusively doesn’t make a feminist/feminized text, however in combination I think it does) 2. an artist statement from both Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo and 3. the aforementioned interpretation of Losing L'una.
First off, one might say I’m attending to a strawman when I say that digital poetics is a patriarchal aesthetic. We can discuss this; however, I would posit that one look at digital poetics as being constituted within a particular archive/strain of the avant-garde, an avant-garde historically composed by and from white men. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, as it is a historical fact, but I do want to note that this strain of the avant-garde from which digital poetics claims lineage appropriates the minority status for itself. To cite some remarks I made in my recent essay with Jordan Windholz in Puerto del Sol, fifteen years ago, John Yau criticized Eliot Weinberger for making a now familiar claim about modernist-derived avant-gardisms’ appropriation of the Other. More recently, Timothy Yu expands and further delineates the complicated relationship between ethnic and Other minorities and self-proclaimed avant-garde communities. In his Race and the Avant-Garde, Yu notes the tendency for avant-garde movements to claim a position of alterity that essentially equates such groups with minorities. As Yu makes clear, often claims of aestheticism—the avant-garde’s forte—occlude politics. Yu concludes, “This is the inevitable effect of declaring that the ideological struggle of experimental writers is conducted ‘in other (aesthetic) terms’: such writers are granted access to, and indeed a monopoly over, the universalizing category of ‘the aesthetic,’ whereas women, minority, and gay writers are excluded from that category.” That is, despite claims to a position of alterity, such self-proclaimed alterity in fact lends the avant-gardist a position of power that too often excludes those who are minorities by circumstance, not choice. This occlusion of the political in digital poetics we have addressed in class. I want to assert Strickland is intervening in this “pure aesthetic” of the avant-garde and in extension, digital poetics, a politics of ecriture feminine. If you disagree with this assessment, I point you to look at the fairly recent essay in the Chicago Review “Numbers Trouble” by JULIANA SPAHR & STEPHANIE YOUNG, you can find it online, where they point out the lack of representation of women in experimental/new/post-avant poetries and representative anthologies. Now, to the how.
Firstly, I want to address the division of Losing Luna/Waveson.nets between the physical text and its digital counterpart. I associate this division of the work into the material work and the digital realm as an act of caesura, a line break in the form. One may read the work in the order one wishes, however, the digital piece and the material work act as a whole.
Firstly, I want to address the division of Losing L'una/Waveson.nets between the physical text and its digital counterpart. I associate this division of the work into the material work and the digital realm as an act of caesura, a line break in the form. One may read the work in the order one wishes, however, the digital piece and the material work act as a whole. In order to do so, I want to briefly address how the political exists in the caesura by referring to the aesthetic analysis of Giorgio Agambin. (and I’m poaching previous writing from my blog).
Giorgio Agamben, political philosopher and critical theorist, writes in The Idea of Prose, “No definition of verse is perfectly satisfying unless it asserts an identity for poetry against prose through the possibility of enjambment” (39). For Agamben, the enjambment is the foundational difference between verse and prose. In The End of the Poem, Agamben asserts that enjambment is the “opposition of a metrical limit to a syntactical limit, of a prosodic pause to a semantic pause” (109). Poetry, for Agamben, is the discourse where the opposition between sound and meaning is made manifest; prose is the discourse where the representation of the difference and opposition between the semiotic and semantic event cannot occur (110). In addition, the end of a poem is marked by a falling toward prose through the finality of the poem’s possible realization: if the poem is identified through enjambment, the end of the poem marks the state where enjambment is no longer possible: hence, the poem realizes itself into the field of prose.
The most striking assertion by Agamben, at least in reference to poetry and prose, is when he states, “This sublime hesitation between meaning and sound is the poetic inheritance with which thought must come to terms” (Idea of Prose 41). The “sublime hesitation” Agamben alludes to is the point where poetry edges toward pure semiotic materiality: language invested in its material as language. Is this not the materiality of the digital work? The hesitation between the book and digital work performs the same work as the written caesura. To continue with Agamben: in semiotic materiality, the poem no longer attends to communication, semantic intention; rather, it communicates its state as language itself, pure material (which I associate with the visual/textual embodiment found in the digital portion of the Stricklands work) The singular nature of any given poem is founded upon, what Agamben calls, the semiotic event when enjambment occurs: where there is enjambment prose becomes poetry “to let language finally communicate itself, without remaining unsaid in what is said” (115). This semiotic event is the horizon limit of reason’s dominance as intention or meaning in language itself. Language, for Agamben, is the limit of reason; in the semiotic event reason must encounter itself as embodied in material. It loses agency as reason in that horizon: the unsayable is spoken. The unsayable spoken by Strickland may well be the feminized subject. The space between the text of the book and the text of the screen is a feminized space.
What makes this semiotic event in the caesura of the book to the digital material feminist/feminized? Material proof might be found in the poem Evil is External, where Strickland writes:
READ Page 37 Losing L'una
This is to say, that the woman feels in her body the negation of the rapist: in the space of negation, forgetting, emptiness, the woman remembers. And remember earlier, in “Imagination” part 1, the positive nothingness of the void that is the woman.
Moreover, one might say the caesura between book and digital space is feminine because of the artistic statement of the digital piece.
The essay or artist statement made by Stickland is less a demand for a prescriptive method for the reader to approach the text, rather, it is an insurgence into a phallic-centered discourse in order to destabilize conceptions on how digital poetry is read: typically abstracted into a system that refuses identity claims, the artist statement in Waveson.nets posits the identity of two women as central to the creation of the piece. The naming of the woman as such is at once a method to name the artist but also to posit a community of woman acting together to create a work. Or as Strickland writes in Waveson.net 37, “A knowledge supported by community, language, gender (37) or, as stated before, the artists statement “restores the sense/of a rightful self to those deprived of it.” In fact, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo writes in her blog, “I am a believer in artist statements. How can we accept urinals as artwork unless the artist is able to talk about their intentions and context?” And in this context, the artists are women (Lawson Jaramillo decidedly multicultural, having been raised in in Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, Iran, US, France). This work, through the acknowledgement of the woman as creator, refuses a historical aesthetic that is still, as Spahr and Young argued in the Chicago Review, a politically misogynistic aesthetic. Stickland, on the other hand, posits a feminist aesthetic that operates through identity situated in collaborative community. She doesn’t necessarily shirk identity, but places the identity of the feminine as a necessary context to the destabilization of the patriarchal digital avant-garde. In fact, she resituates the digital space by having it dialogue with the printed page thus grounding the work in a local and real environment. This local and real environment does deal explicitly with the socio-political realm (as pointed out in my citing the poems of Losing Luna/Waveson.nets in the presentation). She posits a digital poetics that desires the aesthetic play of the medium in conversation with the printed word without shirking the very real identities and politics of the feminine.
I believe Strickland creates an argument that identity as a woman, a minority, need not be dismissed in order to stake claim as an innovative writer. Rather, she posits a hermeneutic that claims identity in order to posit a foundation for a different epistemology, a feminine epistemology through language in line with Cixous and ecriture feminine. An epistemology that moves beyond the printed page into a hybrid state. Feminist theorist Elan Paulson writes, citing editors Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor from their essay anthology The Future of the Page, “the traditional printed page, since before the Enlightenment, has reinforced linear and hierarchical epistemic structures that have determined the way that readers tend to prioritize information.” In hybridizing and working in community, Strickland refuses this hierarchical epistemic structure in both the digital and printed realm. And in this, perhaps, Strickland’s effort to circumscribe the avant-garde that dismisses identity claims is an effort to supplant a literary historical imagination that is racist, sexist and patriarchal. And in so doing, the prosody of Losing Luna/Waveson.nets is an effort to reposition gendered subjectivity toward a more utopian vision. Paradoxically, it is a utopian vision of irruption: the interstitial space of the book and digital realm, the minority status of the feminized subject are both acts defined by enjambment, a cleaving and separation—a defining that refuses closure; as Agamben writes in “The Idea of Language II”, and which perhaps Strickland would agree:
The ultimate meaning of language. . . .is the injunction “Be just”; and yet it is precisely the meaning of this injunction that the machine of language is absolutely incapable of getting us to understand. Or, rather, it can do it only by ceasing to perform its penal function, only by shattering into pieces. . . cleaving, In this way justice triumphs over justice, language over language (`).
Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem. Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA. 1999.
Strickland, Stephanie. Losing L’una/Waveson.nets. Penguin. NY, NY. 2002.
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