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Strickland and digital ecriture féminine

In Losing L’una Stephanie Strickland employs the words and character of the great 20^th 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. Idea of Prose. State University of New York Press. Albany, NY. 1995.

Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem. Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA. 1999.

Strickland, Stephanie. Losing L’una/Waveson.nets. Penguin. NY, NY. 2002.

Failure in Poetry

This post was intended to be a reflection on digital poetics; however, after reading my friend Tom's blog on the success of particular digital's poem's failures (the pleasure in their failure) that I wanted to briefly address this binary: success/failure. I don't know necessary what these words mean in relation to the poetic; how and when does a poem fail: what is the criteria of success in the particular genre's that occur in the 'poetic' mode? I know this appears like a simply, almost dense, question; however, I question this rather empty binary.

Dylan A. T. Miner, professor of Transcultural Studies at Michigan State University, articulates that modernity/coloniality “forces the complex realities of human existence into easily codifiable systems of opposites” (174). The conditions that posit the conditions of success or failure are premised on this binary.

I need to spend more time clarifying my thoughts on this question of the failure in a poem; still, I can't think of any art object that succeeds. . . . .in many ways, the beauty, yes I said it, the beauty is in the "failing" of the art object: the horizon where it realizes its finitude; and the beautiful is the oscillation between obscurity and light. The late Reginald Shepherd wrote the following on difficult and obscure poetry on his wonderful blog:

I take Moore’s admonition to refer to the clarity of the materials, of the saying and showing itself, not of what it means or how it’s to be interpreted. This is the clarity of an experience: the poem is an experience the reader has, and though one doesn’t always know what the experience “means,” one knows what happened, what one experienced. But if what happened isn’t clear, then there’s no possibility of making meaning out of it. As Joan Houlihan cogently points out, incoherence is neither mysterious nor difficult; it's just another source of boredom. The poet should provide the reader with the elements out of which the meaning or meanings can be assembled or produced, and the pieces of the mosaic should be clear and distinct (like Descartes’ ideas), even if their relations to one another are not immediately apparent. (Shepherd)

Shepherd posits the conditions not for a successful or failed poem, rather, he situates the poem in a broader experiential context: does it feed life or is it a symptom (boredom) of the desensitizing modernity's shock and awe inflicts on its occupants?

Miner, Dylan A.T.. “When They Awaken: Indigeneity, Miscegenation, and Anticolonial Visuality.” Rhetorics of the Americas. Ed. Damian Baca, Victor Villanueva. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Art for Art's Sake

Day by Kenneth Goldsmith appropriates the text of a particular issue of The New York Times (this is well known). Jason Christie, in “Sampling the Culture: 4 Notes Toward a Poetics of Plundergraphia and on Kenneth Goldsmith's Day,” asserts that Day is another method to deconstruct the conceptual space between “high” and “low” art. While much of the essay is self-evident in its employment of Day to (again) point out this deconstruction between the “high” and “low,” the conclusion of the essay posits something that is very interesting:

His text [Goldsmith’s Day] exists much like a DJ's mix: in the ephemeral space of experience, the concept, disassociated from but reliant on objects, created in transformation and left there, haunting the annex of the Real, created through an act of plunder, created by sampling the culture. And the book is an independent artefact of the process, a urinal, a recording.

The text exists in an “ephemeral space of experience, the concept”: concept is the otherside of experience. It is dissociated from corporal objects but reliant on them. The book is the artefact, the material manifestation, of the plundering of the newspaper. What is compelling is the allusion to the ephemeral space of the concept: Jason Christie, as I understand the essay, sees the concept as being that “he [Goldsmith] fills the sanctuary of the place of worship with the street noise of traffic, and thereby offers us a glimpse of our continuing dependence on the categorical division of high and low art.” However, I think there is an otherside to this ephemeral space of experience.

The otherside of the concept, its shadow, is revealed in its excessive mimetic act; one might call the otherside of the concept as follows: it obviously questions the conception of high art, however, its self-evident representation reveals its fundamental inadequacy to respond and counter the commodification of the speech act. It reveals the inevitable logic of the appropriation of art by the commodity structure and how it eats itself in response: a snake eating its skin while pointing out how delicious the meal is to those around.

However, as Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman point out in Notes on Conceptualisms from UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE, conceptualisms are “strategies of failure” aiming to invite the reader to “redress failure” and “hallucinate repair” (25). The fact of its failed critique is already part of the excessive mimesis of the piece and thus cannot be the otherside of the ephemeral space of the concept. I think the otherside of Christie’s ephemeral space of experience, veiled beneath its overly self-evident critique, is the problematic state of its representation as critique. If the project is a strategy of failure whose purpose is to provoke hallucination of repair (w/o actual repair), and to only appear as a critique, one might say of conceptualisms: “critique for the appearance of critique.” This is a rather cynical form of l’art pour l’art.

It is worth restating Benjamin's view of this from "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century": "Nonconformists rebel against consigning art to the marketplace. They rally around the banner of l'art pour l'art. . . .the solemn rite with which it is celebrated is the pendant to the distraction that transfigures the commodity. Both abstract from the social existence of human beings" (11).

I am making a number of assertions that require a bit more elaboration; however, if the otherside of conceptualism is its negative state of aesthetic l'art pour l'art, then it itself contributes, in an even more veiled manner because of its self-evidence, to the narrative of progress in neo-liberal capitalism; it offers only hallucinations of repair.

Benjamin, Walter. "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" from The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press: Massachusetts, 1999.

Text Curtain

"Text Curtain" is one poem that struck me as reveling in enjambment. And interestingly enough, it, in stasis, is primarily organized as a prose block (at least until the pointer shifts the curtain of its form). The play between prose and poem reminded me of Giorgio Agamben and his statements regarding prose and poem.

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. The poem no longer attends to communication, semantic intention; rather, it communicates its state as language itself. 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. Alexander Duttmann states in “Integral Actuality,” the introduction to Agamben’s Idea of Prose:

“Communication cannot be anything but the communication of communicability.. . .; but, as such, communication implies an exteriority that originally transforms it into communication of something: it is in this way that language gives rise to poetic singularity and to philosophical generality (6).

Poetic singularity is the semiotic horizon of reason’s failing; it is where poetic language becomes conscious of itself as materiality (in the semiotic event) to the betrayal of “communication of something.” Philosophical generality, prose, is the betrayed communication. In this binary, the poetic is placed after philosophical generality: the semiotic event of enjambment can only occur from the presupposed material intention of non-enjambment. Invention, i.e. singularity, is manifested from prose.

"Text Curtain" enters into this symbolic space between prose and poem; the invention of the piece is manifested from the prose. The semiotic horizon is the shifting phoneme hung from their thread; this horizon is directed by the experiencer of the piece. The shifting terms on the screen in stasis are the philosophical generality of communication as communication; placed under the eyes of reader/experiencer, interpenetration occurs: fluid signification manifests as poetic singularity. Enjambment in "Text Curtain" requires the horizon (participation and all possible contexts) of the participating reader. In other words, the curtain of text in "Text Curtain" when pulled away reveals/revels in the freedom of the reader in the reader's engagement; it reveals/revels in the agency of signification.

Agamben, Giorgio. Idea of Prose. State University of New York Press. Albany, NY. 1995.

Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem. Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA. 1999.

Tonight!!!

Umbrella Factory Magazine presents it's first reading
at Fluid Coffee Bar (19th & Pennsylvania, Denver)
February 27th, 7:30 - 9:30p.

We're excited to have Mathias Svalina, Julie Carr, and J. Michael Martinez reading, and we're pretty sure you'll regret not showing up. Bios below:

J. Michael Martinez’s writings have appeared in Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, on NPR, and, most recently, in Quarterly West, Eleven Eleven, Copper Nickel, and Parthenon West . He is the recipient of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize; his collection Heredities was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award and will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2010.

Julie Carr is the author of four books of poetry: Mead: An Epithalamion, Equivocal, 100 Notes on Violence, which won the Sawtooth Poetry Award for 2009, and the forthcoming Sarah-of Fragments and Lines, a National Poetry Series winner. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Nation, Boston Review, and American Poetry Review. She is the co-publisher (with Tim Roberts) of Counterpath Press and teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Mathias Svalina's first book, Destruction Myth, is out from Cleveland State University Press. He is the author of five chapbooks, and the co-author of another five. His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, The Boston Review, Diagram, Jubilat, and many other journals. With Zachary Schomburg, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He teaches and lives in Denver.

Any questions? E-mail me at oren@umbrellafactorymagazine.com

Concrete Poetry and the DP

"The essential is reduced language."

Mary Ellen Scott

"Concrete Poetry is 'I'-less. . . .Poet: dissolved, issues no orders to reader who has to provide his own mind-gum syntax"

don Sylvester Houedard

Concrete poetry, as described by both Mary Ellen Scott and don Sylvester Houedard, aims for a "semantic economy".

The reduction of a poem, away from emotional conveyance and intellectual intention, to its material element, language, is one that I have always found compelling and interesting. The performativity of a reduced semantic economy: Ian Hamilton Finlay's concrete work is a direct allusion to his later construction of Little Sparta, his garden of embodied poetics. Houedard alludes to the work of Allen Kaprow, famous for his Happenings, installation pieces that broke down the boundaries between audience and art object; later in Kaprow's work, the touching of another's face, intentionally and consciously, became a work of art in this theories of a lived art practice. In both instances, and in concrete poetry itself, I sense a immense focus on a being-with the art object: the concrete poem is not something one consumes, interprets or analyzes; rather, it is something one experiences and dwells with (in the Heideggerian sense). And like Heidegger, concrete poetry, as a spatially located object in the world that one experiences one may possibly come to dwell in the poetic after its building; this is one aspect of concrete poetry, as fully manifested in Finlay's later constructions and Kaprow's immediately embodied works, that I think I can relate to digital poetics: one undergoes the experience of a digital poem, one does not passively receive or interpret. However, in order to come to the level of dwelling that Heidegger speaks for in Building, Dwelling, Thinkings, one must have the capacity, to some degree, to be cognitive of one's mortality and thus fully come toward one's living in the world. I'm not sure if I've seen such digital poetry of such mortal recognition? One might ask, does Finlay arrive at this idea? I think so, Little Sparta is a living and embodied work, where Finlay came to live. Kaprow's later work is an investment in life as life (see his writings collected in "Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life" ). This is where it gets quirky, as I think about, a concrete poem is invested in a reduced economy, a "pure" employment of language as material: how does one convey a consciousness of mortality with such limited means so that one may dwell in the art object?