round-up: 1/14
books, quotations, revision strategies, & more
Hi & happy Friday.
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Revision strategies
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I have a few new zines for sale on the website. They are so cute & I worked hard on them. Buy them here.
And, as always,
I’m selling 5 books for $30 to afford my car insurance & gas & skincare regimen. I hope you’ll consider buying some—they’re often brand-new & tend to come with a free zine or stickers, thanks to my sense of whimsy.
A question for you:
Which poets (or prose writers!) do you see as “masters of syntax”? I see Carl Phillips and Brian Teare as exemplars, but there must be more. Who comes to mind for you?
What I read last week:
The End, Aditi Machado
“After Crip, Crip Afters,” Alison Kafer
“MAGGIE SIEBERT ON: HYPER-MORALITY, TRANSGRESSIVE FICTION, HER COLLECTION “BONDING,” AND WHY SHE CHOSE TO MAKE IT AVAILABLE FOR FREE VIA TWITTER,” Shelby Hinte
On my to-read list:
The Necessity (and Inadequacy) of Trans Self-Acceptance Narratives
Googling Literary Lesbians: On Carson McCullers and the Erotics of Incompletion
The first bestselling paperback original in the US was a work of lesbian pulp fiction.
Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin (by Anne Carson)
Quotations:
The long poem has historically as we know been a form that men have dominated. And the way that the long poem takes up space is so interesting and fascinating to me as a gendered space, too. […] It never ceases to amaze me, how radical the act of asking someone to sit with you for a long time unfortunately is if you are not a cis man.
Loss has made a tenuous "we" of us all.
-Judith Butler
Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies-as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.
-Judith Butler
It is not as if an "I" exists independently over here and then simply loses a "you" over there, especially if the attachment to "you" is part of what composes who "I" am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who "am" I, without you?
-Judith Butler
What grief displays, in contrast, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control.
-Judith Butler
Let's face it. We're undone by each other.
-Judith Butler
I reason —
Earth is short —
And Anguish — absolute —
-Emily Dickinson
I’m always reading. Writing—that’s reading too, only: practiced outwardly, for a public.
-Aditi Machado, The End
I think of teaching as a managed conversation of which I am the principal author (in perennial danger of becoming its authority). My authorial powers are spent in directing collective attention toward texts and practices I deem valuable.
-Aditi Machado, The End
I don’t know how to talk about money, just that I need to. I can acknowledge that I write, and teach writing, under / against / in accordance with the pressures of the university, the market, and social media, all of which have something to do with capital. I am a paid member of the US academe. I capitulate to capital on a daily basis. I make compromises.
-Aditi Machado, The End
The epiphany […] acts as the salable essence of a poem. It’s tweetable. It gets all the snaps in the event space. It’s never brutal, but it can be tragic. It almost always follows the telling of an anecdote and is nostalgic. It’s armchair psychology. It lacks mystery. My instincts tell me that the market seduces us into writing this way. It feels way too good—I don’t trust it.
-Aditi Machado, The End
I am reminded of all the disability memoirs, the illness narratives, in which the protagonist informs the reader of their former vitality and able-bodiedness and capacity, as if the tragedy of their condition is made evident only in contrast to what came before (as if tragedies, by definition, befall only those who don’t deserve them). Disability studies has long challenged these narratives for their focus on overcoming, on the good work that good patients do to rehabilitate into good citizens after their tragic injuries or illnesses or catastrophes. But perhaps we need to pay as much attention to the way the before is narrated in these stories as to the after. Aren’t these stories all ways of insisting that one’s disability be read a certain way, a more positive way, because of what came before, because of who one was before?
-Alison Kafer
I am writing these lines, thinking these thoughts, feeling these pulls in a country in which innocence is posed against punishment. If injury befalls the innocent, then someone must be punished; if someone is being punished, they must not be innocent. What does it mean, then, to insist on the innocence of the disabled? To require blamelessness as a condition of care?
-Alison Kafer
We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.
-José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.
-José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
In our everyday life abstract utopias are akin to banal optimism. (Recent calls for gay or queer optimism seem too close to elite homosexual evasion of politics.)
-José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
The horror tradition is, to my mind, the richest literary field we have at our disposal, as it speaks most plainly to our worst impulses, thoughts, desires and anxieties. It’s a safer way for us to encounter the unknowable.
-Maggie Siebert
Closure is a fiction.
-Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”
We can say that a “closed text” is one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the “open text,” meanwhile, all the elements of the work are maximally excited; here it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting) argument that they have taken into the dimension of the work.
-Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”
The “open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.
-Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”
Dressed out like an animal, / she thistles & fickles. She fawns // in a murmur of milk. Grows feral.
-Claire Hero, “Molt”
Why did it bother me that Kay Ryan does not write about her sex life? That is a preposterous expectation of a reader. The reason I realized I had such an absurd desire is because lesbian sex life writ large in literature is repressed. We have very few people historically, in the United States, openly writing lesbian sex narratives. Poetry is repressed in this country; if poetry isn’t even honored, then lesbian poetry certainly isn’t. With Kay Ryan as the official poet of the United States, I wanted more than what I was getting. I wanted Kay Ryan to wear ACT-UP’s Silence=Death t-shirt. Ryan navigated a butch presentation as Poet Laureate; she did it with a lot of poise and self-preservation, and I respect her for that.
Revision strategies
featured in Aditi Machado’s The End:
cut that last line
try moving the last line to the middle of the poem
the middle of the poem is the poem
write more!
Tweets:
That’s it! Have a good weekend!
-Despy Boutris