Author Archives: Shailen Mishra

A Compleat Book for the Teaching to Read Poetry

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Rob Koehler, Series Contributor

This series examines the first teaching anthology of poetry in English to reflect on teachers’ reasons for directing students to read poetry.

My interest in the poetics of emplacement—in the border(s) between language and place, the written and the lived, the created and the experienced—comes not with the process of composition but rather with the process of instruction, the moment when a poem enters the pedagogical space of the classroom and becomes a part of its unique and contested landscape. More particularly, I am interested in the border between what a teacher believes he or she is teaching and what a student believes he or she is learning.  This is the unruly and ineradicable complexity in any pedagogical situation and can quickly spiral out to encompass all moments of instruction whatever, so, to focus my analysis, I want to reflect specifically on why teachers ask students to read poetry.

Of course, as many beliefs about why students should read poetry exist as there are teachers in the world.  And, were I another kind of scholar, I would spend these next few pieces drawing out the various reasons I have heard discussed and argued.  However, my own bent is historical rather than ethnographic, and I want to turn from the answers we might give in our moment to the answers that another teacher gave in a quite different historical moment.

Teaching poetry is so familiar and widespread a practice to us that it is somewhat surprising that the oldest teaching anthology of poetry in English was published in London in 1717.  To give the educational milieu in brief: early eighteenth-century England had no public school system, no uniform legal mandate requiring formal education, few educational institutions that would educate women, two universities, and a uniform recognized language of scholarship and learning, Latin.  Thus, the publication of [The Virgin Muse] in August of that year was not business as usual.  Up to the publication of this textbook, the teaching of English in schools extended to teaching basic reading; once students could read their Bibles, they started learning Latin or stopped learning to read at school.

What I want to consider in this and the other pieces in this series is how an examination of this textbook can offer a productive perspective on why teachers believe students should read poetry.  I will use the work of James Greenwood, the compiler of The Virgin Muse, to consider in turn what was being taught by reading poetry, what poetry was to be taught, and what students were perceived as needing to use this textbook.  Through a nuanced examination of how one teacher answered these questions in the past, I hope to provoke us to think again about what benefits we see in the present and how those benefits relate to our actual classroom practices.

To return to The Virgin Muse again, I want to give some brief background on its compiler, James Greenwood;  Relatively little of his life has survived down to the present, most important in this context is that teaching was his lifelong vocation and that his career culminated with his appointment as Surmaster of St. Paul’s School in London in 1721, a post he held until his death in 1737.  Despite the lack of biographical details, Greenwood left us interesting evidence of his thinking in his preface to The Virgin Muse.  I have posted the entire preface elsewhere, but I want to focus here on Greenwood’s articulation of what his students would learn from reading poetry.  He writes,”I have endeavoured to make it [The Virgin Muse] a compleat [sic] book for the Teaching to Read Poetry: The Poems consisting of Verses of different Measures, you have all the chief sorts of English Versification”.

To Greenwood, then, to teach students to read poetry was to teach them prosody and poetic forms, to help them understand the structures of poetry rather than its meaning.  In short, students should be taught to understand and recognize the technical system of arrangement and organization from which, in Greenwood’s moment, all poetry was built.  A teacher could measure students’ success in learning to read poetry by asking them to scan a poem, give its meter, and identify its form.  Questions of interpretation, of affective response, of criticism generally were not the teacher’s responsibility or the student’s .

Of course, Greenwood does not disregard interpretation or criticism; he addresses those concerns quite clearly in his preface when he says, “I have therefore had great Regard to introduce nothing here, but what is strictly Modest, and truly Poetical; and as for the difficult Places, they are made very easie [sic] and intelligible, by the Help of Notes, and a Large Index, explaining every hard Word”.  Criticism, then, is removed to a pre-pedagogical moment, in which the teacher reads and selects only appropriate pieces based on moral criteria of Greenwood’s own devising, a process to which students are not made privy. The process of interpretation is also removed to a pre-pedagogical moment, with Greenwood giving glosses that interpret “difficult” passages for students an definitions of “hard” words for them to use, those passages and words that are left unexplained must, implicitly, be understandable to any student.

Greenwood’s understanding of what a teacher should teach his students is an early articulation of a position that argues that the teaching of poetry is concerned with the technical and empirical aspects of poetic form.  The implicit goal seems to be to teach students to focus on those aspects and to avoid questions of interpretation and criticism that have no immediately discernible answer.  Those questions are left outside the space of the classroom, questions for the teacher but not for the students.  Yet, and here we come again to the question of a poetics of emplacement, the landscape of the classroom relies on more than what the teacher states as his or her pedagogical objectives. My next piece will turn from Greenwood’s objectives in teaching to the poetry that he chose to include in his anthology, offering an examination of whether Greenwood, in fact, created a “compleat book for the teaching to read poetry” by his own criteria and also what other implicit pedagogical objectives he seems to be pursuing that might undermine his stated goals.

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Rob Koehler is a second year doctoral student in English at New York University and has an abiding interest in the processes and peculiarities of teaching reading, especially reading literature of all sorts, in the classroom. He blogs at Reading.Text.Book.History. on all things related to education, textbooks, and reading.

Six Micro Essays on the Tenuous Public Body

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Toby Altman, Series Contributor

Toby’s series “Bodies in Space” is about sustained thinking of the physicality of the body and its relation to poetry. Here, critical essay fractures, moves like poetry.

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Let’s be real (though the injunction already admits a failure of reality which is the condition of our discourse): everyone likes looking at bodies. I choose that word—likes—with a certain care, certain as I am that ‘liking’ something is both the most generic libidinal act, and fretted with corporate power. Capitalism is engined by like(s): as Facebook reminds us, metaphor is money gone wild. And so the libido is a kind of economy, or the economy is a kind of libido. Not that the ‘or’ matters for those of us down here in it, who have it the American way, that is, both ways at once. Capitalism is the surveillance we delight in. Delight is surveillance itself. To watch and be watched, to like and be liked: this is the consummation for which a body is trained and shaped.

2.

I am flexing my critical muscles here—a bad habit, but nonetheless revealing: of the thing that flexes; this body, in its critical acts, slouched at a desk in insatiable winter; swollen at the waist; irredeemably white and male, and therefore capable of disappearing into its language. Or, rather, appearing as its language: on Facebook, a major symptom of privilege will be the ability to appear as fossilized language, to delete the material and historical facticity of one’s particular flesh. A material and a history which is otherwise intractable and carnivorous, dismantling language, reducing authorship to the circulation of the body.

3.

Leigh Stein, in her trenchant and necessary open letter to HTMLGiant, documents the casual violence through which women’s writing is reduced to the circulation of a body:

In the summer of 2011, I met with a team of Random House sales reps who would be responsible for bringing my novel and poetry collection to bookstores and libraries around the country. One asked me what kind of cover image I wanted for my novel.
“I only know I don’t want a headless woman on the cover,” I said. “I don’t want my book cover to exclude men from picking it up.”
“Do you really think a man would read your work?”
“Well, a lot of men like my poetry,” I said.
“Only because you’re cute,” I was told. By my editor.
I didn’t know what to say. I like to think that out of the 37 people in the world who read poetry, the men who read mine are finding some merit there, and not just jacking off to my author photo.

Such misogyny limits the female body to itself; it denies access to the means of literary production and circulation. Or (this or again an and), it seeks to reduce literary production to the traffic in women: the distribution of female bodies for specular pleasure.

Such misogyny, in its stupidity, its virulence, its violence, may be understood as a vigorous defense of the actual. If it seems hysterical, in (paradoxically) the pathological sense of the word, it’s because the mechanisms of literary production and distribution already organize bodies in rigid and misogynist logics—lending some the capacity to recede into text, and forcing most writing to circulate instead as the body of its author.

4.

The mechanisms of literary community and circulation are structured by an underlying misogynist logic: the logic of liking and circulating bodies; of specularity, surveillance, and digital capital. Take, as an example, the poetry reading—a form which offers the display and specular consumption of bodies as one of its major pleasures, adjacent and often superior to its literary allure. To be an audience member at a poetry reading is simultaneously to engage in voyeurism and disciplinary violence: the pleasure we take in looking at bodies is, partially, the pleasure of limiting and shaping them with our gaze. In such a setting, the capacity to disappear into one’s text, to delete the body, is the capacity to evade discipline: which, in our country, is both the image and prime symptom of race and gender privilege. (Just ask William Zantzinger).

5.

Let us therefore build better institutions, and critique the ones we have with a generous and collective care. And let’s celebrate the improvisatory and ephemeral practices of poets who critique the interpolation and discipline of their bodies with their bodies. In that spirit I turn to a recent example from a ‘reading’ given by the poet Emily Barton at the Red Rover Series in Chicago—in the belief that such interventions dizzyingly exceed this lame, safe act of internet, institutional critique, in both subversive potential and bravery.

I use scare quotes here because Barton refused to read or, indeed, to engage in any of the ritual pleasantries of the poetry reading. Instead, she sat on a stool at the front of the room and quietly read the New York Review of Books (a publication which has become notorious recently for excluding women from its pages). In the background, from a small iPhone speaker, a male voice (ok, full disclosure, my male voice) read her poems in a dreary monotone. It was a precise parody of the gendered dynamics of the poetry reading. Surrendering her voice, offering her body purely as a thing to be seen, Barton reenacted the reduction of female writing to the female body. (It matters too that it was my voice, since at the time of the reading, Emily and I had been engaged some three weeks: under critique is marital heterosexuality which, even with the best intentions, remains a ritual of patriarchy, not a form of but the traffic in women).

Barton’s performance, precise as it was in capturing the gendered dynamics of the poetry reading, was not a capitulation to their disciplinary force. The poetry reading is a scrupulous and decorous space—so scrupulous that its implicit regulations are rarely felt because rarely violated. The poet is expected, indeed compelled to participate in the ritual. To refuse to engage, as Barton did, is to express hostility to the ritual itself. This hostility was richly registered in the room: which became suddenly possessed by a physical sense of discomfort, accompanied by the special and diligent silence reserved for painful and awkward public situations. Here, I think, lies the full brilliance of Barton’s performance. It is one thing to parody the strictures of gender. It is quite another to make a room feel the critique as a loss: of certainty, of the grid through which (gendered) (aesthetic) experience is rendered intelligible. Barton’s reading did not point toward a solution to the gendered imperatives of the reading series—that would be simple utopianism, which we all should learn to avoid (desiring). Rather, she showed us—a fecund demonstration, open for imitation and critique—how the logics of the poetry reading might decompose itself.

6.

Over the holidays, I spent a few languorous and pleasurable days reading about the history of the poetry reading—a mechanism of literary distribution which is really only fifty years old but, like gender, masquerades as the natural. I was disappointed to find that, despite the recent ‘performative turn’ in poetics, the poetry readings have only been very tentatively theorized. Peter Middelton, for instance, writes compellingly about the role of space in the aesthetics of the reading, but has little to say about its politics. As a card carrying member of the devil’s party, I believe it is better to know—however little knowledge actually helps us negotiate the rough imperatives of power. I think it is time, therefore, that we collectively come to grips with the politics of the poetry reading—rather, with the way that the reading inflicts politics unevenly across (our) bodies.

Ideally, such an account would be mobile and intersectional: a diffracted and kaleidoscopic model, which registers the way poetic power acts differently on different bodies. At a panel on “The Politics of Poetry in Performance” at MLA this year, for example, Kate Zambreno lamented the cultural injunction against women expressing anger—and posed her own angry language as a form of resistance. In a subsequent talk, Douglas Kearney noted that, as a black male poet, anger acts as an automatic generic demand on his writing: radically limiting its possibilities to a stereotypical form of racial experience. For him, the question becomes how to subvert that expectation without blunting the force of his anger. Poetry readings produce contradictory demands on different bodies. And so, any theory of the poetry reading must be supple enough to accommodate those contradictions. As an initial gesture toward such a theory, this little essay falls woefully short. Neither intersectional nor particularly supple, it risks (with much feminist work—especially by white critics) positing a universal white subject. I end with that failure, in hope of correction.

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Toby Altman is a conceptual poet. His poems have appeared. He is the author of and the recipient of. He currently lives in, where he works as and serves on the editorial board for. For more of his, please visit his and follow him on.

SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading Series

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We are happy to announce the second annual reading event in our SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading Series, happening on Thursday, April 10th, from 7-10PM. The series is named for SRPR’s long-time editor and benefactor, Lucia Getsi, and is co-sponsored by WGLT’s Poetry Radio, ISU’s Creative Writing Program, and ISU’s Department of English. This event will take place at the historic Ewing Manor in Bloomington and will feature a poetry reading by award-winning SRPR poets and a reception with wine and appetizers. The event is free and open to the public. Donations are welcome, but not required. Please save the date, spread the word, and bring a friend!

 

Traumatic Emplacement: Poetry Emplaces Violence

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Emily Ronay Johnston, SRPR Managing Editor

Emily Johnston’s series “Traumatic Emplacement” explores poetics of emplacement, and the simultaneity of dislocation and enmeshment in traumatic poetry.

This post of mine will explore a pedagogical strategy for teaching trauma and poetry in relation to one another—a strategy that might be used in a variety of learning settings, including but certainly not limited to classrooms. Just as the “new” SRPR is concerned with “writing that leads us to the limits of our comfort zones … so that we might experience the borders of our own known worlds… as sites of connection instead of sites of incontestable difference,” I am concerned, as a teacher, with writing that leads students to explore and extend their comfort zones as sites of recognition through which to identify their implication in the traumatic issues plaguing our planet.

This semester, I am teaching a literary and cultural studies course on gender with a particular focus on issues of gender violence across the globe. One of our course texts, Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, is an anthology of “poetry of resistance [that] acts as differential consciousness by allowing poets to use multiple strategies to challenge the powers that endorse gender violence” (Wiseman xvi). Editor Laura Madeline Wiseman identifies the following six strategies at work in these poems: breaking silence; raising consciousness and engaging poetry as an act of bearing witness; disrupting predominant, hegemonic narratives about gender violence; sassing language; strategic anger; and resisting for change and poetry as action (xvii-xxiii). In short, the poetry in this collection functions as activism.

I assign Women Write Resistance in hopes that reading the poems, alongside critical work and other literature dealing with gender violence, will allow students to explore the personal—the language of emotion, the body, and the deep psyche where trauma dwells and where language ultimately fails to tell our stories—as a political act of resistance to gender violence. As Wiseman states, the poets featured in the anthology “are actors, rather than reactionaries” who “resist by arming themselves with poems” (xiv).

Now that we are approaching the end of the semester and have finished reading the collection, I will be asking my students to write a found poem about gender violence by selecting lines from the anthology (lines that stand out to them, for whatever reason) and then putting them together into a poem of their own, adding and changing words as they see fit. I will ask them to choose and arrange; to bear witness to the stories of others and try to make some sense of those stories through engaging the poems in the poems’ language.

After writing, everyone will then read their poems aloud to a small group of peers who will be instructed to listen for what the found poem is conveying about gender violence. Rather than analyze or interpret the poems, a mode of reading students are thoroughly trained in doing already, they will simply make note of what they hear by scribbling it down on paper while they listen. Within their groups, students will discuss how what they heard aligns with and complicates what they know about gender violence. Trauma eludes language. So in this activity, the words of poets bearing witness to trauma (those poets featured in the anthology as well as the student poets in our class) are leading discussion and students are encouraged to engage the poems not through analysis, but through listening.

Here is a found poem I composed, based upon several poems in Women Write Resistance:[1]

Found Poem on Leaving

In the soft light of a Sunday morning,
I feel my husband’s hand creep under my silk teddy.
I stiffen, feeling the thud of refusal over the tingle of yes.

The dogs bark outside,
snapdragons, flowered tongues,
and all the wired faces of the past strung up.

Hear the silence. And then sing above it.

I have decided to leave him in the middle of a hurricane
while every front porch wind chime chimes a song to celebrate
my going away from ugly Sundays.

I have decided to drive off forever, away from him
to live on. I will be the fleeting
sound of a song he thought he heard, moved toward, and lost

to a sky full of signals split by wind. My hair will trail
and whip and tangle at seventy miles per hour – both windows down.
Away, the home no longer home.

Hear the silence. And then sing above it.

Even asleep, he would thrash and howl like a wounded animal,
the sky shattering, with stars.
This is the end of my dreams.

She sees herself rocking and rolling with him,
the man leering at the thread of women, stupid bitches.
But no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.

Hear the silence. And then sing above it.

Writing is hard inside silence,
words go round and round and fall away, out of sight, out of mind,
as for years you went round and round inside silence, sentenced to this.

The ax hangs on the porch, woodpile nearby,
each log plotted, uneasily entwined.
The wind drags its rusty blade back into earth.

The wild moon foams at the mouth.
The wild moon creeps softly at her feet.

Here is what I hear in my words:

It sounds like a letter I wrote (never sent) to my abusive ex-husband after I left. In it, the road, the traveling away from him, was a recurring theme—a fantasy of something better; of something new, not recycled from one generation of men to the next. Place provides a means of connecting back to the moment of trauma and of finally leaving the site of trauma behind. Place allows one to remember, in part, the experience of being violated, of trying to leave, of actually leaving, of finally leaving.

What do you hear? How does your found poem sound?

[1] This found poem includes excerpts from the following poems in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, edited by Laura Madeline Wiseman: “Marital Privilege” by Ann Bracken (33-4); “Going to Silence” by Marylisa Dedomenicis (48); “Schiller” by Jehanne Dubrow (51); “Whiskey Nights” by Susan Kelly-Dewitt (94); “Camera Obscura” by Lucinda Roy (158); “Take Back the Night” by Carly Sachs (159); “Silence” by Ellin Sarot (163); “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death” and “A Story of Stonewall” by Maureen Seaton (166-7); “Sonnet for My Daughter at 9” by Cassie Premo Steele (174); “Splitting Wood” by Margo Taft Stever (175); and “Port Arthur, 1939” by Kathleen Tyler (180)

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Emily is from Boston, San Francisco, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Central Illinois. Holding a Ph.D. in English Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry, her work emerges at the intersections of writing studies, social justice pedagogy, trauma theory, film theory, and narrativity. In particular, she researches and publishes on students’ literacy learning in relation to issues of sexualized trauma. She has taught courses in academic writing, public writing, creative writing, gender studies, literature and film, and English as a Second Language. Emily is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Writing Pedagogy at The University of Delaware, and Managing Editor of Spoon River Poetry Review (SRPR).

The Place of Noir: I-55 Mile Markers 267 to 238

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Elizabeth Hatmaker, Guest Contributor

There will be a bright, shimmering, silver veil stretched every-
where tight, to hide the deep, black, empty, terrible bot-
tom of the world where people fall who are alone, or dead,

Sick or alone.
Alone or poor,
Weak, or mad, or doomed, or alone;

Kenneth Fearing
“American Rhapsody (3)”

How do you get between nowhere to somewhere? And how, then, you know when you’ve gotten, as Cain writes in Double Indemnity, “to the end of the line”? These used to be central existential questions in the films, novels, poetry, and lyric sensibilities we call noir. It’s certainly been argued that noir is a cosmopolitan form constructed from city iconographies and the pulse of commerce and commercialism, modernism and technology. Yet for everyone who will talk about the urban locales of novels like Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon or films like Dassin’s Naked City, I’ll counter with novels like Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Hammett’s Red Harvest, Dorothy Hughes’ Ride the Pink Horse or films like Siodmak’s The Killers. If the “someplaces” of noir are cosmopolitan spaces, noir’s “nowheres” are often not pastoral frontiers full of fresh possibilities, but inter-locations—roadside gas stations, industrial spurs, the tract homes of decreasing size, warehouses, exits reliant on tourists just traveling through to big cities or rural retreats.

While modernism idealizes movement and progress, noir often offers the ambivalent alternative to the freedom of movement, a profound sense of dislocation. The protagonists of noir are often escaping, hiding out, on the lamb, running away, or getting lost.

I am fascinated by the travel between somewhere and nowhere, through the interzones that represent neither the energy of the city nor the imagined and idealized frontier. I’m entranced especially by the physical markers of this affective transition. Sometimes you look around and you just know that suddenly you aren’t anyplace in particular anymore. You observe specific physical outliers that mark the edges of cultural signification and you confront their ambivalent affects.

Illinois is a figure divided by the I-80 corridor. Let’s not pretend otherwise. I-55 runs south almost all the way to New Orleans and north all the way to Lake Shore Drive. At mile maker 250, it is bisected by I-80, which runs from Teaneck, NJ, way out to San Francisco. It runs East-West just a little north of the Des Plaines River.

Above exists Chicago, the city and metro area with the largest population, large concert venues, tech corridors, “big city assholes,” a better selection of international food and cosmetics.

I live below, with flat land and solid people who mostly did not vote for Obama, “a couple hours south of the city” to my friends in California. I live in a cancer belt in a nice and affordable craftsman house. I live down here in central Illinois with the Spoon River for which this journal was named. Spoon River is truly lovely. Central Illinois is not nowhere.

The intersection of I-55 and I-80 is in Joliet, IL. Joliet itself is a fine town. It was once home to two famous prisons that you’ve probably heard referenced in many Chicago noirs. Going to Joliet used to have a very specific noir meaning. Now one of the prisons is closed.

A recent highway project along I-55 erected sound barriers along several miles so as to afford local homeowners some privacy and noise control. Recent efforts to build a new mall at the intersection of these two highways seems to have stalled although boarded up homes, originally slated for demolition, still dot the frontage road. Within two miles there is a hotel owned by the Elks Club. Billboards along the highway advertise casinos, laser medical procedure, car dealerships, and the Merrimac Caverns, which are located way down in Missouri.

What might make a landscape lyrically noir? I suppose I return to Elizabeth Willis’s definition of the lyric voice as a figure in which the landscape is phenomenalized. If we look at two prime examples of “noir poetry,” both Kenneth Fearing’s Dead Reckoning or Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make create specific political and aesthetic landscapes of downward mobility. Both use a pop culture pastiche to suggest the lost lonely urban figures, beautiful and doomed. Yet like much post-noir iconography, its translation into our current neo-liberal landscape can seem both naïve and melancholic; the attractions and terrors of mid-century America have played out, after all. Noir nostalgia continues to play on in the beautiful pictures of decaying mansions and public buildings or when we consider evidence that cities like Detroit or even parts of Chicago are dying. We feel it when we sense the industrial beams falling to earth or when we smell the rust from the Des Plaines and feel I-55, scorched at the guardrails, curling in a bit on us.

History mediates and re-mediates roads to somewhere—the future, success, freedom—as a kind of infrastructure of our desires. At the same time counter-landscapes—the past, regret, ambivalence, rejection—wink at us, still demanding the status of place or matter.

In contemporary noir studies, Patrick Blaine describes Chilean writer Ramón Díaz Eterovic’s hard-boiled Heredia series. The power of the Heredia series, Blaine argues, is based. . .“less on the resolution of crimes than on a collective effort to restore a lost past which has been forcefully and artificially extirpated. It also resists the present aesthetic paradigms (as strong as their pull might be), based on the psychology of the market, which imposes a constant, forced obsolescence on all aspects of life, flattening affect and relying on the empty repetition of patterns of communication.”

At mile marker 238 there is a dead exit at Braidwood/IL 129. From South I-55, drivers used to be able to exit via a left lane U turn through the central reservation to merge with southbound traffic. From the southbound left lane, travelers could exit and cross over the northbound lane via an overpass that has, over time, become unstable and dangerous. For about nine months signs for the exit remained, marking movement no longer possible. Barriers were erected and the pavement was broken up and removed and now significant prairie grass grows as if Illinois has simply consumed its own idea. To the casual onlooker, all that remains is a single light to mark the dead.

Braidwood is home to a nuclear facility that powers much of the Chicagoland metro area. I can never not see a whole story in my mind on dark rides back from the city, down under I-80, headed towards the south.

There are vague plans to re-design the entire infrastructure in Will County south of the Des Plaines River. Attention is currently focused on the Arsenal Road exit at mile marker 245 as it is home to both an ExxonMobil Refinery and the CenterPoint Intermodal Center, apparently the largest trucking hub in the nation. This exit is home to the now defunct Joliet Army Ammunitions Plant, which operated through the 1970s. It is current site of a military cemetery. Other portions of the former plant are listed as sites on the EPA Superfund list.

Current road construction often strands drivers on the Des Plaines River Bridge in the range between static and audibility; many popular Chicago radio stations—de facto public spaces—seem to phase out at this boundary. This is not a story about Illinois and yet here Illinois is.

Marc Augé describes the spaces I mean as “non-spaces.” They are recursive, evasive, and out of sync with the systems of meaning that traditionally define identity, space, and temporality. Yet non spaces are replete with words or “instructions for use” with which we are encouraged to enact with words as identity and landscape in the most mundane ways. The far left lane ends after Bluff Road; you no longer require three lanes for your automobility.

Yet the buried pasts, the deconstructed meanings of dead exits, the nowhere of identity, suggest that non-spaces might be productively imagined as noir spaces, that interchange between here and someplace better or worse. In these spaces, in this lyric sensibility expressed in film, novels, and landscape, we unravel the strange routes between desires and demands enforced by billboards and our melancholia for a lost and equally conflicted past.

Try 5 on the dial, try 10, 15
Just the ghost of an inch, did you know, divides Japan and
Peru?
20, 25
Is that what you want, static and a speech and the fragment of a
waltz, is that just right?

Kenneth Fearing
“Radio Blues”

In Natsuo Kirino’s 1997 noir novel Out, the female protagonists work at a bento factory in what is politely called the “Tokyo suburbs.” They actually work the Mushashi-Murayama district, and if you look on Google maps you will see that it is nowhere where anyone, including sex tourists, would ever go in Tokyo. It is as much of the world is, an interlinking set of highways and factories and houses and malls. The novel’s progression takes its protagonists through a series of locations that are out, intertubes encouraging meditation on the physical conditions of their increasing alienation as they progress from one sense of out to another.

Popular among the growing market for novels many would term “global noir” are those by Scandinavian authors Henning Mankell, Camilla Läckburg, Arnuldar Indriðason, and Stieg Larsson. Although there remains much focus on how these writers engage gender oppression, multiculturalism, and the long and complex memory of Nazi collaboration and resistance, often the novelists rely on settings—summer tourist villages, small ferry ports and (in Indriðason’s case, a county) both isolated from and central to global trade and tourism. These places are inter-zones too, vulnerable to the inter-reliance between EU capitalism and socialism, between white nationalist violence and the exploitation of global labor. In these places, on these emptying highways, between cosmopolitanisms, at these travel stops, all global noir subjects feel the increased pressure to become convenient and hospitable to investments possibilities.

At I-55 Bolingbrook exit 267, there once stood an abandoned mall known as Old Chicago. Modeled on early 20th century Chicago designs, the mall, which opened in 1975, featured small boutiques instead of larger mainstream stores. Inside the store, among the small batch product stood a bright yellow roller coaster, a log ride, rides and rides—a whole fair, a reminder of the Chicago World’s Fair and other lost public spaces of populist excitement. And yet it failed by 1980. Rumor at the time was that too many black kids came and scared the white kids and their parents off. I’m sure that the business of malls is simultaneously both more complex and more simple than that.

If you’ve seen the 1978 Brian De Palma film The Fury, you’ve seen Old Chicago. It seems like an idea that could never work. And it didn’t. But I am here to tell you it was there and it was fun. I have nostalgia for a nostalgic place that marketed nostalgia for something before fast capitalism, some other de facto public space where you went to see the attractions of your own age embedded in a nostalgia for past de facto places. Old Chicago is a repetition of a repetition of a place you could go and have a good time along the edges of the city, a haunted city, its attractions, where the beauty of kinder capitalisms that didn’t work are ground to earth, buried under a sea of cars, nowhere that used to be somewhere, at the exit you should take if you want to avoid the I-355 toll road to go to the IKEA.

So what’s to fear here about the noir of the I-80 split? What about these stories of the long journey from Chicago, itself at risk of becoming a tourist destination surrounded by people with dwindling access to public services? How is this different than down the road in central Illinois, suffering from the chemicals of agribusiness and occasional unapologetic regional xenophobia? And between is that I-55/I-80 interchange of sprawl and repetition and slight deaths. Where are we driving? Jodi Dean, in noir-like fashion, defends left melancholia in The Communist Horizon, as a reasonable affect in the face of an increasingly digital culture that has made bad compromises with capitalism, compromises that have wrought serious consequences to global workers. In an interview in CounterPunch, she identifies the dangers of a lyric enchantment with the kind of spaces I’m talking about:

Drive [Freudian] isn’t oriented toward something; it’s shaped from loss and just attaches to any old thing, easily moving from one object of intense attachment to another (I’m tempted to say that with respect to politics drive manifests itself as a kind of political Asperger’s syndrome; you know, how everyone is at one moment obsessed with binary oppositions, then fracking, then “isms,” then debt). It’s a repetitive circuit that results from failure, where people get off (get a little nugget of enjoyment) from failing. . . . This language is reflexive, inward-turning as well as self-loathing. I argue that communicative capitalism (and consequently contemporary democracy as well as contemporary media networks) exhibit the reflexive structure of drive. Examples: getting stuck in the intertubes, clicking around, looking but not finding, repeating the same gestures, having the same pointless arguments, getting invested in them even when (or especially when) they don’t matter.

How, then, do we keep our affects both dirty and true along the road? How do we feel the place of cultural failure as well as the infrastructure that links rust to byproduct? How do we see and embody the ambivalence of our compromised places? How do we re-claim our dead roads and those lost in silence behind our sound barriers?

A proposed bridge between the Danish town of Rødby and the German town of Puttgarden would potentially save the dying economy of the southern communities of Lolland Island in Denmark. Like many communities outside of Copenhagen, the communities of Lolland rely on tourism from Copenhagen and, potentially, from German industrial cities like Hamburg and Hanover, to enhance their minimal agricultural and industrial base. The bridge is predicted to be completed in 2018 after years of negotiation between German and Danish infrastructure agencies. Until then, motorists and those traveling on the EuroRail must use a ferry on which alcohol, snacks, as well as luxury items—perfumes and cosmetics, name brand jewelry, the tools of cosmopolitan living—are available for purchase during the roughly 40 minute journey across the Baltic Sea. Your cars and trains ride on the lower decks, skirting duty-free waters that smell of salt.

Bought at the drugstore down the street
Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always
night, or day:
Bought to use as a last resort,
Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o’clock,
Borrowed or bought, to look well, to ennoble. To prevent
disease. To entertain To have.
Broken or sold. Or given away. Or used and forgotten. Or lost.

Kenneth Fearing
“Green Light”

In Shuichi Yoshida’s 2011 noir novel Villain, a girl dies along the haunted Mitsuse Pass, Japan National Route 263 in the province of Saga among a set of characters who have never been to Tokyo or avoid it because of the high cost of train travel and accommodations. They use dating sites because there is no place to meet people in their world; clubs and karaoke are expensive and difficult for awkward people. The Mistuse Pass is used by drivers seeking to avoid a toll road as they move between work and leisure. It looks lovely in photos, but the characters talk about it as a highway between endless shopping centers, roadside love hotels, and residential construction, far from the cities that define our neoliberal industries and desires, even as we look from the car and see our waste.

As you head down I-55 towards central Illinois, right past where three lanes turn to two, your car will drop swiftly towards the Des Plaines River Bridge. On the left you will see shimmering and silver brightness from the ExxonMobil refinery plant at Arsenal Road. It will seem to you a magical city all its own as your radio turns to fuzz, you flatten out, your car speeds towards the dead Braidwood exit and then noses on towards someplace that is not here and is not central Illinois.

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Elizabeth Hatmaker is the author of Girl in Two Pieces (BlazeVOX 2010), which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times book award. Her poetry is featured in Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights 2009), ACM, Bird Dog, Epoch, MiPOesias, Mandorla, Mississippi Review, Mirage/Periodical, and Projector Magazine. She teaches writing, cultural studies, film, and urban education at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.

The Appositional Project: Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [saina]

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Ryan Clark, Series Contributor

Ryan Clark’s series “The Appositional Project” examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination/loss.

One of the more compelling poetry projects I have come across over the past few years has been Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory series, currently comprised of two titles: [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and [saina] (Omnidawn, 2010). In both books, Santos Perez addresses the history of Guåhan (Guam) and its native Chamorro people. It is a project of repair, one that seeks to incorporate the fragments of Chamorro culture that have survived centuries of colonization at the hands of Spain, Japan, and, presently, the United States. Further, from unincorporated territory enacts a mapping of Guam through the author’s layering of political, cultural, and personal memory that serves to locate that which has become dispersed, replaced, and forgotten.

The act of incorporation is emphasized throughout the series by the preposition “from,” which appears in the title as well as at the start of each poem. Rather than writing stand-alone poems, Santos Perez has woven through each book excerpts from several long poems. In [saina], these include “tidelands,” “all with ocean views,” “sourcings,” “preterrain,” “aerial roots,” and “organic acts.” Each excerpt is therefore titled “from tidelands” or “from organic acts,” or even “ginen aerial roots,” ginen being the Chamorro word for “from.” Additionally, Santos Perez draws from numerous source texts in his poetry, including Chamorro folk tales, travel brochures and websites, and the 1950 Organic Act of Guam, which again places emphasis on the act of incorporating and bringing together. Just as colonization heavily influenced Guam and modern Chamorro culture (most Chamorros are Catholic, a holdover from Spanish rule), Santos Perez brings different texts and voices into contact with one another in order to create poetry that is multivoiced, multilingual, and multicultured, with multiple levels of mixed identity establishing a never singular and never complete representation of the Chamorro experience.

While just about every page merits lengthy discussion, I find myself most drawn to the excerpts “from all with ocean views” (and “ginen all with ocean views”). Each excerpt consists of two parts: the first includes a series of lunes composed of language appropriated from a variety of travel magazines, and the second features a prose block with the words “guåhan is” followed by language that has been remixed from articles from the website of a Guam news network. One excerpt of a lune section is as follows:

‘reinvented by
each new gaze’
the arc of a cliff                     diver’ funeral
complete with
water buffalo

sacrifice’ for those  |  inclined to  |  paradise’ ‘all our
employees are still  |  native and  |  we require no
translations’ (58)

The opening calls attention to the ways that colonialism so frequently attempts to replace an existing culture with the culture of the colonizer. Even the lune itself is the Japanese haiku re-envisioned as an American form. Guam has been “reinvented by / each new gaze” for centuries, and this language also calls attention to the tourist industry. At the end of the excerpt, we are reminded how native cultures are exoticized and held up as living tourist attractions. That “‘all our / employees are still  |  native” is presented as a selling point, just as one might expect a brochure to mention beachfront access or gorgeous scenery (“all with ocean views”).

In this sense, Santos Perez is making evident the way in which tourism in Guam acts as a sort of neo-colonialism. In a later excerpt, “ginen sourcings,” Santos Perez mentions that in 2008 approximately 1.179 million tourists visited Guam, spending an average of “$1,650 for a three-night four-day stay” (89). That the majority of tourists are from Japan, a former colonizer of the island, only reinforces this notion. By using travel magazines as his source text, Santos Perez is turning the language of tourism in on itself.

This serves as a clear example of apposition, and it is a technique that the author turns to repeatedly in the “from organic acts” excerpts, where he appropriates language from the 1950 Organic Act of Guam, the law that designated the island as an unincorporated territory of the United States. In one such excerpt, subtitled “proclamation no 4347 < 2/1/75 40 fr 5129 >”, Santos Perez inserts language from the Catholic rosary, both in Chamorro and in English, into the language of the government document, ending with the mixed lines, “but literate us from] the independence of the united states of america” (101). The “organic acts” poem is the longest that appears in [saina], and it is also the poem that incorporates the most diverse blend of political, cultural, and personal history. On the same page as the above excerpt, Santos Perez draws text from a Chamorro legend and also inserts language from his grandmother talking about how her singing voice resembles that of her mother.

from unincorporated territory is not simply a project of opposition, though opposition is certainly a necessary step in the process of reclaiming Chamorro culture and identity. The project is most importantly one that hopes to incorporate the multidimensional history of Guam and the Chamorro people. In “from preterrain,” Santos Perez writes, “could i break ‘sky’ / into pieces of ‘want’ / to gather all / that [we] remember did i say words show evidence / of how we are made // to see” (69). The words that make up the poetry in these books explore how identity and culture have been formed. How are we made to see Guam, an island invisible on most world maps?

The evidence must come through language, and so this project is charged with the task of creating Guam as a place in words, of incorporating the various elements of the Chamorro experience. It is a project of mapping, of locating the dislocated, and while this work is ambitious, it nonetheless succeeds through the author’s willingness to engage the act of gathering with an attentiveness to the importance of historical facts, cultural values and stories, and the personal experiences of individuals such as his grandmother. Craig Santos Perez reminds us that “from” is a marker not only for location but our relation to location as well.

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Ryan Clark has dedicated years of his life to homophonic translation and is particularly interested in the reparative potential of appropriative writing, including how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. His poetry has appeared in Smoking Glue Gun, Tenderloin, Seven Corners, and Fact-Simile, and he also has an essay about teaching homophonic translation forthcoming from Something on Paper. He currently teaches composition at Savannah State University.

Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri

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Shailen Mishra, Blog Editor & Series Contributor

Shailen’s series “Space in Culture” explores the motif of space in the works of Indian poets and poetry.

In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Jon Stewart talks of how the content in The Daily Show is developed: “We don’t do anything but make the connections.” In the show, the facts (those incriminating media bites) are put together to present the larger truth, the broader context, without which the gut-stabbing humor of the show would not exist. Connections are at the heart of human expression. Rhetoric can be potent because of it. Arguments can capture the outlying detail in a meaningful manner. And similarly, poetry fires up imagination through connections. What are metaphors, metonymy, personification, connotations, if not implied connections?

Arun Kolatkar’s poetry collection Jejuri reminds us of our connectedness. Claims about Jejuri range from “one of the great books of modern India” to its being the poetry equivalent of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. But the sad reality is that many literary-minded Indians haven’t even heard of the poet or his work (including myself until some time back). So, what’s the value of Jejuri for the Indian writing in English and for Indian literature in general is a debate I won’t go into detail here. But the fact that I was unaware for such a long time of such a fine piece of modern Indian literature is a deeply humbling fact for me. So as I was saying Arun Kolatkar’s poetry collection Jejuri reminds us of our connectedness. At the level of narration, symbolism, and affect, Jejuri is about reminding us how densely we’re tethered to multiple beings and things in our lives. We’re always attached to places for obvious material and sentimental reasons; such connections are discernible. But then there are many illusive ones, which require traveling back in time, retrieving the details that’s faded/fading from our minds, searching cluelessly for that moment of original register, or paradoxically, not noticing the connection because it’s so deeply ingrained with our reality. And we wonder that if this illusiveness could be pinned down and articulated, then the fragile impression of our connection could be bolstered to some extent. Jejuri is a project in that regard. Kolatkar probes connections not only as a skeptic but also as someone enchanted. And in that simultaneity lies the excitement of the place Jejuri, and Jejuri.

Jejuri is a small pilgrimage town, not too far from Mumbai/Bombay, in the state of Maharashtra in Western India. As the Notes section of the book proclaims, this town is dedicated to the legacy of Khandoba, a popular local god who cuts across the caste barrier. Even more, this mythic figure had a Muslim wife and a Muslim name, Mallu Khan. The legends of Khandoba are numerous and so are his devotees. Hence, Jejuri’s history largely derives from the tales of Khandoba, the legends his devotees have spun, and the hold the god has upon his devotees which has fueled the lore in the first place. Kolatkar writes in the poem “Scratch”: “there is no crop / other than god / and god is harvested here / around the year / and round the clock / out of the bad earth / and the hard rock…scratch a rock / and a legend springs.” And these legends, their copiousness, their free peddling by the Jejurians do not stop amusing Kolatkar as he asks the priest’s young son, “do you really believe that story…” The answer is irrelevant because a believer is not going to turn a skeptic; not in Jejuri. The bonding between the believer and his/her god is cemented here. Miracle-wielding Khandoba is too good a catch for the needy and afflicted devotee; so why let a poet’s skepticism play spoilsport? Here, the big issues of life, death, mystery, universe, and love are on the side of the devotee, while the poet only has reason.

The lifestyle in Jejuri has a predictable rhythm. Complacently caught up in the monotony, its inhabitants take the routine for granted, like the legends around them, the hills, rocks, temples, ruins, and devotees/tourists. Is it a surprise then that the book Jejuri begins with the image of the sunrise and ends with the sunset? The chronology is respected since the poems seem to follow the timeline of the poet arriving in Jejuri in the first poem and leaving from the railway station in the last one. And in between, each poem seems to be linked to the next as the poet is strolling through the town and discovering it bit by bit. More or less this pattern is maintained, explicitly or implicitly. For example, one could speculate as the order of the poems progresses that “The Bus” arrives in Jejuri, which is observed by “The Priest” and the poet disembarks and notices on his way to the temple features of the town like “Heart of Ruin”, “The Doorstep”, “Water Supply”, “The Door” until he arrives at “A Low Temple” etc. But the orderliness of sequence is synonymous with the ubiquitousness of shrines, temples, and scared places in Jejuri. Like time, the routineness of space is taken for granted here. And the mastery of Kolatkar lies in how slyly he undermines that predictability: “The door was open. / Manohar thought / it was one more temple…It isn’t another temple, / he said, / it’s just a cowshed.” Again, in the poem “Hills”, Kolatkar tries to point out this regularity: the ubiquitousness of shrines and legends equals the repetition of rocks and boulders on a hillside:

hills
demons
and sand blasted shoulders
bladed with shale

demons
hills
cactus thrust
up through the ribs of rock

hills
demons
kneequartz
limestone loins…

What is then Kolatkar’s mission at Jejuri? Just to expose the blind faith, the irrational legends? No, he’s not a cynic. In fact, he is an empathetic skeptic. He would not be the priest, his son, or any of the devotees, but he understands why they’re that way. His need for comfort is no different from theirs. Hence, he finds a god in “Yeshwant Rao” who’s marginalized (“a second class god”), more appropriate to his needs, and more understanding of his skepticism. Kolatkar writes: “He is merely a kind of a bone setter. / The only thing is, / as he himself has no heads, hands and feet, / he happens to understand you a little better.” Yeshwant Rao comes from the untouchable caste and his shrine is placed not inside Khandoba’s temple compound, but outside, as a “gatekeeper.” That’s the gift handed to him for his dedication to Khandoba and Jejuri.  A second rank god for a second rate devotee like Kolatkar, and together they extend the core of Jejuri to its periphery, its margin. And in that extension Kolatkar makes Jejuri appear larger than it could have been. It’s not just a land of uncontested miracle and myth as Jejurians like to believe, but it can bear with dignity a more humane topography to the satisfaction of a skeptical outsider amidst its dysfunction, ruins, and contrasts. That Jejuri is both is Kolatkar’s point, and he connects the two ends to remind us how to make better sense of things.

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Shailen Mishra is a book hopper, story whore, poetry pariah, novelist, three times failed guitar learner, and an aspiring didgeridoo player. He holds a Ph.D. from Illinois State University and an MFA from North Carolina State University. In his spare time, he edits SRPR’s blog and manages its website.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 5

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Jake Young, Guest Contributor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

My two passions in life, writing and wine, sometimes seem inevitable. I was raised in the Santa Cruz Mountains around books and literature; my father Gary Young is a well-regarded poet, and his writing studio, which sits on a hill above our home, is a short stroll from one of the finest wineries in the Santa Cruz area. For the past three years I’ve worked for the vintner across the road, pouring wine for customers in the tasting room, labeling and boxing new bottles, and helping with the harvest and crush for the first time last year. I realized the many invisible hands and hearts that go into the wine that I was serving, and I realized I want to combine my passions for wine and poetry.To distinguish wines from different vineyards, French winemakers developed the concept of terroir, loosely translated as “the taste of place.” The central tenet behind terroir is that every individual wine can reflect the land where the grapes were grown and the wine is produced. Implied by the concept of terroir is the notion that wine has metaphorical value. In one of his odes, Pablo Neruda shouts out to wine:

more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.

Neruda knew the terroir of the human heart. He knew good writing, like good wine, must be balanced, well constructed, surprising but not overwhelming. And the best writing, like the best wine, appears so natural it seems to originate not from a person, but straight from the earth. Neruda recognized the labor, cooperation, reliance on nature, commitment, and luck necessary to make fine wine, and he seemed to insist that wine, like poetry, is more than an integral aspect of human life: it is a metaphor for everything that holds a society together.

There is so much that goes into making a bottle of wine. Those who recognize terroir understand that wine tastes like the land, that the flavors tell a story, and that this story contains a sense of place. To work with the land, to cultivate and nurture the terroir of a wine, is to reveal the components of a place. Place greatly influences my poems; I feel a pull to the landscapes that are such an important part of my poetic project—praising the land, rows of grapes, fields of artichokes, and paths through forests. Through poetry, it’s possible to show how cultures are exemplified by what they consume, and examine how people are connected to the land. People are nourished not only by food, but also by the places where food is grown and by the people who prepare it. “There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher. A great wine reveals a sense of place, and poetry at its most sublime reveals this as well. Traditionally, wine writing has focused on tasting a wine, evaluating its flavors, assessing the bouquet, commenting on texture, tannins and acidity. I try to approach writing about wine and food from a different perspective. Through my poetry, I want to show how the fruits of the land exemplify culture, and examine how people are connected to the land.Wine and poetry have a long history together. Poets were the first wine writers. In ancient China, poetry was considered wine distilled from the mind. Even today, people retell stories of the ancient Chinese poets who played drinking games, floating wine cups downstream and composing a formal poem where the cup landed, drunk on the language of the land. Poetry, like wine, encourages us to love where we are, what we do, and who we are with. I want to praise the world. In order to better understand our own lives, let us understand our wine. Each sip of wine is a reminder of the complexities that tie things together, of the subtle connections that make life enjoyable.

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Jake Young lives in Santa Cruz, California, and works at Beauregard Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He Received his MFA at North Carolina State University. His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Red Wheelbarrow, Miramar, Solo Novo, PANK, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, phren-Z, and Gastronomica: Journal of Food and Culture.

The House of Loss, or, Hamlet and the Oyster

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Toby Altman, Series Contributor

Toby’s series “Bodies in Space” is about sustained thinking of the physicality of the body and its relation to poetry. Here, critical essay fractures, moves like poetry.

“But who asked you to swallow men like oysters, Prince Hamlet?” (Nietzsche)

I said that a house is an engraving that incites desire. But it is not enough to consider the house as an “object.” The house is a privileged entrail, transcending the anatomy of all the houses in which we have found shelter. In every digestion, even the richest, the first task is to find the shell of the essential: the intimate valve of inside space. For the house furnishes us. And the entrail deepens to the point where an immemorial domain opens. We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our entrails are perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that is loss.

What is poetry but the witnessing of a moment that causes one to say entrail? For some, the poem enacts and re-enacts queasy rituals of defilement and revulsion, an obsession with corporeality that reduces everything to appetite and excretion. The poem is then a desire for aperture coupled with a disgust at openness; a need for, alongside a rage about, bodily closure. And, the unction of lyric seals up the skin, leaving the diseased interior to fester “unseen.” One is left with a set of fantasies of access to the other’s interior—concrete fantasies of eating, purging, or penetration—and this is called, often enough, ethics.

Put another way, it is the essential myth of the lyric that the higher the art, the more one may capture that which is art, that thing that lies within language. Here in the graveyard, the soul (which Walter Benjamin calls “earth-bound”) comes to inaugurate the form, to dwell in it like the flesh in an oyster. But this particular creature is the object of Hamlet’s greedy love. He slurps it down, and the slurping is a kind of music. And thus only the eater seems to possess the ultimate truth of entrails: there are no oysters in Hamlet (or Hamlet); only the armor of the Ghost.

But, paying heed to “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is hair to” does not necessarily turn one against the body; on the contrary its very fragility may elicit a tenderness toward the facts of moral embodiment. For instance, there is no doubt that Rilke liked locks. But who doesn’t like both locks and keys? Gentle closing calls for gentle opening, and we should want life always to be well oiled, in the (libidinal) manner of the Eucharist.

Speaking of resurrection, let me start over. I said that a house is an engraving that incites desire, and the word is delicious with itself: in-grave-ing, [a] writing which is also [a] ritual of mourning. [A] ritual which is also the making of [a] place. A house for the body which is also an image of it. For the house furnishes us, and deepens the entrail until it opens on a reservoir of oil, black, Eucharistic, distilled from the body itself. I mean language, which is built to envelope and sustain itself. I mean: all sorrow is booty sorrow and all mourning is a form of eating. Praise its salvific unmaking.

The author would like to thank Gaston Bachelard, Vanessa Place, and David Hillman, for donating their language to this essay.

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Toby Altman is a conceptual poet. His poems have appeared. He is the author of and the recipient of. He currently lives in, where he works as and serves on the editorial board for. For more of his, please visit his and follow him on.

Displaced Earth: An Engagement with Sand and Soot

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Adrienne Dodt, Series Contributor

Adrienne’s series “Digital Landscapes” is about navigating hypertext.

Stephanie Strickland’s The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot¹ is a poetic hypertext about a love story between the characters Sand and Harry Soot. The text is made of linked nodes that one can traverse through different methods. Each node contains two verses, one for each character (titled “1” for Soot and usually “0” for Sand, though she occasionally has other binary code titles), and an image that is in some way science-based. One can read the text in any order through links attached to words, links attached to images, and links attached to a series of 0s at the bottom of each page.

The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot is displaced through its content and its form.

Sand: Soot:
Sand is earth. Soot is earth.
Sand is the substance silica, Soot is the substance carbon,
which makes glass and silicon chips.² which makes life.²
Sand is inert. Soot is active.
Sand represents the raw material Soot represents the processed (burned)
out of which we construct our virtual reality. remnants of the once living.
Sand is that which is natural, untouched. Carbon is the material
Sand encompasses both the natural and the unnatural. out of which we construct living reality.
Sand is that which will be interpreted by humans. Soot is that which was interpreted by humans.

      0                                                                                        1
Biocompatible glass?                                                       Harry Soot,
Sand looks askance.                                                       unclear, of course, about fire.
Sand an infinite receiver—                                              How original, originating,
infinitely flexible. Beyond                                                 it really was—
flex in fact, an infinite                                                       Forests aflame.¹
deceiver: Proteus at home.¹

and

01000011
Sand is sand.¹

New York City: The ubiquitous (American) city, it becomes indistinctive in the process of fictionalization: the Everycity. NYC is the projection of human’s ideal “metropolis”— fears, desires, artistic impulses— a filtered view of an actual New York City made of concrete, steel, people, neighborhoods. New York City is a physical, human-made geography. NYC is an abstract, human-made geography.

1
Harry Soot believes he is watching.
Harry thinks he is in Times Square.
He is. She is not.¹

It is telling that only Harry Soot is associated with New York City. Soot symbolizes man (in both the general and gendered interpretation), who must navigate human-made geographies. This arena is closed off to Sand, who represents non-living nature turned into technology.

1
Soot ground his keys
in his pocket,
defacing his Metrocard.¹

This verse is located next to an image of a Metrocard— a pass for New York’s subway system. The card is a means of travel through the city. By scraping his keys against the card, Soot renders it unusable. He sabotages his “key” to the trains, the portal to moving from one place to the next, with his actual keys, the portal to (presumably) his home. He cannot (doesn’t want to) navigate the actual city. He is intentionally dis-placed as a character, a persona on the internet, a fictionalized person who cannot traverse reality.

The image of the card itself links to another node of the text; thus the card becomes a literal portal from one site to another even as it is rendered as an image and is thus inutile as passage through an actual place.

Nature: Amorphous, uncontrollable Nature is the symbol of that which is not constructed. Nature is the Everywhere; it is incomprehensible as it encroaches on our constructed geographies. Nature is that which we classify and name— an interpretation of the unknown/other— into flora, fauna, geological features. Nature is a fictionalized ideal of nature: an overlaid transparency onto the living and non-living earth.

0
Sand seeks the scent
of lemon viburnum,
murmuring purple
of the ringneck doves’ soft
gurgle as they walk on the wall
and their syllables spill over and

fall
down
a
column

of slowness. Midnight blue
of Krishna’s¹

In this verse, Sand is in her untouched state. Nature overtakes the language (of doves, but still a language), rendering it almost unintelligible, and language “spills over” and “falls” down the human-made construction of a column. The column represents one of the earliest breakthroughs in architecture, a milestone of human ingenuity.

0

Sand’s similarity to scarabs? Or a
rosa dolorosa, every petal
thorned? Or swallows up close.
“The tail is forked and as elegant
as a trout’s, but more attenuated,
just short of baroque,” says the
naturist. I quote.¹

In this verse, Sand represents controlled nature, nature that has been quantified, measured, and classified. Sand is that which is taken from nature and processed for human knowledge (which is in itself a use.)

0
Sand resounds as long as a whale song
passed along and around the waters of the
world. Like a motherchild pod, she/they
both threatened and succored by the
coasts. Alone in the bay, rolling over and
back beneath the moon, as

1
Harry and his cohort heave
into view, traveling in a pack,
driving them aground.¹

This is the conflict between human and (the rest of) nature: humans attempt to conquer animals, land, and geology for their own use while nature resists and fights back. In this verse, Sand has been conquered by Soot; nature has been conquered by human for use.

The Internet: The internet is a no-place and therefore, so goes the sophism, an every-place. The internet is both constructed— through code and content— and unconstructed— through its immateriality, the lack of physicality. The internet is a medium through which humans navigate from site to site to site in our conception of the internet as a series of places, both connected (linked) and unconnected (discrete).

The hypertext is a dis-placement: there is no spatial determination (or order) to the text. One can travel through any chosen path to interpret the text. In this way, the text is doubly dis-placed: through the non-place of the internet and through the de-construction/interpreted re-construction of its narrative.

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Sand insinuated herself. ZaumZoom in,
she has gone ahead. ZoomTzim out,
she is not behind.¹

Sand “has gone ahead,” or, in another word, progressed. “Progress” and “advance” (to go ahead) are the words we use to describe technology. To take the natural and turn it into the abstract is progress because it furthers human purposes. Sand is located on the internet, which is conducted through silicon/sand. She can progress because she is of the internet, or the internet is of her.

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Harry Soot
tried to find a center. Beneath or beyond.
A point to yield or resist.¹

Soot, on the other hand, is a constructed and self-constructed entity. His subjectivity tries to relate to an objectivity beyond himself, and that objective reality is, paradoxically, virtual. It is that which he cannot touch. Soot cannot locate himself because he is incompatible as a physical substrate. He is caught up in his own abstraction.

We, as readers, construct a narrative through our choices acted upon the text. The dis-placement of the text is, ultimately, what frees us to perform other operations of interpretation.

Footnotes:

¹ Stephanie Strickland, The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot. http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/frame.html
² I riffed off of some of Strickland’s ideas here.
Stephanie Strickland, “Seven Reasons Why Sandsoot is the Way It Is.” http://www.wordcircuits.com/htww/strickland.htm#top

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Adrienne Dodt is a poet and essayist. Adrienne’s work can be found in The Body Electric anthology and Fact-Simile, Apothecary, Con/Crescent, and Monkey Puzzle magazines. Ze is a member of The Next Objectivists poetry collective in Chicago. Ze was the Poetry Editor for Bombay Gin magazine in 2008-2009, and ze edited the Next Objectivists’ chapbook Collective Unconsciousnesses in 2011. Adrienne currently teaches English at City Colleges of Chicago.