Dear All,
Please, in addition to finishing your proposal drafts and sending me them by email by Tuesday, please do these readings in preparation for the Tuesday lecture “Public & Private SIgns, Ritual & Guerilla Poetry”:
1) Hannah Weiner, from The Clairvoyant Journal READ THE PREFACE AND THE “MARCH” PAGES HERE (you can read as much as you’d like, as I encourage you to read all the pdf pages and listen to some of this work recorded, but assigned are only “Preface” and “March”).
2) Caroline Bergvall, on Weiner and Corporeal Rituals & Writing HERE
3) CA Conrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises HERE and HERE (the 2nd link are the exercises themselves, including one we collaborated on at Evergreen last quarter)
4) Re-read (or read if you haven’t yet) Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand’s Landscapes excerpt, HERE and in an earlier blog post and earlier email (thus you should already have read this).
5) Tina Darragh, Will Be Abducted… in next issue of Wheelhouse (sneak peek) HERE
6) Finally, make sure you’ve read Nonsite Collective’s draft proposal, which is in a blog post below (also sent last week as email).
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Optional/Recommended
Hannah Weiner, Little Book / Indians HERE
Since I will use the term “abjection” (from “abject”), though will be using it differently from Julia Kristeva, who is central to the term’s use in critical and identity theory, let me first say: I tend only to use this term as an instrumental verb, given that (not totally unlike Kristeva) I take “the abject” to be that which we narrate to be so, and as such, not an essential or ontological quality or characteristic of any particular person or group, but rather, as a term that describes a material fact of how we think of/describe persons. Therefore, I may use this term to describe a space that we can all potentially inhabit, a term that can equally apply to each of us, thus none of us. For our purposes, though, I will talk a little about “abjecting” the self as a way to recognize that the self is also other, that it is not an “it” but rather multiple (self and other are not mutually exclusive), that this causes in many of us (especially those within a cultural majority) a kind of horror or nausea. I’ll lean on this term in talking about how poetry’s work helps facilitate (potentially) such a process of recognition (a step in the politicizing of–even our private/very personal–languages, use of signs, the written, etc). So, for more on this term’s lineage, here is the Wiki article on it (not bad, not great, but not bad).