on the notebook

On the Notebook

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”—Frantz Fanon

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The struggle against colonialism is a struggle in two fronts: it is a struggle for social, political and economic independence but also a struggle for cultural independence: the colonized, condemned to provide the raw materials for the products of another’s consumption is also condemned to mirror the physical and cultural paradigms of dominance, and which he will never embody—he is driven to sterility, to madness.

The colonized is bled—physically and spiritually—so that the industrialized world can be what it is. Yes, even today. Colonialism—that shape-shifting chameleon—goes by many names, many resurrections.  

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Césaire’s Notebook can be critiqued for being incomprehensible, frustrating, and disturbing but what cannot be denied is the Notebook’s power to serve as a finely-honed scalpel of change—its power to “clinically” remove the parasite of mental colonialism. The Notebook’s central metaphor is that of trying on different masks. As the poem’s narrator returns to his native land, a “desolate bedsore on the wounds of the water,” he is struck by the perceived futility of his fellow countrymen (and women; even though they rarely if ever appear in the poem!). Our narrator is conflicted and ecstatic as he tries on different identities and is moved and frustrated by his desire for his people to stop “hoeing and digging” and begin “cutting something quite, quite different really from the insipid cane.” The master’s head!

Disillusioned with the various masks the narrator is set to the task of creating a new identity—one that accepts both its African heritage and the legacy of slavery:

"No, we've never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great...I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without amition, at best conscientious sorcerers and the only unquestionable record that we broke was that of endurance under the chicote [whip]..."

More than a reference to the color of skin, Negritude becomes a political and living identity—an identity of change for all those who

“have explored neither the seas nor the sky but those who

know all the nooks and crannies of the country of suffering

those whose only voyages have been uprooting

those who were domesticated and christianised

those who were inoculated with bastardisation”

Negritude deconstructs the power dynamics of the colonial world, it turns language into action-material (“beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who screams is not a dancing bear”):

Language returns the accusations—destroys the mad logic of whiteness—of savagery to the “proper English lady who finds “a Hottentot’s skull in her soup tureen.” White becomes the color of evil; white-culture becomes poison. The “jiculi milk” which no French dictionary can identify becomes the antidote by which the colonized can envision a land “where everything is free and fraternal, my land.”

Negritude becomes the language of the oppressed rising, it becomes “Haiti where negritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity.”  It becomes Toussaint--freed if not economically or politically at least in mind and spirit from the parasite of whiteness. Negritude “defies the white screams of a white death,” it becomes a celebration of life—bold and black and beautiful—a drum of rebellion breaking  the “white pool of silence.”  

At the end of the Notebook the narrator finally begins to understand the process of his own Negritude and is finally able to speak to the inhabitants of his land which were at first “so strangely chattering and dumb.”

*

Some thoughts and questions:

The historian Eduardo Galeano writes of Europe’s legacy or rather shatters what we are often led to believe—that while colonialism was immensely painful it left the natives a legacy of railroads, schools, language, political institutions, PROGRESS (and not to mention “culture”):

                “When Belgium left the Congo, a total of three Congolese held positions of responsibility in government.

                When Great Britain left Tanzania, the country had but two engineers and twelve doctors.

                When Spain left Western Sahara, the country had one doctor, one lawyer and one specialist in commerce.

                When Portugal left Mozambique, the country had 99 percent illiteracy rate, not a single high school graduate and no university.”  

Today, the same argument continues, we associate progress with industrialization and with Western paradigms of economic development and cultural references. Colonialism—that chameleon, that master of resurrection—continues unabated.  Today it is called globalization, neocolonialism, progress for all, and which according to its prophets promises Ipads for everyone.

 And yet, we have not come a long way from the times of the Notebook:

We live in times with the most profound wealth-inequalities: 1/3  of the world’s peoples live in extreme poverty (less than two dollars a day) this translates to:

·         --640 million children in developing countries living without adequate shelter: or one in three.

·         --400 million children who have no access to safewater: or one in five.

·          --270 million children who have no access to health services: or one in seven.

·         --Number of telephones per 100 people in Sweden, 162; in Norway, 158; in South Asia, 4.

·         --Number of Internet users per 100 people in Iceland, 65; in Liechtenstein, 58; in Sweden, 57; in the Republic of Korea and the United States, 55; in Canada, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands, 51; and in South Asia, 2.

Such is the mad-logic of progress; the third world is still reduced to a source of cheap labor and natural resources; the fruits of these lands enjoyed by an industrialized world which imposes its cultural paradigms over the rest of us. 

I read the Notebook as an assault against the sterility of the impossible: a sterility that condemns the developing-world to flawed models of development and to the mimicry of physical and cultural norms of beauty which we can never embody. And it raises for me the following questions:

 How does the language of poetry succeed at doing away with the apparent inexpugnability of these times of “enduring” colonialism? How does language fail the poet and what—if anything—can fill in this void left by language/poetry?

And what do we make of Césaire’s use of French as oppose to Creole? What do we make of the lack of women appearing in the poem? Must we excuse him with the argument that such were the times?

How does Césaire merge his socio-historical consciousness with the creative consciousness of the language and to what effect?

In these times of recessions and revolutions (and to add to that, the looming threat of environmental degradation), what does the poet do with the ever-present feeling of social urgency? Are there artistic or ideological risks involved when engaging this urgency? In other words, does urgency dilute the poetic process, the way of arriving at this new language?

Unfortunately I do not know the answers to this questions and I only have questions and more questions.

As always feel free to discuss whatever struck your mind, or whatever I left out.             

Considering Superimpositions

Last time I blogged I considered the visual aesthetic; this time, since we are still keeping in mind exactly what a vision is, I have decided to consider what the words that make up the vision actually do: what roles they play, how they reveal a theater in which we are moved and haunted. Much like movies have scenes, lighting and audio, so these same considerations are in effect in poetry, albeit slightly subtler but perhaps more gratifying. However, I feel I cannot fully explain the effect of visual poetry without also pulling visual media into this as well. There are a few. I am considering the superimpositions of things that create our visual theater.

                                                            ***

We see what we want to see. We consider what we want to consider. One way to think about it is in the consideration of the superimposition of sound + visual: 

Please click here

In this case, how do we translate the music in this scene? How do we interpret the action without the sound, or the sound without the action? How do we translate what cannot be translated, or what has already been translated? How do we interpret without other contexts? We interpret such things by the visuals + sounds + textual cues that surrounds said piece, much like Hiromi Ito’s interpretation (which is, in turn, Jeffrey Angles’ interpretation of Ito) of femininity, shamanism and family in Killing Kanoko. We can view the classical, elevated music in the Clockwork Orange clip as one of two poles: either something to be regarded as serious and contemplative, or humorous for the very fact that Alex kicks the shit out of his goons against this music. We desire the superimposition, especially in order to heighten the important/ funny/ serious/ thoughtful/ etc situations.

I think of what Ito is writing “against,” what musicality Ito is bringing into this book. This is difficult, however, because I am aware that this book is a translation, therefore not everything (sound, equality of definitions, etc) is understood. But I’ll do my best. I think of Ito’s “Underground” as music, not necessarily as sound (though there are beautiful pile-ups of alliteration), but as text, and what the text is searching for:

The white wooden memorial tablet of my mother
(In-law) stands as it has from the time of her burial.
The movements of my father (in-law) are sluggish. He washes
The grave with maddening slowness… (77)

Ito states the physical disconnect between her and her parents and her hometown (“I move farther and farther away / From Tokyo and my own parents”), as well as coloring her text with whites and browns and greens; Ito creates music with her superimpositions of observations against poignant internal structures against lines (77). In other words, a grave without a name, background, and translation may not be as powerful without the tools Ito provides. The text, I think, is searching for place, and meaning within the place.

Of course, translation is all in how we, as readers, interpret any situation:

Click again

I am careful to note that the personal experience shapes the external translation. The joke behind this Family Guy clip is that Stewie has inaccurately articulated words before (the “h” against multiple “wh” words), and this drives Brian nuts. Stewie (perhaps knowingly but I’d like to think unknowingly) says these words and believes they have the correct pronunciation. I bring this up to showcase the differences of interpretation: what may be correct to one may be completely different to another. It’s the slightness in which we find the striking differences. I also bring this up because, without reference/ previous knowledge of the long-standing joke, perhaps this dialogue at hand would not be found as humorous. Perhaps.

So brings me to “A Poem for Ueno-San.” The translator generously lets me know in the back of the book that the words “poetry” and “death” are quite similar in Japanese aside from a slight accent that differentiates the two. This very note, had I not read it, is something that could not be exactly interpreted otherwise in the poem to the non-Japanese-speaker. The joke is lost. The joke is there, in the pages, but it’s not the same. And that’s sad:

Whenever Ueno-San says poetry it sounds like death 
Even when I know she’s talking about poetry
Death springs from her mouth
These sudden fatalities fluster me…
Ueno-San wants to give meaning to my death
I don’t want meaning assigned to me… (59, 60)

I retract: it’s not necessarily a “joke” (and I use that word extremely loosely) anymore, but a sort of exchange of realities. While the non-Japanese speaker can fully accept the physics of text-language where poetry sounds like/ means death without understanding the slight accent differences of their Japanese counterparts, I feel it would mean so much more if I had organically understood this. I feel like I’m reading not just Ito but Angles as well. Unfortunately, only so much can be done in this regard. And, for what it's worth, I can fully accept poetry as death, here in Ito's work, and find it beautiful all the same. It’s just I still find myself wondering what if I had known this pun earlier? I read this poem as a superimposition of language + language, what is accepted as truth and what is trying to get out as truth.

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Ito operates in a world without borders, and the horrors build upon the emptiness—perhaps, in part, because the unknown is something which can be anything, any fact/ facet of interiority or exteriority, but many register this ether as fear; perhaps also because Ito seems to enjoy the terrifying dwell. In Ito’s case, I interpret her unknowns in terms of what she does put on the page: what facts and fantasies she produces, for me, implicates the plane on which she operates.

Speaking of “facts,” I remember watching Halloween is Grinch Night as a little kid, and this part (clip here, no pressing need to watch, just for reference) terrified me, but the statement leading up to this moment terrified me more: the unknown, the Grinch’s statement of “facing the facts”. This is about a little Who named Ukariah, on his way to the so aptly named Euphemism on “Grinch Night” (for clarity: Grinch Night is a night of tensions, where creatures stir and basically piss the Grinch off so he comes down from Mt. Crumpet). Ukariah is a Who who wears glasses, but states throughout the short that he prefers the way things look when he takes his glasses off, and every time is faced with the same answer: “YOU PUT YOUR GLASSES BACK ON AND FACE THE FACTS!” Obviously, this recurring statement of “facing the facts” resounds a bit harder to my 25 year old self than my 5 year old self. Even the Grinch repeats this sentiment before unleashing a trip in which only the 1970s and Dr. Seuss could produce.

So, what “facts” are to be considered of Ito? The long and short of it: many things. This is contingent upon the reader and their personal synergistic experience; the writer and their experience (what they are saying/ implying); the translator, if applicable: how s/he views the writer’s work and translates into essentially another medium (something apart from its organic state, knowing things will be lost in the movement). I know I touched on this in my last blog, but since this is still about vision, I feel I should again recognize this point while also attempting to move on to newer considerations…

I consider the margins and negative space, the gutters and text. But mostly I think of Ito and what she considers of the gutters of the book, the columns of the book’s namesake poem. I think of Ito’s femininity, in which she always seems to be fighting her gender. In “Killing Kanoko” she struggles with the contemplation (perhaps fantasy) of infanticide. This seems, to me, a struggle between woman and child (perhaps one in the same) and the desire to extinguish a certain extension of self. I love how this was set up in its “original” columns. Ito is almost writing a superimposition against femininity, of femininity:

I want to kill Kanoko in Tokyo
Congratulations
Congratulations on your destruction
Congratulations on your destruction
Teruko-chan
Congratulations on your abortion
Mihoko-chan
Congratulations on your abortion
Kumiko-san
Congratulations on your abortion
Congratulations on killing Tomo-kun (38)

It has a music to it, doesn’t it? The repetitions that make themselves a song, the different names that, to the majority who are unfamiliar, are just names, but connect themselves to Ito's glamorous grotesque image of abortion.

These repetitions are facts that build upon each other and then explode in the end, hence the single columns that occupy the last two pages, which allow the reader to interpret this as either the infanticide actually being played out, or there is some resolution of self against self, feminine against feminine.

What do you all think of these “againsts”? What do you think of the translations? Does the fact that this is a translation create a friction for your considerations (hence, an interpretation of an interpretation), heighten the words that are played out on the page, or other? How do you interpret superimpositions?

VIOLENCE!

The thing which struck me most about both the Butler and the Borzutzky texts was how violent and violence-centered they are. In Ever, there seems to be a central violence which causes the rest of the book to become destabilized both in terms of the plot and in terms of the language itself. On page 8, some unnamed and seemingly unnatural event causes mass destruction and death. Images of light bursting and bubbling rooms, bodies appearing from thin air, football players torn to pieces / flattened to nothing, fish churned to blood. This outside violence, the destruction of human flesh and buildings, occurs while the speaker remains relatively untouched though without a doubt destabilized.

The very language of the Butler piece suggests this destabilization. It is lush and dense, the syntax is strange and twisting; in certain parts, I found it difficult to follow. I imagined this onslaught of language as a violence done to the reader in a sense, an overload of words and images and phrases which do not necessarily accumulate into a logical sequence but instead builds and beats the reader into submission, much like the outside world destroys and does violence and beats bodies into submission(death). The speaker, then, is this decentralized, insane figure which resides in a house that is relatively untouched by the surrounding apocalypse. The house is strange, and though I only gave you guys a bit of the book, it gets weirder the further the story goes. Rooms twist into more rooms and the house becomes this living labyrinthine type thing in which the speaker stumbles around and attempts to exist, all the while the outside world crumbles (and, it can be argued, the speaker’s inside world as well).

The structure of Butler’s book further suggests a form of violence is being done to the reader and even the very fundamental idea of what a book should be. The inclusion of abstract images creates a dissonance with the text. The use of brackets sectioned off from each other also goes against this idea of what a traditional novel/book is. Because it includes images and these strange brackets/movements, it can be argued that the basic principle of a novel’s construction is in doubt/challenged. The violence of the text is enacted on the characters, the reader, and the abstract idea of a novel’s form.

The Borzutzky text includes some similar elements as the Butler text. Its opening poem “Resuscitation” (the title itself suggests a sort of violence as resuscitation is usually needed after a traumatic violence event, whether it is some form of outside violence [attack, accident] or some form of inward violence [heart failure, disease, whatever]) begins with an image of falling and stumbling over a dead horse and breaking its ribs. The violence here is less abstract than it is in the Butler as the language itself is more, I don’t know, straightforward in some way. It’s easier to grasp how/what the violence is/does as the sentence structures are much more linear and traditional when compared with the Butler sentences. This violence continues throughout the book in various forms.

Another common theme/idea in Borzutzky is the poem/poet itself. This first pops up in “Failure in the Imagination” where the main ‘character’ of the poem is ‘the poet’. The poet wants terrorists to kill his rival poets in NYC and he sortof interacts with disembodied limbs and such. As it moves toward the prose poems, it (the book) starts to meditate on what a book is / what poetry is / what these things do / what people think/feel about these things. Always there are violences done to the body. In “The Readers,” which opens with “Who reads these books?” people’s fingers get pulled off, people have lost their tongues, limbs fall from the sky. What begins as a seemingly straightforward meditation on the readership of poetry ends up venturing into a more surreal/violent territory. (I love that the readers live in a tower of books. Sound familiar guys? Guys? I’m talkin’ about getting an MFA guys. I’m talking about our tower of books.) All of this is funny, to some extent, but it also can be read as critiquing modern poetry culture (and there is a very definite culture).

Anyway, there seem to be violent/harsh attitudes toward poets and poetry in general. From “In my Numb Heart, a Prick of Misgiving”: “I want a poet who can be toilet trained to prevent the shit from spilling out of his mouth.” I’m always a little wary of poets complaining about poets/poetry in a poem unless it is aimed toward the self specifically or else a little tongue in cheek (I almost typed ironic but I guess it’s always ironic when you critique poetry by using poetry). This particular moment is funny, though, and so I forgive it its self-centeredness(masturbatory). Many of the poems in the latter half of the book deal with poets or poetry in some way. The biggest constant in all of these is a focus on the body as a site of violence. From “Love in the Time of Poetry”: “We listened to the poetry of infestation, and from above a giant appendage dug out the pestilence from between my toes . . .” It goes on like this, emphasizing the body in relation to poets/poetry, all the while doing violence to the body. (The Love in the Time of Cholera reference isn’t lost on me, by the way, I’m sortof just ignoring it since I haven’t read the book and only saw a part of the movie).

To conclude, the body is a site of violence perpetrated by the inside and the outside. Poetry (and novels and literature and language) can be used as methods of violence, infesting the bodies of those that read it, burrowing into inherited conventions of what a book/poem is/should be. In both books the author relates to the inner/outer worlds through this violence and enacts a sort of self-effacement (gradual insanity in Butler [possibliy] and physical dismemberment / mocking poetry while writing poetry in Borzutzky).

What do you think?

“Every coffee grind is you./ Which are endless” —considering the visual/ personal aesthetic charge

Of vision+ poetry: I’ve been considering vision and what it does to poetry. I’ve been considering the vision of poetry, and the relationship of vision in terms of what I think it’s ‘supposed’ (more on that later) to do with the poetic verse/ word/ etc.

I, like many, have been guilty of judging the visual aesthetic of a poem (a completely subjective experience that has the marvelous ability to both articulate its direction and/ or be of something completely different, something of which I will explain further) before it is even read. It can bear on a poem, and, depending on the particular poem, can equate itself to the weight of the actual words that inhabit said space. However, it must be said that without the word, vision cannot exist; therefore, what is considered Word must allow for a visual space in which to move/ live. It must also be said that without an aesthetic charge regarding words/ space/ movement/ etc, the vision cannot operate. What, then, is the determinate aesthetic, the precision of visions v. word v. the individual?

Considering Erozcelik’s Rose Strikes and Coffee Grounds, which begins in a sort of beautiful voodoo that sets the first half of the book in columns, the poems are a mythic construction of fortunes& images that allows the reader to disintegrate into either column. I find myself too conventional here, I read them as the numbers designate, as the pages designate; on the second read, I can allow an ambiguous approach (though I do wonder if this is in part due to the fact that I have already enjoyed the poems based on the structural intent of the author, and now am rather toying [for lack of better word] with my own visual poetic architecture), and while I enjoy the syncopation dual-column reading permits, I feel more at ease with the containment of a single page in this particular medium.


I admire the motion of the columns as well, their stoic nature coupled with the images that keep repeating themselves (rainbow/ bow, fish, fortune, coffee grinds, flying, saucer, etc) seem to push the reader into a more careful consideration of said images. When repetition is found in columns (themselves an echo), it is obvious that this superimposition is not an accident. The shifting of images+ vision means I, as a reader, have a lot of meanings to manage; I find the motion is in the lines, and in their consideration to be as such.

Rose Strikes takes a different stance, arranging itself into a more contemporary figure at first, and then visually unraveling itself as the pages go on. Of course, one notices the roses (—how can you not?) and their continual re-/deconstruction. They are figures of being that I believe hold both an individual value and a worldly currency. A favorite, an example, “Threesomes”:

the moon rises
moonrose

i i love you
swoonrose

where where were you
windrose

Of course, they are of threes, set in a collection of three stanzas, each building upon itself and their corresponding rose. (Sound must have a little cameo, here, as I find it impossible to speak/ think of vision without its often-interconnected counterpart:) The build-up of repetitions (1, 2, 3; the “were” so close in sound to “where” it slyly makes me categorize it with the other “where”; also, the fact that these repetitions are an act of building are only a clever illusion, as they all contain the same amount of syllables) only to be met with a single identifying rose is both poignant and telling of the trajectory of this particular chapter. It is a continual shift of long v. short, set v. open, wordy v. blank, etc., that allows for a slow overkill of roses. That is to say, the vision granted to the reader is the compelling oscillation, the movement between the pages. Of course, this vision is highly individualized, a version of what I think the poem/ word/ image/ format/ etc is ‘supposed’ to do for me, and what it does on a personal scale v. what it actually does on a more generalized interpretive podium; I am fairly certain my classmates will have a different vision/ version. That’s the intrigue, the endless shifts and possibilities.


It is not just about the overall vision of a poem, but the visions the poem provides to the reader; an interesting thought, considering the images are ultimately solidified by the reader, from their own experience and imagination manipulation (made possible by personal associations and image/ word-clouds). Therefore, it becomes something volatile in its intrinsic dismissal of containment. A sort of synesthesia, if you will: the “charged” vision/ sound/ mind connection is dependent upon many personal outlets. How curious, then, we are to ask so much of an audience, as a poet, as a writer… to place our visions onto another’s visual influence vis-à-vis their sensory experience and personal knowledge. We must be nuts.


This seems a fitting segway into the preface of Antonin Artaud’s “The Theater and Its Double,” in which the space/ theater is recognized as an integrated sensory movement:

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything —gestures, sounds, words, screams, darkness— rediscovers itself at precisely the moment where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. (12)

Here, the physical definition of theater is used, where pantomimes and gestures abound— but what of the written art? What gestures are used when there are no corporeal instruments? I feel we must rely on the language “to express its manifestations,” then, and the page as the theater in which it operates. (Of course, the language at hand, the attempts of overarching expressions, will manifest itself inevitably in varying contexts, based on the reader.) The operational space, in the written context, is its own theater in which we must consider its medium carefully; there are no performers to direct our attention to the layout, the negative space, the background, the foreground, etc.


In the search of expressing what exactly vision in space can do, I am reminded of this digital age in which we can manipulate our words onto more than just pages. Firstly, I am reminded of Andy Campbell’s "Spawn"

http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/fall2002/spawn/#

It is a poem framed only by the limits of my computer, and only concerned with what is in and around what appears to be a single-jar world. This poem comes to life thanks to Flash and personal interaction, but it also resonates into my particular aesthetic: may be because I’ve spent too much time thinking about/ being fascinated and horrified by bugs, and those impossibly indiscriminate dots remind me of such; perhaps because the wicked thought of entrapment juxtaposed with those wistful descriptions move me so; however, all things considered, these are my understandings: I get to choose what I think is lovely and interesting based on my own interpretive model.


Secondly, I have considered Jason Nelson’s “Birds Still Warm from Flying,” in which You are the operator, and can create whichever version/ vision best suits you: 

http://www.secrettechnology.com/ausco/poecubic2.html

Here the cube is rotated+ words are manipulated by the [/my /your] trackpad’s direction and the [/my /your] mind to move it. I can create different poetic possibilities and outcomes (though the lines are considerately numbered, I take comfort knowing I do not have to abide, and find it easier to break the rules on a screen that welcomes the unmethodical). Admittedly, I feel god-ish in this space, and this pleases me.

What do you all think of vision? What does vision do for you as a reader? As a poet? (I didn’t even touch on translation: how does the word choice of a translator affect the poetry at hand? —are they chosen out of simplicity, economy, a personal charge/ vision toward a particular word, etc? Does this even matter?) What, in vision, matters to you?