I'm Sorry About the Tori Amos, too
But what're you gonna do?
Farrah Field has made a juicy Gurlesque syllabus. A particularly inspired choice, Gremlins.
There's some neuron I've got to trace, connecting Gurlesque (and other feminist poetics, I'd suspect) to Haraway's companion species work.
And here are five poems by Farrah that Jeff & I got all hyped up about. Why didn't I buy Farrah's book at AWP? Next year, shopping list.
Labels: Gurlesque
posted by Danielle at 1:20 PM
5 Comments:
I would add to the Harroway parallel text the concept of Ecriture Feminine - Cixous, Kristeva etc.
Thanks, Ross... you mean ecriture feminine has a relationship to Gurlesque? Or in general to feminist poetics?
I like Cixous, particularly Kristeva, Wittig, etc., but the bit about placing experience before language or women somehow escaping the phallic order of language--their bodies somehow outside cultural construction--a sticking point for me. I'd be curious to hear which poets are down with it...or whose work seems to practice it...
I'm not sure who 'practices' it as a 'technique' - I'm only familiar with it as a critical framwork. The reason for bringing it up comes from my interest in the Gurlesque as part of a larger framework of writers whose practice deconstructs ideas of gender, and the Gurlesque as a "framework" in which to talk about similar issues. Arielle asks in her essay "Can male poets be Gurlesque?", and Cixous (i think) cites Joyce as a male writer who demonstrates the potential of textual femininity - within the Gurlesque framework you've got both Johannes and Tom Whalen who could fall under this umbrella (as i have stated over on Farrah's blog). This is i think a good opening for discussion.
Cixous could also provide an opening for reaing of Ariana's work. Her (mis-)use of text from multitudinous sources weaving a trail through various disciplines and traditions (i'm thinking of THE COW here) to create complex networks of affective production i think provides real potential for this kind of reading - Her texts (including Cour de Lion) follow a logic of their own, kind of like a train of thought, rather than dominant formal arragements or ideas of "discipline". Similar claims to that last one could be made for Johannes's work.
I think there is potential in these kind of thoughts, as a kind of preliminary brainstorm at least.
Oh, okay, I see--that's rather different than what I was thinking about the Haraway parallel!
Likely--as you suggest in that "larger framework"--there's some great gender-bendy umbrella under which Gurlesque and what I think of as grotesque, hysterical, hyper-, etc. masculinity-performance work cluster. Johannes, Aaron Kunin, Jon Leon, Joe Wenderoth, Ronald Palmer, etc. I'm very early in a project on these varieties of masculinity in contemp. poetry (hoping it comes to fruition!).
We're culturally addicted to the gender binary, whether or not one individually feels gender to be a looser spectrum... I think to interrogate the masculine norms to which one is bound vs. the feminine norms to which one is bound are distinctly different projects no matter how similar some of the formal elements, and I'm immensely curious about each.
To be fair, I should note I haven't read the Cixous closely enough to get my head around what she's saying about Joyce, but I think what she identifies in him strikes me more like male hysteria than feminine writing (of which I'm suspicious, anyhow, on account of the body-essentialim)...but maybe Johannes is writing femme by Cixous's standards. He certainly gets mileage out of Kristeva-abjection!
I'm kinda thinking of most of this in terms of "tactics" rather than anything particularly concrete- I'm not sure how much of said readings really have anything to do with Cixous, or how much is just me using bits i've read as jumping-off points (so to speak).
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