caesura ~ francesca lisette

public notebook: musings on the body, healing, poetry, mysticism, & all kinds of revolutionary praxis

[francesca-lisette]

I want to say that every dream is a little death…a visit to the liminal space, where it is always raining silver in the forest.

~ Jackie Wang, 'Twists and Turns in the Bowels of the Neon Dragon: A Dream Maze'

[francesca-lisette]

The fantasy of melancholy cannibalism, according to Julia Kristeva in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, is a way to maintain an attachment to the lost object in the face of death. The body of the other is literally consumed in many of the dreams of depressed persons:

Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested…than lost. The melancholy cannibalistic imagination is a repudiation of the loss’s reality and of death as well. It manifests the anguish of losing the other through the survival of the self, surely a deserted self but not separated from what still and ever nourishes it and becomes transformed into the self—which also resuscitates—through such a devouring.~ Jackie Wang, 'Twists and Turns in the Bowels of the Neon Dragon: A Dream Maze', April 2016 at Harriet (Poetry Foundation)

[historium]

Zitkala-Sa, first Native American woman to write an opera 1898

[gorejock]

Zitkala-Sa was also an activist and a highly trained violinist! She was a really cool woman and by no means should only be seen as an opera writer. That said, her Sun Dance Opera drew inspiration from Yankton Dakota and Ute spirituality at a time when practicing religious ceremonies outright was banned.

[francesca-lisette]

sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics

My second book, sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics will soon be available from Boiler House Press! It’s officially released on Guy Fawkes Day - November 5th, 2018 - & you can pre-order it here.

From the Boiler House Press website:

“sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics is a three-part interrogation of love, gender, ritual and the body. It heralds a new kind of poetic thinking, one that seeks to articulate and enact a mode of resistance to the obstinacy of present conditions, by focusing on embodiment, tenderness and optimism. It wants to break new paths and contribute to a collective imagining of a different future. It is a record of and a practice towards healing.”

[francesca-lisette]

ST. VALENTINE WAS A MARTYR

Two husbands of the same flesh

Between retrieval & defilement

the one envelope ripped alert to escape,

blended microphone, glorious veil parted by exografia.

i’m clueing in, Xmas navy jaw hung terrific,

snail’s cape scarpered & hunched in soft hood overload.

you can try to pretend

      but the embarrassment laden ad hoc

      in sour frost repeals its hungry due:

paused scale, adamant of DONE, brain glue spillage

fronts while the manicure taps out its own foregone cliché.

we window, ask ? point weather, unmap filibustered spaghetti

combat in a language we still don’t understand.

wretched – because lamplight casts the wrong kind of shadow

gets a skin all wrinkled & bartered in its hue.

    we could play,

    we could define

    we could not dance, unless

    we agree not to call it that.

cancel it faith, time scrapes moulting corners off a bus ticket

the liveliest scrounger you ever did see

there’s a certain irony speculating on disaster from lips blown

& planed over the ledge. how much sweetness lives

in lyrics unsung, passion graves

unfilled, how much sorrow,

sparks overhead,

your hands greenly supplicant

pushing off raked light

          waiting, undone.

14.02.2017

[aplaceofaction]

Full details online HERE

[francesca-lisette]

Considering hopping over to the UK for this...

[francesca-lisette]

it was when i stopped searching for home within others and lifted the foundations of home within myself i found there were no roots more intimate than those between a mind and a body that have decided to be whole.

Rupi Kaur

[francesca-lisette]

TAKING FORM

UNION Decamping from the world intuition as art sacred, profane, hermetic united in one flesh + boxing gloves read

A selection of new & older poems now up @ COVEN Berlin 

[glitteroracle]

[francesca-lisette]

my astrology site

[francesca-lisette]

Love is the basis for the possibility of magic.

Novalis

[francesca-lisette]

ANALOGICAL POETICS. Nourishment is prosaic - indifferent. Remedies are poetic.

Novalis

[francesca-lisette]

Isn't all crystallization a genuinely synthetic and harmonious union of the solid and liquid? And hence, isn't a crystal a genuinely substantial and inspired being?

Novalis

[francesca-lisette]

some words after reading ban en banlieue

I have finished reading ban en banlieue, which in actuality means I have begun reading it, begun letting the book read me. this is the text as destabilised, delinearised encounter. i can’t remember the last time i read a book so exciting, so incendiary.

‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’

a litany of changing light, gathering in weird skies, a foreign (but all too familiar) england. ban is a novel of what happens when the poet encounters an image so arresting it (she) arrests the scene entirely. if i were a critic still absorbed in assessing what genre is, i would call the image which is the gurgling vortex of this work the poetic moment. here it is: a girl walking home from school lies down in the first moments of a race riot. at this moment she is overcome, deciding never to get up again. she’s also: NOT A GIRL, or not only that, in the same sense that all girls aren’t. ban en banlieue is a brilliant exploration of radical passivity, of adopting refusal as the fiercest strategy with which to fight race hatred, colonialism, sexual abuse: but it is also about peering into the darkness of that place, that yet inarticulable vague space in which a girl becomes ash rising above a city; bitumen, tar, blackness that descends, recoagulates, recoils, spits. a memory, a spirit, an autonomous and fearsome deity. & what is central to this writing is the body’s pulsing absorption and transmission, its recording function, enhanced and blown to smithereens – thus recreating the intricacies of the nervous system’s codes of fight or flight. in experiencing trauma, the body freezes and psychic resistance takes over. but that energy has to go somewhere. BAN is what happens after the tragedy, after the witnesses have left the scene; a haunting made visceral.

how rare to read a book so angry and yet deeply spiritual, generous and tender, all at once. how rare to read a book that not only invents but exposes its own cosmology. bhanu kapil has made from her attempt to write BAN, a book as dendritic body: notes, dedications, diary entries, rituals, performances, conversations, meditations, quotations – the spine of a book turned inside out, cyborgian, freakish, hairy stiletto limbs splayed out, dazzling.

this book SHIMMERS with urgency. ban en banlieue has the aura of both labyrinth and oracle: as you enter it, so it enters you.

[francesca-lisette]

The problems of this talk: Am I being manipulative Am I taking up all the energy Is this so un-present Is it too present, such that it misses the point Will writing be erased Where is the sacred Will the pre language become toxic Where did the rhythm go Why can’t I make substance mean something and still keep it substance Straining towards form What to do in the absence of duration, the small time left for this writing The problems of this talk are also the problems of healing and of writing.

Melissa Buzzeo’s superb talk at the The Poetics of Healing conference, 2013.

[francesca-lisette]

Relevant to the ideas of revolutionary tenderness, a manifesto for poetic & activist praxis I wrote in 2013.

[frenchtwist]

I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs.

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa (trans. Keith & Paula Cohen)

[lora-mathis]

radical softness as a weapon, Lora Mathis (2015) radical softness is the idea that sharing your emotions is a political move & a tactic against a society which prioritizes a lack of emotions. strength does not have to mean turning off how you feel and being guarded. it can be sharing yourself openly. it can be putting energy into healing. it can be documenting your vulnerability in-order to make others feel less alone. it can be refusing to be sorry for how you feel. radical softness combats the toxic masculinity which permeates our culture and embraces softness and emotionality-however they may look. 

all of these photos are available as prints here. please consider buying one. my computer just broke beyond repair & i do not have the money to buy a new one.