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from the contemporary literature series at nyu nyu-cls.org

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Fall 2015 Semester in the Contemporary Literature Series

By Peter Tasca

In recent years, the department’s Contemporary Literature Series at NYU has been inviting contemporary authors onto campus and into the undergraduate classroom. Past authors have included novelists Mark Danielewski, Jonathan Franzen, and Zoe Heller, in addition to Pulitzer prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith. The CLS provides NYU students with the unique opportunity of not only seeing some of the most creative minds on the contemporary literature scene firsthand, but also learning about the distinctive ways in which these writers uniquely and individually engage with the artistic process.

This past semester, several English classes have been graced with a diverse company of artists, playwrights, writers, and filmmakers. Jill Magid sat in on Professor Mary Poovey’s Narrative Strategies Seminar; Sibyl Kempson led an exercise in Professor Julia Jarcho’s Advanced Playwriting Workshop; and Stanley Schtinter answered questions from students in Professor Sukhdev Sandhu’s Contemporary British Literature class. While the program originally placed each author in conversation with an English faculty member, the CLS has also recently begun to highlight the creative achievements of our faculty, with a poetry reading last fall by Professor Maureen McLane, and another in the spring by Prof. Thomas Urayoán Noel, inaugurating what will, with any luck, become a long­-standing tradition here at NYU.

This year, on November 2, the faculty spotlight was on Prof. Julia Jarcho who, accompanied by actors Jenny Seastone and Ben Williams, read from several of her plays. Both a playwright and director with the company Minor Theatre, Jarcho’s produced works include
 American Treasure (2009), Dreamless Land (2011), Nomads (2014), and Grimly Handsome (2013 & 2015), the winner of an Obie award for Best New American Play. Before the reading began, Jarcho was introduced by her friend and colleague Professor Wendy Lee, who started off her discussion by stating that Jarcho’s works “redeem literary criticism.” Although Professor Lee noted that Jarcho often receives positive reviews from theatre critics, many of them fail to testify to the complexity of her work. One need only glance at a selection of these reviews—“I can’t say I completely got Julia Jarcho’s one act ‘American Treasure,’ but I still liked it,” wrote one critic—to register the gap that Professor Lee addresses.

Offering a reading of her own, Professor Lee argued that the wicked and wacky subversiveness of Jarcho’s work comes from her deep concern with the notion of intimacy in all of its manifest forms. These include the intimacy of violence, the foreclosure of intimacy in
 unintelligibility, and the intimacy of the theater as a performative space. In an online interview with CLS fellow Gina Elbert the week before the reading, Jarcho encapsulated the paradoxical form of intimacy in her work by saying “if you asked me what theater does that no other art does, I might say it has something to do with letting a kind of violence emerge between language and reality.”

A dramatic reading turned out to suit this type of disruptive energy unexpectedly well. When we go see a play, we anticipate certain dramatic conventions. Even when these conventions are broken, we know they are being broken in the service of a performance. A reading, on the other hand, normally consists of a brief prologue or lecture in which the writer introduces and gives context for the following slice of the work. This lecture­ portion of a reading is not the performance of the material itself. In purporting to speak to us truthfully about how we are to receive the material, it observes the decorum of reality. But not in this case. Getting up in front of the podium, Prof. Jarcho promptly shouted “Romanticism!” It seems to be a lecture: “Let’s all get used to the word,” she continued, “Romanticism…” whereupon she slapped herself in the face, complaining about insects. “Romanticism, in the larval state, attaches to the skin. Chews on you a little and falls away. Normally. Once grown up, well: No longer a threat. No longer an…irritation.” Soon thereafter she made the blithe announcement: “You all look confused,” before lapsing into silence, as audience members’ heads turned and bodies began to shift uncomfortably in their seats.

But as the speeches developed, one realized that these performative gaps and hesitations formally double the philosophical issues Jarcho’s characters grapple with. Moreover, it became clear that the question of how one “correctly” stages a play is central to them. “If one wanted to make a piece of, let’s say, let’s say, anything,” Jarcho stuttered, “god demands that you do it as well as god would want you to do it. And since god himself is perfection itself, it follows, it follows—” Yet the divine syllogism for the “correct” way never arrives. The words hang suspended in stammering human mouths. “Because you see the assurance,” she continued in character, “that things are not that way, that there is no correct procedure, that in fact we—” before finally breaking off, allowing us to observe the ways in which performative incompleteness can act as a salve for its existential counterpart.

This is not to say, however, that Jarcho’s work is gloomy.Her bending of theatrical  rules demonstrates the idiosyncrasy of her zany wit as much as it provokes serious intellectual 
reflection. For instance, American Treasure, which deals with the irresponsible mythologization of Native Americans, was conceived, she told the audience with a straight face, because the Nicholas Cage movie National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets upset her. The plot revolves around the search for a mysterious ancient being named the Hauntus, a macguffin which at once evokes the the traumatic history of Native American resettlement and sets up a punch­line for the contemporary character “Poca,” a tough ­talking antiques dealer who has sold her sister’s scalp. After performing a scene from this piece, Seastone and Williams shifted into a scene from Jarcho’s Grimly Handsome, in which—at least for the first act—two Slavic serial killers pose as Christmas tree salesmen. At another point in the reading, a poster behind Jarcho, advertising the CLS event, fell off the wall. Jarcho picked it up off the ground and, without missing a beat, declared, “That’s what you call iconoclasm.”

Observing the scenes from Jarcho’s work as well as the “character” that she played in introducing them, with her nervous tics and self-­conscious gestures strategically and theatrically on display, I was reminded of Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp.” “Camp,” Sontag wrote, “sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” Similarly, the dramatic reading the audience was treated to was not really a dramatic reading at all, but a dramatic “reading.” By treating the “lecture” and the “reading” as genres to be played and tampered with, Jarcho’s work and sensibility profoundly exhibits the notion of camp Sontag described as “Being ­as ­playing ­a ­Role,” as “the farthest extension…of the metaphor of life as theater.”

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Pre-Event Interview with Julia Jarcho

Conducted by CLS Fellow Gina Elbert

1. Can you pick your top three favorite plays and explain how they have influenced you? A Murder of Crows by Mac Wellman, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World by Suzan-Lori Parks, and maybe Action by Sam Shepard. They all are written with insane precision.They celebrate deviance and they leave no quarter for any presumption that (a) there is such a thing as a normal life or (b) things are OK. They all have lines that will ring in your head forever through their incredible rhythmic composition. In different ways they all have lots of space in them, space for things to be funny and sad and weird. And in the midst of all this spaciousness you suddenly slam into these jolts of powerful feeling. So, that's what I'd like to do in my plays... 2. What is your favorite part about writing plays, as opposed to doing any other kind of writing? Events of speech are my favorite thing. Writing plays gives me a chance to live in that element: utterance as something that happens, and in happening unmakes us. Also, writing plays is (at least for me) a form that is self-evidently incomplete. I don't think I would write plays if I didn't also direct them. So in that sense writing a play is like writing a promissory note-- I don't really know what that is, but-- anyway writing a contract for a future collaboration. Less lonely than other forms of writing. 3. What is the writing process like for you? It varies a lot depending on what else is going on. There are times when I write for an hour every morning, and there are times when I have to wait until I can set aside a week or a weekend and write intensely then. But I always keep working on text throughout a production, it never stops changing until the play closes. That's a nice thing about production as opposed to publication, you can keep noodling endlessly. 4. Which playwright or play do you feel is underrated by popular culture? At this point in our history and in this country I don't think any really good theater can register at all in popular culture. Except maybe through patterns of affiliation that exist because of people who write plays and also write for TV, i.e. indirectly. 5. If you could have any actor or actress work on a play with you, who would it be and why? Well I love the actors I do work with! So I would always pick them. But like stars? Hmm. Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert come to mind, because I think they're both so smart and such brave performers. And funny. I like Kumail Nanjiani too. A sense of humor is key, and someone who also writes or at least thinks in a rigorous way about the world, that's the kind of actor I really like to work with. 6. Can you tell us about a time when your experiences as a playwright directly informed your life as a professor? When I teach my playwriting class, I'm often thinking about experiences I've had as an artist, and also helpful things other artists have said to me. But I think more generally, my sense of what it means to be an artist is bound up with a sense of advocating for a principle that familiarity and truth are at odds with each other, and likewise when I teach I'm mostly trying to help students engage with things that are weird and difficult. 7. What can dramatic literature add to the arts that no other genre or type of literature can? I'm not sure dramatic literature inherently does anything very different from what other kinds of literature do, except that plays are also thinking about and changing the theater. Pieces of dramatic literature are pieces of theory about what theater is. But if you asked me what theater does that no other art does, I might say it has something to do with letting a kind of violence emerge between language and reality. I do think theater has a specific kind of relationship to the real, even though I'd never say it simply is "more real" or more immediate or anything like that. 8. When did you become interested in becoming a playwright? I was around theater as a kid because I grew up in New York and my mother worked in one; she also started taking me to see experimental theater shows when I was pretty young-- junior high? I was always a writer because of teachers I had as a kid and general bookwormery. So I think it was a matter of time. Like lots of kids I used to want to be a performer, because I craved attention. But ultimately it's too boring to be told what to do and besides I wasn't good enough at it; I'd rather tell other people what to do. (I mean, make gentle requests.) 9. What advice would you give someone interesting in going into dramatic literature? Do you mean someone who wanted to write plays? I would say, immediately start putting them on, on a very small scale. If you write them and they languish on your computer you're just encouraging a sense of crippling isolation and resentment. And I think if you write plays it's your responsibility to make them exist in performance too. I would also say go and see lots of things and ask people whose plays you like what they think you should read and see. I would say a lot of other things too and I do when I teach, but those are probably the biggest ones. Parks, in an essay in her first collection of plays, says, "Right from the jump, ask yourself, 'Why does this thing I'm writing have to be a play?'" I think that's good advice. And I also think you probably can't do that without having a lived experience of different things that plays can be.

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4.7.2015 | Patrick Deer and Brian Turner

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April 7: Brian Turner

On Tuesday, April 7, poet and memoirist Brian Turner visited New York University in collaboration between The Contemporary Literature Series and the Humanities Initiative at NYU. Turner is an Iraq War veteran who has written and edited multiple works, including the recent memoir My Life as a Foreign Country, the poetry collections Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise, and the collection The Strangest of Theatres (as editor). Turner spent most of his time on Tuesday reading from My Life as a Foreign Country, a memoir told as a series of fragments based on the Japanese practice of haibun. Between fragments, Turner shared memories of his time overseas. After one poem, “Insignia,” which addresses a Sergeant who routinely sexually assaults a female soldier, Turner described his experience visiting a V.A. hospital in Palo Alto. There were two campuses specifically for both male and female victims of sexual assault. Turner followed this anecdote, Turner urged the audience, “Watch out for each other, you know?” Turner then read the first fragment from his memoir, which begins powerfully, “I am a drone aircraft.” Turner’s reading was followed by a short discussion with Professor Patrick Deer, who specializes in war literature and is currently teaching a class on contemporary war literature in the U.S. and Britain; many of the students who asked questions had read My Life as a Foreign Country as part of Professor Deer’s class. Turner provided slightly wandering yet insightful answers to both Professor Deer’s and the audience’s questions. He discussed the apparently small world of contemporary war literature, the blurriness of a war’s beginning and end dates (he considers the Iraq war to have begun in 1991), and the role of creative fiction as a “meditative space” rather than a strictly nonfictional form. “I have trouble with facts,” Turner said. While this may be true, his writing proves his talent for working with blurred memories.

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There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;-- Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more. The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where’er I go, That there hath past away a glory from the earth. Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, And while the young lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound, To me alone there came a thought of grief: A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong. The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,-- No more shall grief of mine the season wrong: I hear the echoes through the mountains throng. The winds come to me from the fields of sleep, And all the earth is gay; Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity, And with the heart of May Doth every beast keep holiday;-- Thou child of joy, Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy! Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all. O evil day! if I were sullen While Earth herself is adorning This sweet May-morning; And the children are culling On every side In a thousand valleys far and wide Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, And the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm:-- I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! --But there’s a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have look’d upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone: The pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And, even with something of a mother’s mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came. Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A six years’ darling of a pigmy size! See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses, With light upon him from his father’s eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shaped by himself with newly-learned art; A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral; And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song: Then will he fit his tongue To dialogues of business, love, or strife; But it will not be long Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride The little actor cons another part; Filling from time to time his ‘humorous stage’ With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation. Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy soul’s immensity; Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,-- Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths rest Which we are toiling all our lives to find, In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; Thou, over whom thy Immortality Broods like the day, a master o’er a slave, A Presence which is not to be put by; To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed, without the sense of sight Of day or the warm light, A place of thoughts where we in waiting lie; Thou little child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height, Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The years to bring the inevitable yoke, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight, And custom lie upon thee with a weight Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life! 0 joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That Nature yet remembers What was so fugitive! The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest, Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:-- --Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings, Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts, before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised: But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet a master-light of all our seeing; Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake, To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor man nor boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Hence, in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither; Can in a moment travel thither-- And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. Then, sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song! And let the young lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound! We, in thought, will join your throng, Ye that pipe and ye that play, Ye that through your hearts to-day Feel the gladness of the May! What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. And 0, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquish’d one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway; I love the brooks which down their channels fret Even more than when I tripp’d lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet; The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

William Wordsworth, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"

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They were not kidding when they said they were blinded by a vision of love. It was not just a manner of speaking or feeling though it’s hard to say how the dead really felt harder even than knowing the living. You are so opaque to me your brief moments of apparent transparency seem fraudulent windows in a Brutalist structure everyone admires. The effort your life requires exhausts me. I am not kidding.

Maureen McLane, “They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century”

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What I’m looking for is an unmarked door we’ll walk through and there: whatever we’d wished for beyond the door. What I’m looking for is a golden bowl carefully repaired a complete world sealed along cracked lines. What I’m looking for may not be there. What you’re looking for may or may not be me. I’m listening for the return of that sound I heard in the woods just now, that silvery sound that seemed to call not only to me.

Maureen McLane, "What I'm Looking For"

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CLS PRE-EVENT INTERVIEW WITH MAUREEN MCLANE

1. Who are your favorite poets? Sappho (in translation: Jim Powell, A. Carson); Shelley; Wordsworth; Anne Carson; Lisa Robertson; Inger Christensen (trans. Susanna Nied); Whitman; Dickinson; Rilke in tactical doses, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation; Cavafy (trans. Rae Dalven); Pessoa (trans. Richard Zenith); Stein; Williams; Darwish (in Fady Joudah’s, Sinan Antoon’s, and Ibrahim Muhawi’s translations); Zbigniew Herbert (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter); Mandelstam (trans. Brown and Merwin); Bishop in some moods; M. Moore; Horace (trans. David Ferry), esp. the Odes; Anonymous (‘author’ [sic] of many a ballad, medieval carole, bawdy song, what have you). Some contemporaries I follow: Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, Devin Johnston, Peter O’Leary, Katie Peterson, August Kleinzahler, Cathy Park Hong, Oli Hazzard, Enrique Winter. Christian Bök is a goad, Vanessa Place a conceptual oracle/laser. I think more perhaps of favorite poems or books than of poets: I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with Wordsworth’s Excursion, for example, or Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third, but I could live a whole life with Wordsworth’s Prelude and some odes, and some of Shelley and Coleridge, and Mandelstam. And some Pound is beyond beyond. Muldoon: dazzling—“The Mudroom,” Hay. Frank Bidart’s Desire; Carson’s “Glass Essay”; Christensen’s Alphabet; Ko Un’s Ten Thousand Lives; Robertson’s The Weather; Robert Hass’s translations of Basho, Buson, and Issa. Wallace Stevens: weird and inexhaustible. A lot of middle Stevens is horrible; early and late, fantastic. 2. Who was the most influential writer to you as a young poet? “GOD”—as mediated by the Catholic Bible; then probably Williams, Cummings (alas), Dickinson, Bishop, Eliot, Whitman, Berryman, Dylan Thomas. Lewis Carroll from childhood, and nursery rhymes and jingles. Madrigals and motets and hymns. 3. When did you first start writing? Well, if you mean, when did I start first thinking of myself as possibly a writer, I’d say, in high school . . . but being a poet seems to me an ever receding horizon: an asymptotic curve toward something, maybe Coleridge’s “infinite I AM.” Though Keats’s negative capability is perhaps a more attractive, and I think accurate, model of poetic faculties and stance.

Read the rest of the pre-event interview with Maureen McLane here.

[shrinemaidens]

my skin some days extends as wide as the sea and the waves of the world roll through, equable terrible but I am living this narrow life and no other except yours I imagine some days we’re graced or grazed by a shared bullet

Maureen McLane, “Passage III” (via shrinemaidens)

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CLS Faculty Spotlight on Professor Maureen McLane

Maureen McLane is a professor at NYU, a literary critic, and a poet. She holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago, and she taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the East Harlem Poetry Project before coming to NYU. Her research focuses on the intersection of poetry, “literature,” and modernity. She has written two works of criticism, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romanticism and Romanticism and the Human Sciences. She also co-edited with James Chandler The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism.

In addition to her works of criticism, McLane has published three books of poetry and an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, My Poets. My Poets was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. Her most recent book of poetry, This Blue, is a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. The New York Times Book Review said of This Blue, “These are poems meant to keep you on your toes,” and Library Journal called the book “an exciting collection that celebrates the extraordinary in the ordinary.”

Re/post will feature Professor McLane throughout the next few weeks, and she will headline a CLS event on Thursday, November 13.

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TWERKING WITH THE CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE SERIES: SPRING EVENT ROUND UP

On one rainy April night, the English Department got cozy with two visiting poets: Urayoán Noel (a.k.a. our very own Professor Tomás Noel), and Latasha Nevada Diggs, multimedia poet extraordinaire. Centered around Diggs’s new book, TwERK (Belladonna*, 2013), the event was put on by the Contemporary Literature Series at NYU, a program now nearing the end of its second year.

Continuing its tradition of bringing NYU students in conversation with contemporary writers, the Contemporary Literature Series at NYU brought authors both established and emerging to NYU classrooms this semester. This semester’s visitors included graphic novelist Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, poet Major Jackson, writer and academic Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, post-activist Robin Clarke, and for the capstone event of the semester, Noel and Diggs.

Featuring towers of switchboards, mazes of wires, smartphones, voice modifiers, and a wall repurposed for broadcasting tweets about the event in real-time, the event certainly felt on the cutting-edge. At the beginning of the night, poet Noel asked, “is there a sound to the digital?” Perhaps so: in one exuberant performance, Noel blasted a cheesy, synth-filled pop tune through his smartphone’s tinny speakers as he comically gesticulated to the beat of the song. Inspired by upstate cafés and “bad 80s music,” Noel’s aim was to make “upstate language become one with the cheesy music language,” a linguistic fusion that ultimately emphasized dissonance.

Noel’s other poetry too reflected his interest in linguistic dissonance: his performances switched between Spanish, English, Haitian Creole, and a range of regional Spanish dialects. Through the use of the translating function of Siri, the A.I. personal assistant on Apple’s operating systems, Noel demonstrated the essential irreconcilability of translation as his poems fragmented further and further with each jump between languages.

For poet Latasha Nevada Diggs, linguistic mixing also guided her poetry. “I’m a couch potato, [and] I’m not proud,” she said. “But it’s a source material. It’s hard to turn a deaf ear to popular culture in the way that language is transformed by it.” With sources ranging from Tom Cruise to Japanese anime, Diggs let a number of voices mingle in her performance, both textually and aurally. Deploying her personal audio switchboard, Diggs recorded hums, pops, and hisses on the spot that echoed through each of her poems. In the words of Noel, Diggs’s poems are as much “sound pieces” as they are “stories,” and they transformed the room into an richly-textured aural landscape.

The performance was followed by a brief Q&A session and casual conversation over some refreshments. Students present found themselves transported by the performance. “Latasha Diggs‘s performance was compelling, transformative, and unapologetic,” said second-year M.A. student Gabrielle Royal. “It was a collage of voice, sound, and song. It was, simply stated, a revolutionary act.”

Collage might be the best way to describe the night: through linguistic and cultural crossings, the poetry of the night brought together people and texts from different times and places. From the diverse range of students, professors, and community members present to the decor of the night—including a lamp generously donated by Professor Catherine Robson—the event itself was a collaged affair. And that April evening, sheltered from the cold rain under the grunge-venue metal of the event space’s ceiling that, for one night, seemed to take on a different, warmer hue, the Department’s own collaged community came together to celebrate radically innovative literary art.

--Connor Spencer, from the NYU English Spring 2014 Newsletter

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More photos from the April 7, 2014 CLS Event at the NYU English Department.

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Urayoán Noel performing at the NYU English Department -- April 7, 2014

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LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs preparing for her performance at the NYU English Department -- April 7, 2014

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Honey of death or milk of love — we say all. Home is a dull knife against our animal faces. We are a tribe of apes. Mind is a red sky.

Urayoán Noel

[theparisreview]

Charles Tomlinson, The Art of Poetry No. 78

[shinji--moon-deactivated2017123]

I love saying the name. Each sweet syllable seems like there ought to be a crush of sugar on your tongue, a tiny reward just for saying the word. These soft milk-balls, fried golden and soaked in sugar syrup, are glassed up in a luxuriously oversized jar that my grandmother collects under her spice table to store homemade mango and spicy lime pickles. But for Uncle Jacob, these jars serve as seasonal aquariums. When I asked him where the fish in the gulabjamoon jar (now sitting in the center of his dining table) came from, he said after rain, these fish appear in road puddles. Uncle asked a boy to catch some in a towel: a present for my aunt. These fish are small, two inches long. A black teardrop shape behind each eye, and again, if you didn’t catch it the first time, on the tail. Odd because they don’t have the traditional fish ‘shape,’ where the body tapers into a kiss mouth and ends in a swish of tail — more like little silver rectangles suspended in the jar. Uncle said when the puddles dry up in the sun, the fish aren’t there to crack and split their smooth milkskins. He’s never yet seen one dead in the street. Like the fish knew they had to move to a new wet place. Perhaps they were snatched up by a dog or pecked to bits by a rooster. All over the village, wet dogs and wet chickens roam the moss-covered alleys. Nobody knows who cares for these animals but all of them have a crafty gleam in their eye that says: Yes, I ate more than even you today. On the table, the fish watch me watch them eat rice, the only food my aunt gives them. I see the rice fluff in their bellies, swelling. I tap the jar with a fork and the only response is a slight shift in their togetherness — a white square of silk thrown into a small sea.

"Gulabjamoon Jar," Aimee Nezhukumatathil  (via commovente)