#andreagiugni

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Week 6 Wreading Response

Caroline Bergvall specifically disrupts the clear storytelling of the lyric poet and imbues the work with the drama, the interruption, and the rewriting and speaking over that history often performs. She poses the central question--what and how can we speak in the face of what renders us speechless? How can we signal aspects of that speechlessness in ways that exist beyond the medium of text? Drift seems to be an attempt to answer those questions. This helps me start to identify a set of tools for accurately tackling the questions that poetry poses to us, and think beyond the conventional tools of poetry-making to cross genre, medium, duration, and space in answering questions with a new scope of practices. For example, obfuscation seems to be a technique which, while engaging directly with the subject, attempts to communicate through visual or linguistic gesture rather than navigating the web of semantic language. I would like to, through discussion, create a larger set of non-linguistic tools.

The pieces for this week highlight yet another element of poetry’s interdisciplinarity. We started to discuss this a bit with the process of creating sound through the body in reference to sound poetry last week but Caroline Bergvall’s work particularly stresses the performative element of producing poetry. Her work, Drift, is part historical document, part hearkening towards an unnamed archive, part reconstruction and deconstruction of history. In her naming of an uninvestigated or unnamed event, she is again presencing an absence and allows us as readers to identify how the poetics of her work function alongside this notion of the lack. This tension between the named and unnamed is heightened by not only the visual and linguistic barriers the book poses, but also through the notion of the poetry as performance. For the poem to be performed, a certain lyric is invoked. The position of poet as lyric poet, acting as a representative part of a whole is called upon and the performer/poet must then reckon with those implications.

-Andrea

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Question for Cecilia Vicuña

Experiencing Cecilia Vicuña’s work not only on the page but as a performance during her lecture yesterday gave me some additional context to think through the questions that arose during my reading of the text. I was fascinated with her use of embodied language as a way to create a catalogue of trauma that was not only personally validating and necessary to her experience but also aimed to animate the possibility of change. This duality of extremely personal and reactionary art-making and the turn towards revolution is not inherently a duality, but I was fascinated by the various levels of work that her project was doing. I say that it is not inherently a duality because of the ways in which she might conceive of herself and her body as an extrapolated object that belongs to the revolution in and of itself.

In this way, I am fascinated by her use of objects as a sort of medium and product through which she is further constructing and deconstructing language more literally (glasses which spell out “ver dad”) and using the status of a hand-crafted object to signal her presence within the things she might leave behind and which other have left behind. These objects are her new record, built by her, to represent her and everyone else who is experiencing this particular moment alongside her. The implied physical labor required to make these objects and the hand-crafted quality of them insert the body, though distant, into this conversation of memory and meaning-making, as well. Her use of objects seem to signal a desire for authentic record-building and offer an alternative archive which she is creates and is reliant upon.

My question for Cecilia Vicuña is about her understanding of the materiality of language? Since I have identified the notion of object to be central to her work, to what degree is she also conceiving of language as an object? To what degree does this alter language’s malleability and form? How does this reframe language as a tool of documentation and record-building?

-Andrea