*quotations culled from I’ll Drown My Book: Women in Conceptual Writing

 

accumulate

the movements made entrenched always grazing the arms of surrounding bodies

you cannot gather without clustering

the feeling of another’s breath on your face

 

This was something you wanted to write about:

not producing a fact of infrastructure, a dilemma of resources

everyone needed a touch.

 

Somebody started yelling about something that had happened to them in the past.

Someone was trying to listen, someone was trying to drown out the sound

of her breath in the microphone.

 

…the gesture toward an apple

is now more compelling than the apple itself…¹

‘conceptual’ phase which focuses on

the subject of experience rather than the object provoking it.²

the mode of non-function a form of institutional critique, for

its avowed awareness of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion

intrinsic to the project of establishing a corpus…³

one course of action could be inactive, awaiting desire, awaiting pushback

One is not one self.

One has not one self.

One’s speech is that of others.⁴

 

this isn’t new it’s perpetual

each step away from the last

with an opportunity to change course offered literally at every moment

the open field

the matrix of points

…a disavowal of totalizing views and its products, an embrace of process⁵

the grasping

over punctuated

extended into a vibration over time depleting, barely registering

torn

if you use the limited to explore the unlimited you will become exhausted

grinning like a madwoman on display⁶

 

I cannot write about my ability to perceive, peer into, how it haunts me,

sends me places I might not have wanted to go.

As a statement against positioning myself, which would imply an aspiration

on my part to attain status within a hierarchy:⁷ What has accomplishment gained us?

 

an art of low stakes vs. an aesthetic of low stakes:

An art of low stakes makes no challenges to any sort of system, cultural or otherwise.

An aesthetic of low stakes doesn’t intimidate its audience.

 

a deliberate adoption of multiple, often clashing positions

resulting from my engagement with the task at hand: inclusion/exclusion

ALSO → competitiveness

ALSO → performativity

ALSO → identity as performance

ALSO → personas

ALSO → multiplicity

positions, by definition, are tactical⁸

 

There are two ways to see this resistance to meaning:

there’s so much, such a glut, it just doesn’t matter

or

there’s just so much, it’s inevitable that it will mean

try on as many as you can and something’s bound to look good on you

Meaning happens without understanding.

And the reverse also holds as well:

understanding takes place without “meaning.”⁹

When we decide that something doesn’t

make sense

what are we making decisions about?¹⁰

…[conceptual texts] prick us into socio-politicized consciousness about our habits

of meaning making

and text-use.¹¹

materiality in “political writing”:

exists external to the work:

the material is the (potential) real world action

taken by the (potential) reader

or the political events/movements

that are being pointed to.

“Political writing” points to an external material condition and tries to evoke a material response.

materiality in conceptual writing:

exists in the work itself:

The materiality of the writing points to

the conceptual underpinning.

The political event in this case happens in the working of the work itself,

in its production, publishing, and continual persistence (existence) afterward.

The material textual condition creates a site for political growth?

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives […] it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.¹²

 

Everything that’s happening is not happening

in the framed object,

in the entity on which we’re supposedly focusing our attention,

but rather

in the immensely involved ways of looking away from it

and engaging with peripheral entities around it

that might redefine not the object,

but the very notion of an experience of art.¹³

But I also like—no,

love—

when the text opens up

for an action beyond the space of the text.

A possible action.

When the text not only points out something broken and empty and dead (allegorical),

but also makes a gesture

to a hypothetical future action.¹⁴

 

[W]hat resounds as an ethical question is more accurately a material one,

and a question of social structure.

That is, the descriptive turn in critical theory is motivated by

the impossibility of finding the right relation to one’s object.¹⁵

A spire

She

Paints over the thing

Betrays herself with words

autonomous and self-determining subject: precarious self

Is there a logic that could put us all on the same level?

this articulation of commonality: a compendium of features

This tenuous we is an apt description of this assemblage,

or the notion of conceptual writing,

which is still evolving.¹⁶

She said that the Bay Area came to mind when she thought about conceptual poetry and

I felt bored or out of touch or insecure or a little lost.

I don’t even know what that word means: “women”

women in

women

 

I do not believe the conceptual—

especially in the work of women—

can be separated from the body.

Isn’t that what fucked up Western Culture in the first place—

the wrenching of the conceptual from the embodied?¹⁷

“women” are big black hole

in its radical primordiality, as the emergence of verse from the pure Nothing¹⁸

the open

finally

that¹⁹

 

The thing about not knowing

not wanting to know the breadth

the thing about history

the thing about mastery.

Mastery asserts control.

Mastery anathema to: primary vulnerability POINTS TO → social vulnerability as a body

to apprehend that interconnectedness of things

to urge, press, reply²⁰

feelings we don’t recognize as feelings because they’re cerebral

ALSO → iterations of seriousness

ALSO → compelling illumination

ALSO → a complexity of lifeforms is desirable

ALSO → poetry thinks relationally

Something about the things you know manifesting unconsciously in your speech and actions

the cognitive role of experimentalism

definitional tension

Something about well-worn patterns

Could conceptual writing be drawing reframed?

understanding incommensurate points of view

ALSO → benefits of difference

POINTS TO → MORE IDEAS

ALSO → continual minor delinquencies

ALSO → potentials for synthesis

ALSO → die of the roar of it

POINTS TO → and the signal turns inside out

 

“”

write a motion

write emotion

don’t care about writing

whatever

emptied and desiring of emptiness

only enjoyed as a function

passing across and touching on the other side

he said she wasn’t

she wasn’t

stuck

her notes were strong and strange

a bomb threat in the library

that surprised me because

as if I follow and I go on

as if this machine had no place

to have something real/not make anything physical

The ‘conceptual’ mindset, then, is about looking and noticing:

…Not just, I think, to linger:

to somehow penetrate what is noticed until it penetrates you.²¹

What will have been obsessed with looking?

Why add more to the pile other than because you must?

What is “must”?

a way out of stagnancy

…parts of a larger investigation

…working in conjunction with my interest in

borders,

transitions,

and translations…²²

What is integration?

What changes with a woman at the pen?

I didn’t create language, writer thought.

I can’t make language, but in this world, I can play, can be played.²³

POINTS TO → the unintelligible

POINTS TO → re-imagining (pre-figuration?)

POINTS TO → assassination of mastery

POINTS TO → failure as the goal of conceptual writing

POINTS TO →

I am this mix of hegemonic and emergent

in relation to even the critical edges

of that culture

in which I am also saturated,

and through which I have expressed my longing.

Or part of that longing.²⁴

ALSO → The author may have disappeared but language remains privileged…

what could be illuminating in the ways

human and non-human animals don’t have language.²⁵

ALSO → We need prostheses for everything.

Language is one of those first prostheses;

the voice, that turns into language.

I often ask myself what kind of prosthesis a poem is.²⁶

 

who looks like

a desire to choose

a desire to browse

it’s harder

to do that now

it seems to be

all maps

 

this is new://

The exact moment before

something never seen before: appears?

Arrives.²⁷

a marginal image

this is exactly what my life is like

these days

we have to climb over

getting very close to

the unfamiliar

it’s really all there is

…you can’t necessarily buy who you really want to be. You have to buy the available images.²⁸

who this is

the air is

he is

the tree is

the sea is

the cage is

the air is

the wound is

It began as a night vision that landed on the page as a wave.²⁹

 

she passes

between

around

beats against

 

These beatings and burnings join in layers of raptures…³⁰

…a physical and temporal

movement through an intellectual frame,

a frame constructed in curiosity,

curiosity being desire.

The end result is simply, the material evidence of this movement,

muddy tracks

in an English garden,

or on the page.³¹

 

is education

is flesh

is a book

is over there

is splendid

is the sky

is bruised

is far

is half reflection (recollection)

 

both connection to and ambivalence toward the naming of the group

what’s a     

fallen from     

 

sinking feeling

discovers solitude

 

created space between

 

 ↓  ↓  ↓

 

in order to be

 

escaped

cultivation

to carry

a sudden

darkness

sent out waves

Decided that since what

she wanted to do was

just to write,

not to find her own voice,

could and would write

by using anyone’s voice, anyone’s text,

whatever materials she wanted to use.³²

 

we’ve reached

a collage of the real³³

a sloppy, unfinished, bricolage held together by a borrowed framing device,

in turn framed by a borrowed framing device,³⁴

in turn framed by a borrowed framing device.

The ideal would probably be a constant reduction towards almost nothing.³⁵

 

Reframed.

 

(Endnotes)

¹Marcella Durand
Return to Reference.

²Christine Weirtheim
Return to Reference.

³Monica de la Torre
Return to Reference.

⁴Caroline Bergvall
Return to Reference.

⁵Monica de la Torre
Return to Reference.

⁶Monica Mody (breaking the rules, not from the book)
Return to Reference.

⁷Monica de la Torre
Return to Reference.

⁸Monica de la Torre
Return to Reference.

⁹Oana Avasilichioaei and Erin Moure
Return to Reference.

¹⁰Renee Gladman
Return to Reference.

¹¹Judith Goldman
Return to Reference.

¹²Frances Richard
Return to Reference.

¹³Kim Rosenfeld quoting Irit Rogoff
Return to Reference.

¹⁴Mette Moestruo
Return to Reference.

¹⁵Sarah Dowling
Return to Reference.

¹⁶Laynie Browne
Return to Reference.

¹⁷Dodie Bellamy
Return to Reference.

¹⁸Rachel Blau DuPlessis quoting Giorgio Agamben
Return to Reference.

¹⁹Anne Boyer (breaking the rules, not from the book)
Return to Reference.

²⁰Cecilia Vicuña
Return to Reference.

²¹Nada Gordon
Return to Reference.

²²Sawako Naykayasu
Return to Reference.

²³Juliana Spahr
Return to Reference.

²⁴Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Return to Reference.

²⁵Tina Darragh
Return to Reference.

²⁶Chus Pato
Return to Reference.

²⁷Bhanu Kapil
Return to Reference.

²⁸Harryette Mullen
Return to Reference.

²⁹Cecilia Vicuña
Return to Reference.

³⁰Stacy Doris and Lisa Robertson
Return to Reference.

³¹Yedda Morrison
Return to Reference.

³²Juliana Spahr
Return to Reference.

³³Jennifer Karmin
Return to Reference.

³⁴Monica DeTorre
Return to Reference.

³⁵Cia Rinne
Return to Reference.