Reading prompts for November 22: new "lyric" / refunding mythopoesis - native and decolonial writings
Choose one and try out your ideas in writing:
1. Do some research on mythopoetics and comment on how Chabitnoy and/or Joy Harjo weave myth into their contemporary poetry and what it does for the undecidability of water and environmental or social justice.
2. Close-read any of the following poems by Chabitnoy: "Anatomy of a Wave", "Kingugturningaitua", or "Red Bed Fatale".
2. Watch the following situation video (by the poet Claudia Rankine and her partner, the documentary photographer John Lucas), whose text is actually taken from Citizen (though not from any of your excerpts). Considering that two of Rankine's poetry collections are subtitled "An American Lyric", do you see rifts and evolutions here in the concept of "lyric" that tie in with V. Jackson's overview in her academic entry for "Lyric"?
3- Virginia Jackson’s discussion of the dehistoricized (or historically muted) lyric is particularly interesting due to her meticulous literary criticism. She argues that the lyric’s origins as a performative, communal, and historically grounded form have been erased by modern constructions, tracing this transformation from Ancient Greece through the modernist and capitalist periods (this abstraction can also be read through Carol Adams's concept of the absent referent). Initially, the lyric was distanced from its historically and etymologically rooted meaning yet still retained some connection in troubadour culture. Then, in the early modern period, it began to lose its communal character. It was also narrowed down into a written-text-centered form, whose popularity accelerated with the advent of mass printing.
ReplyDeleteWhile 17th century poets and philosophers used lyric as a tool to ration, a deeply emotional and individual perspective of the lyric was excessively emphasized in the Romantic periods. With Goethe’s contribution (and modernists’ obsession of categorization), it gained hegemonic status over other types and genres. It was overgeneralized, even used synonymously with poetry itself, reflecting capitalism’s tendency to suppress alternative modes of production in favor of centralized, profitable systems. Jackson identifies this as a process of "lyricization," where diverse poetic forms were unified under the concept of the lyric, marginalizing their historical and performative roots. Thus, the lyric as a "modern invention" serves both as an expression of alienation and as a potential site for critique - a duality that recalls Walter Benjamin’s more optimistic reflections on technology, cinema, and photography in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.
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DeleteThe video Situation by Claudia Rankine and John Lucas, based on Citizen: An American Lyric (notable for its prose-like form), offers a striking reimagining and rehistoricization of the lyric mode. While Rankine incorporates many lyrical qualities, she also deconstructs the modernist shifts (that turned lyric from an adjective into a noun, and almost fixated it on individual and emotional themes). In doing so, she reclaims its collective origins. To be more specific, the poem starts with an “I” language but turns into a “you.” However, this “I” sounds more communal than subjective (perhaps shaped by the collective trauma of systemic racism), let alone the shift to “you,” which makes it dialogic. What is more, through performative readings, documentary footage, and visual storytelling, Rankine and Lucas create a multimodal experience that prompts reflection on social injustices like racism and police brutality. The integration of documentary elements and the videopoem format destabilizes the traditional boundaries of lyric poetry, merging it with visual and journalistic modes. This hybridity echoes Jackson’s view of the lyric's capacity to evolve and absorb other genres, challenging its conceptualization as a purely textual and solitary form.
DeleteThematically, the work uncovers a sense of temporal layering that is not confined to a singular moment of epiphany or reflection, but spanning historical and ongoing injustices. This expansion diverges from the lyric’s (modernist) association with singularity; instead, engages with historical and cultural continuities. In this sense, the lyric becomes a form of witnessing then. At this point, I would like make a short detour to remember what Lyotard (1988) posits in The Differend: “You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it. Most of them disappeared then. And the survivors rarely speak about it. When they do speak about it, their testimony bears only upon a minute part of this situation. How can you know that the situation itself existed? That it is not the fruit of your informant’s imagination?” (p. 3). Lyotard draws attention to the difficulty of testifying. Survivors are either silent or can only convey a portion of the event that occurred in the past as far as they remember. He establishes the relationship between this incapacity of language and experience within such conditions. This is also why Rankine’s and Lucas’s work is so significant. It adapts the lyric form to bear witness to collective social injustices, transforming it into a tool for rehistoricization and critique.
2- Chabitnoy’s poem, ‘Red Bed Fatale’, presents a candid and comprehensive exploration of the intertwined concepts of physicality and identity in relation to the surrounding environment. The style is quite body-centric; it is all surface, blood, water, waves, and most importantly – rebellion, power, and desire. Such repeated phrases as “bounding un-” expresses liberation and rebellion; the author has rinsed away the imposition of society. The poem also employs alliteration and caesura as in the “trembling tremors,” tongue forking”, “throw my throat” which gives it a musical rhythm heightening its corporeality.
ReplyDeleteChabitnoy’s musicality enhances the degree of the poem as in its use of repetitions such as, “throes those throes those open throated”. These patterns tend to have a repetitive and rhythmic flow, mutually reinforcing the incantatory nature of the poem and the one in Joy Harjo’s ‘Eagle Poem’, in which I found this poem while researching about my final paper, with the same characteristics; in ‘Eagle Poem’, the structure and repetition of the phrases span over the life and interconnectedness of life. In ‘Eagle Poem’, Harjo states, “to pray, you will open your whole self / to the sky, the earth, the sun, the moon,” bringing in breath and flying as part of the whole. In the same way that Chabitnoy’s understanding of self is found in the “dark waters heaving” and “monumental Death,” and reflects a surrender to nature’s immensity and embraces its many forces or elements, where one remains in control.
The speaker also declares, “I will be boat and rock / and blood and red dot,” thus situating a body as both a vessel and a landscape. This metaphor points out that one’s sense of self does not only pertain to his or her body, as it also extends to the land, the waters, and the unending cycle of life and death. The experience is not simply held within the body but rather the “cannon” of the body becomes a part of the larger existential spectrum, whether it be the “rock” which denotes stability or the “blood” which signifies vitality.
In using the words such as ‘boat’ and ‘rock’ within the composition of the body, Chabitnoy reinforces her belief that the human condition, in all its complexities, resides in an environment. Nature here is not seen as an exterior background but rather something intrinsic within the speaker, which they cannot detach from. It evokes a more respecting ecological perspective, where the body can exist in any surrounding as well as embody that surrounding. The very relationship of the body with the natural environment evokes a presence of generation, death and resurrection – the infinite cycle of being, where humankind is as the earth, fragile yet enduring, temporary but everlasting.
Also, the word ‘witch’ takes on the powerful feminine figure, the life giver and the transformer of all, who holds mystery. To call one a ‘witch’ also encompasses the idea of finding power to manipulate, both in terms of magic and creating or changing oneself. “i will be” is reiterated to establish agency on the part of the speaker, this being a deliberate act of claiming power and identity. ‘Woken’ and ‘woven’ have the connotations of awakening and creating, respectively. Woken refers to coming out of something inactive to an active state, to awareness or power; woven relates to something interconnected, creating or binding things together as in the weaving of fate, identity or destiny. In this way, these words denote a feeling of renewal and more importantly, one of the speaker’s controls over the content, the past and the future.
2 - Analysis of Red Bed Fatale.
ReplyDeleteThe poem Red Bed Fatale opens with the shocking image of the “sex wet”, which alludes to the image of the female sexual organ. We also assume it is a female speaker due to the title itself, the idea of the “fatale”, which has been used to create the concept of the femme fatale, which means ‘deadly woman’ or ‘lethal woman’. The main interpretation to be taken away from this poem is the fact that our female poetic voice is experiencing self-inflicted sexual pleasure, meaning, masturbation. Specifically in the beginning, we can argue that for thirteen verses she describes the act through words like “boundless”, “bounding”, “open”, “swell”, “trembling”, “tremor”, “urge”, “consuming heat”, “wet self”. The woman subject is holding something back, but then she opens herself, she is no longer bound, and there are keys in her timber, which we can interpret as musical keys, as if she is exuding sound, which could be moaning, she opens her throat in immense pleasure. There is a consuming heat, and she grits her teeth as she reaches a climax.
The poetic voice says “if / this is my olive branch my passing into I’ll be / dammed I will be witch”. An olive branch is often used to symbolize the idea of peace, or something that we are at peace with. Here, the poetic voice does not seem to find joy with that idea of peace, it is a myth that does not fit with her image of herself. So, she is “dammed”, she decides that, instead, she will become a witch, she will be the opposite of that which is expected of her. But this choice will bring immense pain and suffering, as she mentions the “throes” throughout the entire poem. She will throw her body to those waves, into those dark waters, which could mean that, because of her decision, she is going to drown, or she will be sent to die. She ends up on the shore, her transformation depends on the waters that sustain her life.
From the moment the poetic voice says, “I will be Gladys”, the poem takes a sudden turn. There is no longer the image of the femme fatale, or of the witch, she will take meaning into her own hands and words, she will become Gladys, she will turn the myths around and become something of her own volition: a killer whale who will let no one step over her. She will teach her young the same, “to sink ship”, she will teach them to sink the ships that contain all the myths. And, in those waters, she will finally make her bed, she will start anew, for herself and for all others. The new meanings and understandings and categories of thought will transform.
ReplyDelete1- Mythopoetics as a term is used to described a subgenre of speculative fiction, mainly fantasy and science fiction, that creates mythos, out of preexistent archetypes. The biggest example of this concept is the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, that create an English mythos based on Anglosaxon, Nordic and some Celtic culture and storytelling. The category is meant to be invented mythos but in Harjo and Chabitnoy’s is a work of recreation, due to erasure, to trying to make sense of violence and learning how to wield stories against the hegemonic mythology. This erasure is one of culture, of patterns of living with nature (page 2, Chabitnoy) and community “I don’t know how to say I know who my relative are.”, reflected in a lack of language and its search like we see in Red Bed Fatale. The mythos is also used to make sense of violence, especially related to overall disappearance “And every time another one of us was thrown into the sea we became a wondrous beast?” but specially the disappearance of women, seen in the Flood. Finally, mythopoetics offers the possibly of learning how to wield stories through recreation, transformation of the archetype, “A spiritually powerful hunter was able to kill the beast.” to reflect necessity, and conservation of the diaries of the search for language mentioned previously, as well as a way to fight other myths. The section of “Kingugturningaitua” concerning the hook could be read as a struggle between a fisherman who wishes to take the poetic voice with their hook, their story but a poetic voice who only takes the bait to learn. “() won’t take the worm in my mouth”, in the notes, we could argue shows an attempt at the understanding of myth-making without the contamination of the man-worm. The myth-maker wishes to create something beyond, to become a “spiritually powerful hunter” herself.
In terms of water, it is mainly Chabitnoy who makes water an agent (in Harjo’s The Flood, its a sign “… the rain that would flood the world” or a safekeeper of myth and women). The wave as a narrative agent is the focus of the first verses. However, water is reduced, bottled into the human over the course of the poem, transformed from something that consumes, into a small pond, into shared water, with people taking the focus on the end. The narrative agency given into the wave questions the seemed impotence of people, with the poetic voice critical of their actions, “culpable”, but also aware of their power, “capable”. This poem unites theory and praxis, in a way, questioning the lack of action towards the fight against the climate crisis represented in Signs You Are Standing at the End, The Flood “…the convenience store a signal of temporary amnesia.” and the even the consumerist action of Invisible Fish. Through the agency of water, the agency of human is reminded. With this heightened awareness of human agency, overlooking environmental and social justice becomes impossible.
Apocalypse for Indigenous people of Turtle Island has happened. The cultural and environmental destruction of colonialism, genocide, disturbance of natural patterns and the earth’s regulatory system was an apocalypse. The concept of Indigenous Futurism invokes not just survival but a return to living for Indigenous communities, to stedwarship of land. Through myth-making, science and art, the recuperation of what culture it is possible to recuperate is attempted. In the final verses and notes of The Word of the Week is Wave, the poetic voice urges Elders to tell the stories of survival of the apocalypse, as a way of giving hope but also passing the stories along. “Records tend to scarcity” and the kayak/arc concept brought me back to Le Guin’s (very much inspired by Indigenous community) Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, of the necessity of the instrument that keeps things safe. This theory wishes to reframe narrative into a carrier bag of stories. The kayak as a recipient that both keeps but also is allowed movement through water is extremely symbolic of the Indigenous futurism movement, the ancient and the new. This new, we see in Red Bed Fatale, rewriting The Flood. One of the biggest issues to Indigenous communities in Turtle Island is the disappearance, of women and with them, of stories. The lack of knowing is myth-maded in The Flood “the watermonster”, the alternative history represented by the two women, the confrontation of sexuality. “The oldest woman in the tribe wanted to remember me as a symbol in the story of a girl who disobeyed, who gave in to her desires before marriage and was destroyed by the monster disguised as the seductive warrior.” Going back to archetypes, we can see the ruined woman, the seductive warrior, the one who disobeyed, enforced by a third party, leaving the women with no agency. In the poem, the myth intersects with reality in interesting ways (ways that I need more time to comprehend fully), with this magical lake that is in the end man-made but who acts as a safe of women, that leak into the reality, in the form of omens and environmental pollution reflected in the droughts and flood.
DeleteThe freedom of sexuality that the woman in The Flood could not have is the one that the poetic voice in Red Bed Fatale charts, weaves, an ocean to be navigated, coexisted with. The water in this poem, connected with waves of sensual pleasure is something to become “…i will be those dark waters heaving…”, in opposition of other poems were it is foe or myth. Here the myth-making is new ways of experiencing sexuality, away from oppression, beyond an apocalypse. We could argue that Chabitnoy’s poem is not just mythopoetics but part of the Indigenous futurism project.