Reading prompts for November 29 - Rankine, Reilly, Retallack
Choose either (or both),
1. "Languages of description may need to change under pressure of new angles of inquiry into how complex interrelationships make sense. (And vice versa as well.)" Comment on this sentence of "What is Experimental Poetry & Why do We Need It?" by Joan Retallack, in light of either Claudia Rankine's or Evelyn Reilly's poems
1. Listen to the beginning of this video where Evelyn Reilly reads from Styrofoam. In what ways does Evelyn Reilly's online performance - or, aleternatively, Claudia Rankine's "situation videos" (see previous post) - help you understand these poems better?
2.
ReplyDeleteEvelyn Reilly and Claudia Rankine’s readings provide a better understanding of their poems. The same poem read aloud reads differently from the one we read to ourselves. Even better, Claudia Rankine’s situation video provides sounds and images that complement the reading of the poem. This contributes to the environment the poet wants to create. If one could not imagine the situation portrayed, with the sounds of the sirens and the images of people trying on clothing, the message becomes all the more clear. The trying on of clothes does not matter, though, since “there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description’” (Rankine, “Each Time It Begins In The Same Way”) - the acting makes the message even more transparent, the clothes are not what makes the description. Although Evelyn Reilly’s reading is not accompanied by fabricated sounds their reading also allows us to better understand the tone and the rhythm used. Plus, the remarks they make in between poems make the experience all the more entertaining and enriching. Besides understanding the poem better, it can be easier to concentrate on the meter and find other sound devices like alliterations. Thus, poetry has a lot to do with sound, and reading aloud could really be the only correct way to read poetry.
2- While Claudia Rankine’s situation videos put her experiences into a much wider interpretative potential for her poetry, that is built through text, image, and sound. It creates a multisensory effect with all three elements. Added to the text are images from where Rankine gets visual and in text integration into a work grappling with systemic racism and structural violence in ways that will call for both intellectual and emotional response. The juxtaposition of images, including mundane, everyday moments against her most harrowing scenes of injustice-with measured narration brings powerful meaning to her words grounded in lived realities; layers of meaning that go beyond what writing would suggest are added. This layering might even further parallel the textual density of Reilly in Styrofoam: but the focus of Rankine, upon the delusion of social fissures, rather than those ecological, are different. In contrast, both employ performance and multimedia to destabilize the traditional modes of their audience's engagements with the poetic. Her measured tone and deliberate pacing, combined with stark imagery, task the viewer with engagement, compelling confrontation of the violence and fragility of the social structures she navigates. Also, Claudia Rankine's situational videos combine spoken word and dramatic image, situating abstract discussions of systemic racism within tangible, visual narratives. This approach aligns with Rankine's assertion in 'Citizen: An American Lyric' (2014) that, more often than not, the visual reinforces or distorts the various ways racialised bodies are perceived. The interplay between voice and image in her videos evokes Roland Barthes' concept of the ‘punctum in photography’ (Camera Lucida, 1980), which refers to the element that ‘pricks’ or profoundly disturbs the viewer, eliciting an emotive response. In this instance, the tranquil narrative voice is coupled with disturbing footage of police violence, compelling the audience to engage both emotionally and intellectually.
ReplyDeleteReilly's Styrofoam highlights that her poetry is material. With her fragmented, collage-like language, laced with chemicals and environmental terms, she replicates the chaotic knotting of both human and non-human materials that characterizes the Anthropocene. Hearing those phrases aloud - “polyvinyl,” “ethyl nil,” “foam conditions” - gives the feeling of being in a world where plastics exist, an uneasy coming-together of natural and synthetic realities. Her voice, which mimics the erratic behavior of these entanglements, captures and shapes within itself the ecological disruptions that her work critiques. In listening to her read, one not only finds the poem to be a conceptual critique of material waste but also a sensory experience where auditory dissonance mirrors much of the overwhelming environmental degradation that her work laments. Also, this reading of her poetry by Reilly brings to light the rhythm, fragmentation, and ironic tone of her ecological critique-creating resonance with Timothy Morton's idea on "hyperobjects"-referring to phenomena like plastic pollution, which are big, extensive, and ungraspable by humankind (Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 2013). By pronouncing such words as “polystyrene” and “composters are actually vast mummifiers,” she transforms the text into an acted-out environmental mourning, a tangible bringing of the environmental crisis to sound. Additionally, Rankine’s situational videos fulfill the same purpose in performance, combined with multimedia, that turn up the stakes in her words' affective register. She has made such abstract notions as systemic oppression into actual encounters by saying words along with visual imagery.
1. Joan Retallack in “What is Experimental Poetry & Why do We Need it?” concentrates on the necessity of language to balance with the new inclusivity of subjects of alterity. The invitation to bring more alterity to the conversation is confronted with the inadequacy of the language to deal with the subject. Since the language has not met the changes essential to interrogate the new subjects, inevitably falls short, continuing to ask the same questions and maintaining a one-directional conversation (a concept in itself ironic, since how can a conversation that demands a partake by both parts be one-directional?). Rather than simply dealing with the experimentation with new stylistic devices, Retallack defends the experimentation with poetry (language) to achieve a better understanding of alterity subjects. Furthermore, the author highlights the impact and pressure caused by climate change, which ultimately necessitates experiencing language to better understand, communicate with, and write about it. Additionally, since the relationship between poetry and nature has been one-directional, Retallack poses the question of how can we experiment with describing nature, conscious of avoiding categorizing it as a medium for emotions and “holding up a mirror to reflect her forms?” (9).
ReplyDeleteTo a certain extent, Reilly’s poem “Yet The Wor(l)d Can Still be Very Pretty” responds to this question. The first stanza considers the idea of navigating the intent of initiating a conversation with inadequate language – especially, my interpretation of lines 2 and 3 remote to Retallack mention of “how to create an experience (ideally, a profound understanding) of character as it is beginning to be understood in twentieth century (...) using materials of language absent nineteenth century literary devices” (3). The following stanza can be read as the ‘Self’s avoidance of “the quagmires of objectivity” (one-directional relationship), “the fogs of interiority” (nature as the instrument to express emotions), an “the candelabras of consumer desire” (the burning of nature because of climate change). The third stanza alludes to the idea of reconstructing language to invite new subjects to the conversation, in which “certain subjections of the subject / supposed agreements of gender” can be read as new areas of a possible introduction of interrogation. The fourth stanza relates again to the idea of a monodirectional relationship between language and nature, perfectly exemplified by the crash against a glass that does not reflect (“Self follows the thread of narrativity / only to crash against the glass / of non-transparent communication”). The concluding stanza points to the recomposition of language with privileged attention to nature and animality (the adjective is here described in a positive connotation, which is unusual, then reconfirming the attempt to redescribe nature).
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete1. Retallack’s assertion is of utmost significance as it demonstrates the plasticity of language which also points out its potential need and use for revolutionary purposes. Especially when faced with injustices such as oppression and systematic violence, linguistic frameworks can (and should) be shaped and innovated. In this way, descriptive tools—language, form, and poetics – engages with dynamic realities, and reshaping them may change the way we perceive, resist, respond to or deal with such oppressive mechanisms. This idea can be illuminated through Claudia Rankine’s works. To give an example, in her “Citizen: An American Lyric,” Rankine reimagines and disrupts the conventional boundaries of poetry to explore and reveal the complexities of systemic racism. She employs a hybrid form that melds poetry, prose, and visual elements that, in a way, shows the inadequacy of traditional descriptive methods to convey the lived experiences of racialized bodies. The deictics and pronouns (e.g. “you”) she chooses to use create a destabilizing effect that compels readers to confront their complicity or position within the narrative. Moreover, her incorporation of visual texts illustrates how language extends (beyond the verbal). By taking such multimodal approaches, Rankine exhibits she does not follow conventional expectations of poetry. Instead, she creates a language that embodies the complexity of systemic injustice, inviting readers to see and feel it in new ways. This reimagined language reframes the narrative and fosters new ways of thinking about and responding to such issues. As a result, taking Retallack’s theory into consideration along with Rankine’s experimental poetics, we can see how shifts in descriptive language not only reflect our understanding of complex (personal, political, or cultural) realities, but also actively shape them.
ReplyDelete