Stephen Collis at North of Invention (click here to view his performance).
Steve Collis emphasizes the point that elements of practice that conceptualist writers identify as their own are not “new.” Ron Silliman makes the same observations in his reception of Notes on Conceptualisms, remarking that “constraint-based practices are as old as time itself”; that Vanessa Place’s 50,000-word feat of syntactical suspension in Dies has, if one thinks of its concept in procedural terms (say as a kind of biggering and bettering of the Joycean long sentence) been done before; and suggesting that the kinds of conceptual disruptions achievable through strateg
I watch M. NourbeSe Philip’s performance of “Zong! #1” a mere two weeks after attending my sister’s labor, and the experiences pull at each other. In both cases there are human sounds exceeding vocabulary and in both cases I am honored to witness a brave and generous and necessary act. But in Philip’s case, this is not a delivery that ends in joy and relief.
Jordan Scott at North of Invention (click here to view his performance).
Why is Jordan Scott? [Because the spaces = most interesting!] Are you comfortable? [He has shown and will show that languages {aieee!} are always attached to the body and the body is almost always under duress.] Would you like a cigarette? [They (ink, voice, hand signal etc.), being just another ingredient of chance, are never neither ready nor hesitant …] Have they treated you well?
M. NourbeSe Philip at North of Invention; click here to view her performance. Photo by Aldon Nielsen.
Shortly after North of Invention, I had the opportunity to ask M. NourbeSe Philip a question following her public reading here in St. Catharines, Ontario. She read exclusively from Zong!, outlining for a group of mostly students (the same students featured in the chapbook she holds up towards the end of the video) the difficulty of writing about eighteenth century African slaves who were murdered for the sake of an insurance payout.
My question, drawing upon her repeated desire to “tell the story that cannot be told,” was simple: “Are you ‘against expression’?”
