Divya Victor

'How much can a famished being dream?'

Ethos Books and poetry publishing in Singapore

Divya Victor

During my years in Singapore, I found myself in cafes and libraries reading anthologies and monographs marked with a stark, elegant icon. A swatch of black fabric fanned open? A pie with a dark slice carved out? A stylized ginko leaf floating in white space? A clock paused at five to eight? The books that I kept encountering at poetry readings, in my students’ hands, and on my friends’ coffee tables had this emblem as well. It was the icon of Ethos Books. As I leave the island-nation for Michigan, I wrap Discourses on Locality with this closing interview with Ethos Books, a singular publisher of Poetry in Singapore.

During my years in Singapore, I found myself in cafés and libraries reading anthologies and monographs marked with a stark, elegant icon. A swatch of black fabric fanned open? A pie with a dark slice carved out? A stylized ginko leaf floating in white space? A clock paused at five to eight? The books that I kept encountering at poetry readings, in my students’ hands, and on my friends’ coffee tables had this emblem as well. It was the icon of Ethos Books.

Jacket2 welcomes Divya Victor

Jacket2

Jacket2 is delighted to welcome Divya Victor to our team as our new guest editor. Divya has long been a friend of the journal: she has curated and edited two extraordinary features, “Discourses on Vocality” and “Conceptual writing (plural and global) and other cultural productions” — the latter of which is one of our most massive and ambitious features to date — and written insightfully on her time in Singapore as part of our Commentaries section. She is a prolific poet whose titles include the award-winning Natural Subjects (reviewed here), UNSUB, Things to Do with Your Mouth, Swift Taxidermies 1919–1922, Goodbye, John! On John Baldessari, PUNCH, and more.

Jacket2 is delighted to welcome Divya Victor to our team as our new guest editor. Divya has long been a friend of the journal: she has curated and edited two extraordinary features, “Discourses on Vocality” and “Conceptual writing (plural and global) and other cultural productions” — the latter of which is one of our most massive and ambitious features to date — and written insightfully on her time in Singapore as part of our Commentaries section. She is a prolific poet whose titles include the award-winning Natural Subjects (reviewed here), UNSUB, Things to Do with Your Mouth, Swift Taxidermies 1919–1922, Goodbye, John! On John Baldessari, PUNCH, and the Partial trilogy, as well as a number of chapbooks.

Tania De Rozario: On the monstrous feminine

Divya Victor
Henry Fuseli The Three Witches 1783
Henry Fuseli The Three Witches 1783

Tania De Rozario is an artist, writer and curator interested in issues of gender and sexuality, representations of women in Horror, and art as activism. Her practice hovers on the intersections between text and image, and her work has been showcased in London, Spain, Amsterdam, Singapore, New York and San Francisco. Tania is the author of Tender Delirium (Math Paper Press | 2013), which was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize, the winner of the 2011 NAC-SPH Golden Point Award for English Poetry, and recipient of the NAC Arts Creation Fund for her literary memoir, And The Walls Come Crumbling Down.

 "Does one named woman communicating with another named woman still count as a positive on the Bechdel test if one woman is not actually human?" - Tania De Rozario

Critical color theory

On Angelica Dass and Divya Victor

Rachael E. Katz

A collage of photographs from Angelica Dass’s ongoing Humanæ Project appeared on the cover of the “The Trouble With Race” issue of Foreign Affairs magazine in March 2015.[1] Dass’s photographic pairing of human skin tone with swatches of PANTONE® color was selected for an issue slated to spotlight the global failure of multiculturalism.

February 5, 2016

Messing with the beholder

Claudia Rankine's 'Citizen' and embedded Conceptualism

Catherine Wagner
Reproduction of Adrian Piper's 'Calling Cards' (undated). http://www.spencerart.
Reproduction of Adrian Piper's 'Calling Cards' (undated), which Piper distributed when racially insensitive statements were made in her presence. Calling cards also addressed sexual harassment and other issues.

Dear Divya,

You conceived this forum in the midst of attacks on Conceptualism for being a pain machine wielded by and for white people. I wondered whether your goal was salvific: could Conceptualism’s reputation and potential be rescued, could its soil be aerated and fertilized, could histories, lineages, practices, and ideas not normally associated with the current branding of Conceptualism become part of our sense of it.

February 5, 2016

Expression Concrète

A review of Divya Victor's 'Natural Subjects'

Felix Bernstein

Divya Victor’s new book Natural Subjects deconstructs the relationship between sentimental notions of authorial authenticity and normative models of citizenship in a way that will add some much needed bitters to your cocktail, at least if you can stomach it. The book is therefore, on a theoretical level, an absolutely refreshing and uniquely contrarian read. But on the level of the sonic and textual, it is also one of the most sumptuous, expressive, and musical books to come out of experimental poetry in recent years.

Yong Shu Hoong

On the [unofficial] 'Reluctant Yuppie' and 'Reluctant Soldier' Schools of Poetry in Singapore

Divya Victor
Yong Shu Hoong Photo Crediti Ng Kah Gay
Yong Shu Hoong Photo Crediti Ng Kah Gay

Yong Shu Hoong is the author of five poetry collections, including Frottage (2005) and The Viewing Party (2013), which won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2006 and 2014, respectively. His poems and short stories have been published in literary journals like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Asia Literary Review (Hong Kong), and the anthologies Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton, 2008) and Balik Kampung (Math Paper Press, 2012).

Pooja Nansi

On the whalesongs of Bollywood, sentiment, and the lyric familiar

Divya Victor
Chhoti Bahen, Hindi Film, 1959

"Listening to Mukesh"

Pooja Nansi

Driving to your block,
I slide in my father's cassette
of old Hindi songs and
I am humming in twilight
to the legendary
playback singer's baritone
releasing those sounds in that
language that makes me feel like I am
home. In the back of my throat,
I can taste my grandmother's
translucent thin chappatis
that as children we would
hold up
to the light,
the dough so evenly rolled out
by her hands that not
one lump would show.

Conceptualist Autopoiesis: A dialogue between Divya Victor (United States/India/Singapore), Swantje Lichtenstein (Germany), and Riccardo Boglione (Italy/Uruguay)

20 April 2013

Vanessa Place

The following is an occassional dialogue composed for this occassion. Divya Victor, Swantje Lichtenstein, and Riccardo Boglione may not have met apart from the artifice of this conversation.

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