Photo of Don Mee Choi (left) by Jay Weaver, courtesy of Don Mee Choi.
Before we reach the table of contents of Hardly War, Don Mee Choi’s concerns are clear. The epigraphs set three boundaries. Choi sets up Gertrude Stein as a foremother, whose style she will adapt and whose words she will intersperse with the other voices of the text — “It is funny about wars, they ought to be different but they are not.”
Before we reach the table of contents of Hardly War, Don Mee Choi’s concerns are clear. The epigraphs set three boundaries. Choi sets up Gertrude Stein as a foremother, whose style she will adapt and whose words she will intersperse with the other voices of the text — “It is funny about wars, they ought to be different but they are not.” Roland Barthes’s discourse on photography as “a shared hallucination […] a mad image” prefigures the text’s discourse on photography, its interweaving of treatises on photography, and the reality/unreality of war. Lastly, C. D.
“Many lines function self-descriptively, even synecdochally. […] And yet each line is a discrete instance, a resistance to that impulse to conjoin, maintaining the granularity of the parts in relation to the whole.” Photo by Julia Bloch.
The commonplace that the disorientations and ruptures of contemporary life require an equally disjunctive poetics has led many poets writing today to court the non sequitur as determinedly as a debater might avoid it. In traditional logic and rhetoric, a non sequitur — Latin for “it does not follow” — is a mistake, a fallacy, an inference that does not follow from the premises or evidence.
Photo of Anne Tardos (right) at the Kelly Writers House, March 15, 2016, taken by Writers House staff.
It’s exhilarating to say things. Giddy and strange to put things in the air nobody has heard. Exultant and juicy to make proposals at the interphase between language and reality. I feel these things keenly reading Anne Tardos. “It must be crisp not cryptic, if you want to write,” reads the first line of “Gentle Deer On 10th Avenue,” “There is this come-and-go of ideas, impressions, fears, uncertainties.”[1]
Images from 'Prose Architectures' courtesy of Renee Gladman and Wave Books.
One easily forgets that writing is an act of drawing. On this, Renee Gladman insists: “Drawing was a process of thought — that was true, and so, and especially, was writing.”[1] This notion can be grasped in two ways: on the one hand, inscription is visual. A letter is always a mark, something scrawled. It is only when the mark is given meaning that we come to know and understand it as writing, so that A is A. The architecture of shapes and lines become letters, words, writing.
One easily forgets that writing is an act of drawing. On this, Renee Gladman insists: “Drawing was a process of thought — that was true, and so, and especially, was writing.”[1] This notion can be grasped in two ways: on the one hand, inscription is visual. A letter is always a mark, something scrawled. It is only when the mark is given meaning that we come to know and understand it as writing, so that A is A. The architecture of shapes and lines become letters, words, writing.
This sign on a Leningrad blockade reads: “During air-raids this side of the street is more dangerous.” Photo by Ninaras, via Wikimedia Commons.
From September 1941 to January 1944, as Nazi forces brutally besieged the Russian city of Leningrad, five writers tried to make sense of the chaos swirling around them while they remained trapped in their own city. The works of these Russian writers — Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterligov, and Pavel Zaltsman — make up the collection Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad. Written in the Dark is, in its simplest form, a work of siege poetry: it grapples with the questions that forced stagnation demands.
From September 1941 to January 1944, as Nazi forces brutally besieged the Russian city of Leningrad, five writers tried to make sense of the chaos swirling around them while they remained trapped in their own city. The works of these Russian writers — Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterligov, and Pavel Zaltsman — make up the collection Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad.
