Julie Carr

New sentimentalism

A review of Julie Carr's 'Someone Shot My Book'

Kylan Rice

When viewed as acts of intimacy, reading and writing put “one on the edge of an outside of whatever one figures oneself already to be” — a claim that prompts the poet-scholar Julie Carr to conclude, in the final line of Someone Shot My Book (2018), that “all writing is epistolary.” All poems, then, are as if written in the manner of Emily Dickinson, “on the paper she used to wrap flowers in, or sent in letters.” All poems are addressed to a dear. Indeed, for Carr, “writing is almost always grounded in intimacy, and when it’s not, it begins to lose energy.”

When viewed as acts of intimacy, reading and writing put “one on the edge of an outside of whatever one figures oneself already to be” — a claim that prompts the poet-scholar Julie Carr to conclude, in the final line of Someone Shot My Book (2018), that “all writing is epistolary.” All poems, then, are as if written in the manner of Emily Dickinson, “on the paper she used to wrap flowers in, or sent in letters.” All poems are addressed to a dear. Indeed, for Carr, “writing is almost always grounded in intimacy, and when it’s not, it begins to lose energy.”[1]

Three future dances, or the dance feministic

Julie Carr
“The ‘dance feministic,’ as the song calls it, is a defiantly happy shimmy and thrust and a lipsticked grin that won’t give itself away.” Image from sketch of figural movement for dance (1921), Oskar Schlemmer, via Wikimedia Commons.

We are drawn together to march but because we are so many, we cannot march. We can only shuffle off balance, lean, wind our way, press or fall against one another, allow ourselves to be moved, give up our bodies to the swarm. And so we find we are not militant but in motion, a motion we can’t master. 

1.

April 13, 2018

A fourteen-line poem on the idea of freedom

Julie Carr

1. The spirit of

2. Malice survives

3. The direct exertion

4. Of malice. Give up

5. The desire to be female

6. The whatever being

7. Defined not by what it is

8. And not by what it belongs to

April 13, 2018

'There should be battles'

Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap interview Leslie Kaplan

Julie Carr
Leslie Kaplan
Jennifer Pap
Women on factory floor, 1960.

Poet, novelist, and playwright Leslie Kaplan came of age in 1960s Paris. France was then defined by a particular brand of conservatism, even while tumultuous events called out for a commitment to activism. President Gaulle had successfully pushed for strong executive power when a new constitution was written, founding the Fifth Republic (1958). He believed that a united and powerful France could re-emerge from war and postwar challenges through fidelity to traditions. Attaching paramount importance to French identity and destiny meant paying little heed to the varied needs of working-class people and other vulnerable populations. 

Note[1]: Poet, novelist, and playwright Leslie Kaplan came of age in 1960s Paris. At that time, France was defined by a particular brand of conservatism, even while tumultuous events called out for a commitment to activism. President Charles de Gaulle had successfully pushed for strong executive power when a new constitution was written, founding the Fifth Republic (1958).

October 18, 2017

On the poet-scholar

Margaret Ronda
Hillary Gravendyk (photo courtesy of Benjamin Burrill).

The poet and literary critic Hillary Gravendyk organized a roundtable on the “Poet-Scholar” for the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston, with participants Juliana Spahr, Jennifer Scappettone, Julie Carr, Heather Dubrow, Margaret Ronda, and Barrett Watten.

June 8, 2015

The poet-scholar

A list

Julie Carr

As I am a poet-scholar, or, a person who reads and a person who writes, a person who researches and a person who invents — a person who teaches and a person who edits — I can only consider the question of the poet-scholar from the inside — and so, what follows is a subjective and gendered account of the position of the poet-scholar in the form of a list numbered 1–10.

June 7, 2015

'Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in 19th-century and Contemporary Poetic Practice,' ed. Jeffrey Robinson & Julie Carr

Discount offer

Charles Bernstein
Cover image: Rückenfigur by Susan Bee (2013), oil on linen, 24 x 30 in.; courtesy of the artist.

CONTRIBUTORS
Dan Beachy-Quick / Julie Carr / Jacques Darras / Rachel Blau DuPlessis / Judith Goldman / Simon Jarvis / Andrew Joron / Nigel Leask / Jennifer Moxley / Bob Perelman / Jeffrey C. Robinson / Jerome Rothenberg / Elizabeth Willis / and Heriberto Yépez
288 pp.

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