Why teenage girls?

A question for Trisha Low

One segment for this Jacket2 column will be titled “WHY__________?” in which I will ask certain people Why questions. Participant responses must be between 100-300 words. One of the first people I had a Why question for was Trisha Low. Because it’s a thread running through all her writing and performance work (she reads their diaries, their feminist blog comments, their love letters; she dresses like one in performance then throws up fake blood on herself) I asked her: Why Teenage Girls? Here’s her answer.

After Tiqqun’s Theory of a Young Girl, I think Poetry thinks of teenage girls the way some magazine editor looks at a contact sheet, selecting the spectacle and then pulling it up on the screen for the airbrusher going “INFLATE HER HAIR SO WE CAN SEE THAT FRAGILE VACUITY. I WANT TO SEE THOSE CAPITALISTIC PROCESSES NOT THAT CELLULITE. HAVE THIS SHIT ON MY DESK BY 2.” It’s apt that when I sit down to answer this WHY question, it’s 5.51 pm, I’m listening to slowcore and unwrapping a new tattoo, one that I acquired because of a certain amount of emotional distress, leaking blood and ink while I’m looking at the ‘real’ image reflected in my computer screen of me writing about ‘real emotional’ teenage girls, because what I’m really interested in is the cultural demarcation of the confessional genre. The tension between our structures of feeling (ie. the artificial way in which these feelings will be aestheticised or they will be bullshit) and the socially unfit waste of the feminine, the excess that is created in tandem with these scripted confessions. I have no patience with looking for a sufficiently ethical poetic representation but I’m interested in how your 'ethical' poetic representation is just a fantasy of reparation. As Mary Jacobus writes on Klein: “to make reparation would be such an all-consuming task that an unending, fake analysis is preferable to ‘cure’.” How is Poetry complicit in the urge to falsely ‘heal’ societal wounds into the silent fixity of It Gets Better? What better place to look than the teen girl, whose cut wrist is an abject fuck-you; whose cute Band-Aid and its artificial ‘healing’ is really just your sentimental fantasy – a palatable performance of narrative object that could really just be your worst nightmare. This is also how I do kissing nbd.

xoxo,

January 18, 2013

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My Approach

Being an active part of a poetry community is like having a second job. O the hours I have put in, but rarely do I find time to write about it. I agreed to report for Jacket2 these next few weeks as a writing constraint to correct that. I want to write about the scene(s) I occupy, report and reflect on events, interview organizers and opinionators. And maybe re-post a few things. This space should operate as a window into what is happening in certain corners of poetry right now.

One of Jacket2's editorial suggestions for commentary writers is that we approach the task as a beat reporter. For the last few weeks I've been preparing by thinking of this project with an eye toward journalism, so I've felt a desire to "get at" some challenging issues of the day, dig into particular issues of the moment. I think it could at times border on a kind of gossip column. Nothing lurid or personal, more of a who-said-what-about-which-reading, or a relaying of great ideas that emerge in casual conversation, and maybe even a little "who last saw Kim and Thurston at a poetry event" when that seems relevant.

In a classroom discussion of Gertrude Stein's line "history is gossip," my former professor Charles Bernstein riffed on Stein's way of redistributing our sense of where gossip ends and history begins. That conversation changed forever my approach to the sociality of poetry. You don't learn everything there, but you can learn some important things you would learn nowhere else. Not to say all these posts will make history, or that everything they depict deserves to be remembered. That's not the spirit of Stein's idea. It's that what has happened happened in the smallest of happenings and the large ones too.

Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.