Features
Dialogues with M. NourbeSe Philip
Recently the Canadian Caribbean poet M. NourbeSe Philip has begun to experiment with collaborative public readings of her book-length poem Zong! I had the good fortune of attending one of these readings at the end of May at the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Annual Conference at the University of Waterloo. Handing out about twenty photocopies of Zong!, she provided the audience with page numbers and instructed us to read these pages along with her without worrying about staying in unison. A mesmerizing cacophony ensued, as voices moved under, over, and around each other. Zong! illustrates Philip’s ongoing commitment to poetry as a radical mode of historical inquiry and racial protest. This trans-generational lyric is made only of language taken from the Gregson v. Gilbert decision, a 1783 legal case resulting from the deliberate drowning of 150 slaves. At first I could only hear my voice through the torqued syllables of the poem, but eventually it began to fade as the sea of voices swallowed it up. This group recitation amplified the ritualistic dimensions of this watery text. By inviting her audience to participate, Philip destabilizes the equation of poetic voice with authorial presence fostered by the traditional format of modern poetry readings to navigate us to a different mode of utterance. For me, these collaborative performances form an essential part of the poem’s reading pedagogy, compelling us to read and discuss the dissonance together. The collection of exchanges in this feature takes up this challenge. As Philip acknowledges in her lyrical essay “Wor(l)ds Interrupted,” which forms the centerpiece of the conversation, she herself is still “trying to figure out what Zong! is” and she invites her audience to explore how to read the poem with her.
Published in 2008, Zong! has sparked a considerable amount of scholarly attention for such a recent text — heralded both as a radical work of conceptual poetics and as a spiritual lament for the unmourned dead. In “Wor(l)ds Interrupted, Philip reflects on the critical reception of Zong! and she discusses its relationship to her previous writing. Locating her work in the “swirling waters of the kari basin,” she explores how this space has been “postmodern long before the term was coined.” Characterizing the entire New World as a “site of massive interruption,” she proposes that the nonlinear and fragmentary qualities of poetic discourse are well suited to articulate the visceral effects of the interruptive experience of the Americas and to reclaim its disruptive potential.
Evie Shockley and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan both take up the pressing question of how to read Zong! in their responses to Philip’s “Wor(l)ds Interrupted.” In Sullivan’s commentary “‘Unsayable Secrets’ of Diaspora’s Bodily History,” she focuses on the gendered dimensions of Philip’s rupture to dominant histories through the tracing of black women’s bodily memories. Shockley encapsulates her position through her playful title, “Is Zong! Conceptual Poetry? Yes, It Isn’t.” She argues that Zong! provokes a reconfiguration of what conceptual poetics might become by loosening the divisions between body, mind, and spirit. This feature also includes a written version of the interview that followed Philip’s collaborative reading at the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Annual Conference. Two Canadian scholars, Veronica Austen and Phanuel Antwi, invite Philip to reflect on the relationship of her poetics to spirituality, national identity, and contemporary politics. The interview builds on conversations that run throughout the feature and that embark on reading Zong! together.
Discourses on vocality
Vanessa Place, Kim Rosenfield, Rachel Zolf, and Myung Mi Kim
The discourses with the poets Vanessa Place, Kim Rosenfield, Rachel Zolf, and Myung Mi Kim are records of developing notions of performance, composition, and authorial agency. We center on the work of the “voice” in its many, glossolalic manifestations, asking how the poetic “voice” (through speech, performance, ventriloquy, enunciation) witnesses the contemporary moment. These discourses hover around the opening in the lower part of the human face, surrounded by the lips, through which the discourses are taken in and from which interviews and other views are emitted. Mobilizing new possibilities for historical strategies of appropriative, recombinatory, adaptive, and conceptual poetics, these discourses course through a broad range of questions and answers, tos and fros, calls and responses.
1584 R. Scot, Discouerie Witchcraft
“A wench, practising hir diabolicall witchcraft, and ventriloquize …”
1642 T. Fuller, Holy State
“Some have questioned ventriloquie, when men strangely speak out of their bellies, whether it can be done lawfully or no.”
1960 R. Barthes, “Authors and Writers”
“Contrary to so-called primitive societies, in which there is witchcraft only through the agency of a witch-doctor … the literary institution transcended the literary functions, and within this institution, its essential raw material, language.”
1998 R. Silliman, “Who Speaks”
“Once incorporated into an institutional canon, the text becomes little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy through which a babel of critical voices contend.”
An interest in the mouth, its activities, its cavernous possibility containing teeth and tongues, its emissions and enunciations, and its participation in the labor of performing, projecting, and appropriating identities, drives these discourses. These discourses also emerge as speech from an orifice distended to the fingers — typed, drafted, emailed, rehearsed, resaid, and resent. They are not spoken. They are written, and therein is a lack of lips and glottis, but also a lack of muzzle or hiccup. Vanessa and I, Kim and I, Rachel and I, agree to speak mouth-to-mouth but not face-to-face while sometimes seeing eye-to-eye.
These discourses are the record of a many months of correspondence between a conversant in Buffalo, New York, and another in Los Angeles, California; New York, New York; and Calgary, Alberta. The conversations locate, like a uvula locates the gate at which a mouth opens onto a throat, a pressing need to consider enunciating, performing bodies and the forms with which they conspire to name an emerging poetics of appropriation and ventriloquism driven by a pronounced commitment to defining new feminisms. In my discourses with Place and Rosenfield, we returned directly and sometimes by detour to issues of law and literature, trauma and subjectivity, science and sophistry, sexuality and performance. In my discourses with Zolf, we grappled with the poet’s role in the crisis of witnessing international catastrophe.
The reemergence of an interest in lyric voice and the re/decoding of vocality by contemporary strains of conceptualism and appropriative poetics have given critical pause over the assumptions with which we crowned Language writing and “A pause, a rose, something on paper.” Vocality is a pause which arose on paper but which is now once again pronounced by the loud, masquerading, ventriloquizing body; it is something that must give us pause; it is something we cannot readily appeal to or appoint to an author.
These conversations pause over the question asked by Roland Barthes in “Authors and Writers” — “Who speaks?” — which suggested a generational difference between the bon mot and the bon mort of the author. These conversations pause also over the curiously dropped question mark in Ron Silliman’s engagement with Barthes’s question in his essay “Who Speaks” decades later. This pause is a gesture to reinstate the importance of that question mark, a gesture to return to the question that still curls around any claim about the ordering of signs around the mouth and the ordaining of words on the page in poiesis. I hear our conversation as a way of pausing here to discourse around that question mark.
On Myung Mi Kim
In a discussion with Divya Victor included as part of this feature, Myung Mi Kim quickly arrives at the following problem: “I can’t quite imagine a relationship with a poem, the fact of writing or reading a poem, that would be permanently inscribed.” The sentence reads like an aphorism. It’s portable enough to invite reuse as a doctrine of reading or an imperative of process. As advice, it’s even sound. At this sentence, I experience a familiar sensation in my reading of Kim’s work: like a good (ex-) Baptist, I memorize the verse; I want it on a post-it note above my computer, and I wonder if I shouldn’t forward it to a friend or two. But to resist the urge to pry this instigation, this challenge to poetics, apart from Kim’s work at large is to prepare for an encounter with that work. Kim’s is an effort to inhabit the change, to resist the permanent inscription of — and yet to continually pursue, grow, and foster — relation(s).
So it’s fitting that this collection of materials ranges and doesn’t attempt a comprehensive account of Kim’s thought and her practice as poet. It makes sense that the feature even touches back on a previous gathering of writing on Kim’s work. The pieces here engage Kim’s page work and her voice work, they close read, close listen, and even light out with Kim’s thought as instigation elsewhere. They mark an accretion (over at least the last couple of years) of new responses to Kim’s writing, and as such, they also attest to the continued urgency of that writing — but they needn’t be read as indelible. Later in the same interview with Victor, Kim offers a musical analogy for the performed or published residue of writing: “One ‘publishes’ and that’s the recital. But [the moment of performance] is never cut off from all the other permutations, all the other possibilities, all the other iterations, and all the ways in which I could hear, or could process, or could place this passage next to that passage. It is perpetual, even while there is the thing called the recital or the thing called the book.”
So, too, the pieces assembled here.