A conversation between Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
'TRACTOSAUR' by Amelia Dale
A central premise of Amelia Dale’s work is that it is entirely unconcerned with the valence of the work itself. She makes a poem that is a thing before it is a poem, a thing that never wants to be a ‘poem,’ that nevertheless is or gains something when we call it a poem. Here I want to spend some time with Amelia Dale’s 2015 poem TRACTOSAUR, published by Troll Thread in 2015. A Word doc, for example (the origin of her PDF poems), a file type with a fairly rudimentary and utilitarian purpose, becomes for Dale a playful space in which the poem can extend itself beyond its limits.
A central premise of Amelia Dale’s work is that it is entirely unconcerned with the valence of the work itself. She makes a poem that is a thing before it is a poem, a thing that never wants to be a ‘poem,’ that nevertheless is or gains something when we call it a poem. Here I want to spend some time with Amelia Dale’s 2015 poem TRACTOSAUR, published by Troll Thread in 2015.
A Word doc, for example (the origin of her PDF poems), a file type with a fairly rudimentary and utilitarian purpose, becomes for Dale a playful space in which the poem can extend itself beyond its limits. The format — an electronic file of white rectangular frames/pages with a basic sans serif font and a wonderfully gnarly-looking illustration rendered in MS Paint or similar — gives us a thing that wants to decimate our concept of the poem, of even the illustrated poem.