2. American English as a poetic resource

“American English as a poetic resource” argues that American English is one of the country’s great poetic resources. It is remarkably adaptable, contested, and diverse. When poets explore American English’s poetic usefulness, the diversity of their approaches and interests demonstrates the language’s flexibility. They use American English to critique and celebrate America and its literary traditions and to create a distinctive literature that also draws from traditions outside it. They mark differences as well as affinities. In some cases, the poetry shows an exuberant appreciation of American English’s peculiarities, its quirks and openness to experimentation and cultural cross-fertilization. Discussed poets include Walt Whitman, Harryette Mullen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost.

Entrevista a Gabri Molist

Gabri Molist nació en Barcelona en 1993. Dibujaba en la clase para no aburrirse, como una especie de terapia energética. Leía Mortadelo y Filemónde pequeño, para después enamorarse de Calvin y Hobbes y el Hellboy de Mike Mignola. Ama dibujar gente extraña y curiosa a la que poneen situaciones absurdas e incómodas mientras reivindica las fronteras de lo que posibilita el medio del cómic. La mayor parte de sus historias surgieronen fanzines o cómics autopublicados (Gazpacho, Way Opposite, I Laugh To See Myself So Beautiful In This Mirror). Adaptó un cuentode Sergio Ramírez, Flores Oscuras, al cómic (con otros autores belgas) para el Instituto Cervantes de Bruselas. No tiene miedo a declamar supropia obra; lo hizo en el MACBA durante el evento en Còmic en Revolta comisariado por Francesc Ruiz. Con Apa Apa publicó Asonancia, unaadaptación de cinco poemas al cómic (entre otros, de Robert Frost, Harryette Mullen y Clark Coolidge). Ha vivido en Gante, y actualmente viveen Bruselas. Su sitio web es www.instagram.com/gabrimolist

Laying Bare the Device

What do experiential poet Bruce Andrews and former Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly have in common? On the surface, almost nothing—the former is a highly regarded, retired academic and the latter a disgraced TV host and conservative partisan. For a brief four minutes in 2006, however, the two met and discussed on national television the nature of politics and higher education, with predictable obtuseness on the part of O’Reilly. Nothing was concluded or conceded, and arguably nothing was learned. Yet both did portend a fundamental change to the operation of American political life. O’Reilly’s attempt was far more public (and destructive), but Andrews’s political project has remained confined to a small contingent of scholars. This article reexamines Andrews’s claim that the only effective means of political resistance can come from an experimental poetic practice that challenges the ideology of American individualism at the heart of contemporary sense making. The author argues that the limitations of this political project are instructive and relevant beyond the confines of a scholarly interest in poetry, which are revealed through readings of Harryette Mullen.

Poetry in Expanded Translation: Audre Lorde, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Don Mee Choi

In this article, I discuss the politics and poetics of translation in the work of Audre Lorde, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, and Don Mee Choi, considering each poet's ideas about translation and translation practices, suggesting approaches to reading and thinking about their work in relation to translation and in relation to each other. I ask the following questions: in the selected poets' work, what are the relationships between the movement of people, the removal of dead bodies, and translation practices? How do the poets move between languages and literary forms, and what are the politics and poetics of their movements with regards to migration, dispossession, and death, as well as resistance, refusal, and rebirth? I select these poets because of the ways in which they confront relationships between the history of the English language and literature, imperialism and colonialism, racialisation and racism, gendered experiences and narratives, and their own poetic practices. These histories and experiences do not exist in isolation, nor do the poets attempt to circumscribe their approaches to language, representation, translation, and form from their lived experiences and everyday practices of survival and resistance. The selected poets’ work ranges in form, tone, and argument, but I argue that their refusal to circumscribe politics and poetics pertains to their subject positions and lived experiences as racialised and post/colonial women, and that this refusal is demonstrated in their diverse understandings of translation and translation practices.

Dictionary Poetics

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this study investigates poems by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s), Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh (two “Language Poets” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively), and Harryette Mullen (a post-Black-Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s). By reverse-engineering poems, this study sets the critical record straight on multiple counts. Moreover, reading these poems in tandem with their source texts puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde poems are nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Indeed, beyond the particular arguments and local readings, Dictionary Poetics argues that the new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics maps and articulates the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.

Lexicography and Modern Poetry

‘Lexicography and Modern Poetry’ provides an overview of the various uses that poets have made of dictionaries since the 1960s. Works by a number of poets from Britain and the United States are discussed, chiefly W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and R. F. Langley, but also Charles Olson, Robert Hass, and Harryette Mullen, among others. Following its early acknowledgement of Michael Davidson’s recognition of the ‘lexical insert’, the essay draws a number of connections between Auden, Prynne, and Langley, before the final section collates a range of examples that illustrate a number of the ways in which poets have attempted to challenge the authority of the dictionary.

O CORPO NEGRO COMO LÓCUS DA NEGAÇÃO DA IDENTIDADE

O corpo negro sempre foi, desde o momento de encontro do conquistador e dos povos não-brancos, e ainda é a base para as inserções do racismo e discriminação na sociedade. Em se tratando do corpo negro feminino, salienta-se que ele produz o discurso da sensualização, do desejo e da libido e observamos que a aceitação dele como algo indiferente ao caráter das mulheres ainda é um impasse para que as relações humanas sejam igualitárias. Desse modo, a sociedade, encabeçada pela mídia e indústrias de cosméticos e de moda, transmite aos indivíduos uma dura regra que exclui, diversas vezes, as características dos corpos negros como um padrão de beleza: os cabelos encaracolados são rotulados como ‘ruins’ ou ‘rebeldes’, estando sempre sujeitos aos alisamentos e clareamentos; os traços negros devem ser suavizados pela maquiagem que suaviza os narizes alargados e lábios muito volumosos; a pele negra é branqueada pela maquiagem que insiste em esconder o escuro e valorizar o tom claro, a moda destinada ao público negro, muitas vezes, é imbuída da ideologia do exótico, do falso multicultural. Tudo isso faz com que o negro tenha dificuldades em aceitar sua negritude, a ponto de buscar incessantemente o branqueamento para que possa pertencer à sociedade que prega, ainda hoje, a eugenia. Assim sendo, este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar dois poemas em língua inglesa que discutem a questão da imposição do branqueamento e o apagamento das características dos corpos negros como meio de aceitação na sociedade, a saber: “Kinky Hair Blues”, de Una Marson e “if your complexion is a mess”, de Harryette Mullen. A metodologia se baseia na discussão e aplicação das teorias sobre racismo, discriminação e identidade desenvolvidas por Hooks, Davies, Hall, entre outros. Os resultados revelam que o corpo se figura como lócus da construção da identidade do negro, porém, ele deve negar sua cor e sua identidade para que tenha condições de pertencer à sociedade em que está inserido.

Deep Time, Dark Time

By engaging interventionist art by women of color at two different scales—ephemeral body/earth art and monumental public art—this chapter supplements post-humanist theories of “deep time”—in particular, the temporality of the Anthropocene—with a concept of “dark time.” The intensive, alchemical, and obscure temporality of “dark time” is crucial to understanding black and brown feminist performance interventions against the violence of expropriative capitalism in the Americas. The chapter reads the art work of Kara Walker and Regina José Galindo through the poetry of Harryette Mullen and philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

POESIA EM TRADUÇÃO: A RESISTÊNCIA TRADUTÓRIA NOS JOGOS DO INVISÍVEL E DO INESPERADO

Este artigo aborda a tradução como uma forma de resistência, cujos efeitos do inesperado e do invisível subjazem a minha reinterpretação, em português, de dois poemas da poeta afro-americana contemporânea Harryette Mullen, com interessantes desdobramentos que possibilitam entrever os complexos meandros que caracterizam as diferentes estéticas da negritude.