Monica Mody

2012-01-22T21:28:00.000-08:00

I took in way too much this week. And not enough absorption happened. I’m feeling that pressure right now. Feeling exhausted. The plan is therefore to go to sleep. And wake up remembering a dream. I want to remember more dreams.

Isn’t Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections the most riveting thriller you ever read?

CIIS needs a Margaret Doody. A brilliant, eccentric, swoon-worthy female professor whose scholarship spans, nay, dazzles, the cosmos. I was getting a little tired of the patrilineal exaltation on Friday.

And the Jaipur Literature Festival! It’s shown the world that it is really not about literature but about the four corners of law. Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, Ruchir Joshi. You are folk heroes. Or about to be. Thank you.

Nostalgia crossed

2012-01-14T20:54:00.000-08:00

When you are living far from home, and return after it has been a while, you recover the places and the people you had started believing a part of your archive - they existed only inside your archive.

And what you experience is not joy or pain but something much more thorough.

In other news, the TFA awards function this week was meticulous and elegant and intimate. Congratulations to the winners!

Bangalore Reading

2012-01-12T09:17:00.000-08:00

I'll be reading at the Bard Room, PageTurners, this Saturday, Jan 14 at 6pm.

Please spread the word and maybe I'll see you there as well!

WHERE: 89 Kannan Building, MG Road, Bangalore 560 001

Notes on Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis

2012-01-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

A critic wrotethat reading Narcopolis is “an experience much like waiting for a really longgoods-train to trundle by” and I think yes, but what a goods-train. There is anarrative told by a pipe more than by its human narrator the pipe once consumed(what a beautiful form, ouroboros), and an “I” with a lyric consciousnessdispersed until it can purvey many states of knowing; there is a beautifulNorth-Eastern hijra as heroine; there is a love story; there are many love stories,and the dead are often loved enough to be wanted returned; there are ways inwhich the dead return; there are words and stories and pages and pages aboutreading; this is a book about reading; there is reading that comes to life asdreams, and vice versa; (and memories); there are dreams; there are dreams thathave found what they have to say; there is language that prefers to blacken itseyes in the shadows; there is a shadow of poetry around its eyes; there aregenres tongueless also tongue-in-cheek; there is an audience that finds the ModernAutists of India incomprehensible, or at least good for getting informationabout American visas; there are saints and addicts; there is ruination; thereis despair and suffocation; of course there is self-loathing—and self-redemption;there is history that is familiar and dismal, unfamiliar and appalling; thereis a city.

Narcopolis tellsyou how you must read it.

Over the nextfew days he would pick it up and read as many pages as he could before sadnessgot the better of him and he put it away. (95)

The Critic's Responsibility

2012-01-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

When considering a work of art, I believe the critic has a responsibility to accept the piece on its own terms. This means experiencing, judging, and thinking about the process and the product before me—figuring out what works about it, what doesn’t, and why. A good reviewer enters an artwork and crawls around inside it; a bad one stands outside and says, “I would have done it this way.”

- Jillian Steinhauer

Eighth Annual TOTO Awards

2012-01-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

The amazing TOTO awards are here again. Created in the memory of Angirus 'Toto' Vellani, these awards have since 2005 been encouraging and supporting young artists in India. Please come if you are in Bangalore!

Collaboration in HLR #10

2012-01-02T00:24:00.000-08:00

Jen Stockdale and I have a collaborative piece in Horse Less Review #10.

The journal also includes work by Lily Ladewig, Carrie Bennett, Karen Lepri, Dawn Pendergast, Mark Lamoureux, Molly Brodak, Jeff Alessandrelli, Linda Russo, Becca Jensen, Deborah Poe, Sarah Mangold, Michael Flatt, Christine Gardiner, Jefferson Navicky, Matthew Johnstone, John Duvernoy, Jane Lewty, Maryrose Larkin, Cori A. Winrock, and Ashley Van Doorn. Cover art by Patrick Costello.

2011-12-31T23:40:00.000-08:00

Rapunzel Tower, design by Guy Nordenson and Associates

The first day of a new year. I woke up with a dream pressedagainst me, complete as a fairy tale. And, as terrifying. Only, this fairy talehad not yet found its ending. I realized I would have to provide one when I’mnot dreaming.

With this, I had to remind myself I don’t have to make achoice: that I can write the fairy tale, playing with the possibilities,closings, openings, and tremors the form presents me with, and also engage thedream in work, allowing the symbolic language of the psyche to speak to theself so it admits more self-understanding.

That integrating the unconscious will not stop it fromgifting me with “the fairy way of writing.”

That all the dimensions can interexist!

May we interexist with love and grace in 2012, and in all the years that will arrive new.

New chapbook: Mothereaten

2011-12-29T00:50:00.000-08:00

The Chapbook is a new print journal edited by Alan May that will publish 4-6 chapbooks per issue along with reviews, essays, commentary, etc. concerning chapbooks.

The first issue is just out and includes my chapbook, Mothereaten. Also included are chapbooks by C. J. Waterman, Theodore Worozybt, Nicole Cooley, Drea Kato, Dana Curtis, Carey Scott Wilkerson, Adam Moorad, as well as a review of Joyelle McSweeney’s The Necropastoral by Amy Wright.

The Chapbook is available on Amazon.

Shahid, beloved witness

2011-12-08T14:38:00.001-08:00

It is Agha Shahid Ali's tenth death anniversary today. Take a minute today to think of him and of Kashmir, won't you?

Also, events at Srinagar, Delhi, London, New York, Minneapolis, and Singapore.

Incidental Footage: A Reading/Screening on the Politics of Personal Media

2011-12-04T21:22:00.001-08:00

Friday, 9 December 2011
7:30-10:30pm

Please join us for a screening of incidental footage: films shot by non-professionals, on non-professional devices, without any intentional staging, along with readings by:

PAUL EBENKAMP
GREG MCGARRY
MONICA MODY
CANDY SHUE
and
ALLI WARREN

Our aim is to explore the felt effects of a multitude equipped with the power of media-making. This will include screenings of:

OCCUPY FOOTAGE
ACCIDENTAL VIDEOS
SHOTS FROM THE HIP
TEQUILA SHOTS
WHATEVER YOU WANT

We love you and look forward to seeing you. If you can't make it, we expect you to skype in whatever you happen to be doing instead.

Always,

'Lectric Collective

On Art, Sacrifice, Ecstasy, and Love

2011-11-05T23:22:00.000-07:00

[I presented this at the &Now Conference in UC San Diego on Oct 15 as part of the "No Future" panel. Also posted here at Montevidayo.]

20,000 kg is approximately 44,092 pounds.

How many bags is that?

A few weeks ago, poet Tenzing Rigdol stole this much dirt from Tibet and flew it to Dharamsala in India, where over 80,000 Tibetans live in exile. Was this an act of desperation. Was this an act of art. Was this an act of love.

At the Mandeville Special Collections Library yesterday, I opened one of Alice Notley’s journals at random, and this was the first thing I read: “Love … is a great spirit, Socrates.”

“Love,” Bataille wrote, “expresses a need for sacrifice.” You could lose yourself in love. In the 16^th century, Meera drank poison out of her love for Krishna. Before her, Christ “eagerly endure[d] wounds, even death itself”: so as to serve the beloved, according to Erasmus. Erasmus also concluded that Christ’s torment itself makes him lovable, an object of desire. The erotic nature of sacrificial pain has been especially apparent to mystics, who are themselves made (like Frankenstein’s monster) out of an extravagance of love.

Sri Ramakrishna

Of course, love’s sacrifice is a gift, an offering.

Stuart Sovatsky writes, “…to not share love with others is to be deprived of sharing one’s essential nature with others and experiencing oneself thus[ly].”

I turn to Deleuze+Guattari for guidance and an occult offering—I am partial in my reading: “...the point where the assemblage changes, where the assemblage of love is superseded by an artistic assemblage...”. Or how about vice versa.

Art must be stunned by love. This is my mandate to art, and also a reminder to the self the shadow the artist. Only when art succumbs to love, is overcome with love; only when art gives itself to love and to loving: all that it is making and maiming and unmaking and snuffing out and birthing and repairing: only at that point of ecstatic, entranced, rapturous, extravagant love, does art start weeping, streaming tears and blood and shit and data and time and space all over its body—its face.

Extravagant joy and grief look pretty much alike. Death is the most sincere and extravagant form of love.

Interchangeable

Love and art, being interchangeable, have been used by mystics throughout the ages to induce transpersonal awareness. Alejandro Jodorowsky writes about his first meeting with Pachita, a Mexican sorceress whom he later assisted in her healing practice, where she asks him to read a poem that causes her to go into trance. H., a former psychiatric patient David Lukoff has written about, was summoned into madness when, in his own words, “various lines of verse began to filter into my mind”: by concentrating on the poem he wrote, H. “catapult[ed]” himself into what he called his “Mental Odyssey”. In Sufism, the term “mast” is used for those incapable of functioning normally in the everyday world: they are the god-intoxicated, the ones overcome with love for god.

Ecstatic writing itself, a shamanic act, kills the author, the egoic 'I', and this encounter gives 'birth' to a queer time: which lacks both a past and a future, which folds into itself, which resists linearity and consensus, where there is no hope—only consciousness, which can be conflated with space. This fetal art carries the impress of traumas and pleasures from its own perinatal rite of passage, and becomes a fatally transformative site for the reader who encounters it. As Kathy Acker put it, “If writing cannot and writing must change things, I thought to myself, logically of course, writing will change things magically.”

Ecstatic writing is a kind of channeling, and this is not a new idea so I won’t spend too much time on it except to remind you that the new Nobel Prize winner, Tomas Tranströmer, claimed to have actually become an insect in the woods, and that Hannah Weiner claimed to have actually seen words. Must we bifurcate the concepts and artifacts of shapeshifting and clairvoyance and mediumship from their live or archived experiences? Or can we go beyond the musty Cartesian splitting of mind and matter?

The ecstatic, the mystical, the parapsychological, the occult, the surreal—they all exceed legitimacy, locality, and reality, and can therefore only be understood as hallucinations, as kitsch, as gossip, as dubious, as degenerate, as generative. Art produced in or through or possessed by these states—para-art, shadowy art—is rightly disparaged, at least questionable: after all, we are talking of possession, a sort of hacking, a communication maybe of messages maybe of noise (depending on the hacker’s ethics and objectives), a mediation at the end of which the words, signs, codes that come through may destroy meaning or life as it has existed so far.

As possessions are wont to be, art can be compulsive. Of course, traditional neurology can only classify this compulsive creativity as a disorder, locating it in biology, in the brain. But if we live in a world which is living, where matter is conscious (as suggested by recent research say in astrobiology + theorized by certain cosmologies), then the conceptual category of, for instance, so-called hypergraphia should be discarded.

According to Mircea Eliade, shamans believe that every creation is an irruption of the sacred.

Regular Lucas

“The gods create out of an excess of power, an overflow of energy.” The new science of structured energetics offers slant support to the idea that art, that writing, is a structure of energy, and could be alive. Didn’t Wittgenstein say languages are “forms of life”? If it is alive, then art is not only of the animal, of the body, but art has a body. In her talk yesterday, Bhanu Kapil mentioned wanting to make sentences with nerves. Leslie Scalapino, in a letter to Alice Notley, talked about “the word as the tissue of your species’ soul”.

Bodies, especially moving bodies, carry knowledges and capacities for experience and expression very different from the mind, especially the mind as conceptualized by the dualistic Western paradigm. The mind cannot completely know the body. Kimerer LaMothe talks about the action of the dancing body (rather than its textuality) contributing to the study of religion.

The body of art is the movement of art, and is also the medium that allows flows, intensities, and artaudian particles to circulate or pass through. It is the Deleuzian Body Without Organs. Deleuze lists the following among bodies that have had “enough of organs and [want] to slough them off, or [lose] them”: the hypochondriac body, the paranoid body, the schizo body, the drugged body, the masochist body. But then he writes, “Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance? ... Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation.”

The BwO, the ecstatic body, is a body aware of nonduality, merged with the beloved, a hologram of the universe. In and as an ecstatic body, radically queer, always exceeding, now is art.

Poetry Mohalla launched

2011-11-04T23:35:00.000-07:00

Bol Hyderabad 90.4 FM, the campus community radio station of the University of Hyderabad, will be launching the Poetry Mohalla this weekend. Hosted by Sridala Swami, the Poetry Mohalla will feature contemporary and classical poetry and discussion around it. Airs on Saturdays from 3 to 3:30 p.m. (IST) with a repeat broadcast at 7 p.m. (IST) on Tuesdays.

To listen to the live webstream during show timings, click on the 'Listen Live' button at Bol Hyderabad.

Why I was smiling when I got home

2011-11-04T01:21:00.000-07:00

Creole Choir of Cuba.

On the train I think about performance & ritual.

10.20pm. No car in the parking lot. Car stolen?

Run into V & he is kindness personified & we talk about Buddhist chants until the police officer arrives & I call up the wrong Ali & we laugh hysterically because it's been a night of vanishments & strangers a surreal night & because there's a lesson or a gift somewhere in having your car stolen.

Three poems in Pyrta

2011-11-01T19:57:00.003-07:00

The Fall Issue #5 of Pyrta features three of my poems (including one written long ago about the stones in Delhi: the butch kind and the other kind), along with work by Aseem Kaul and other wonderful folks.

Generosity

2011-10-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

These are the gifts I gave myself today:

"As I keep myself I keep the whole." - Carolyn Myss

Isn't it funny how drying work can be? How to keep the soul moist as we work? In our dailiness?

Plagiarist, Thief, Faker

2011-10-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

A discussion on plagiarism in the context of Indian English poetry has been started by the poets Sumana Roy, Anindita Sengupta, Aruni Kashyap, Nabina Das and Nitoo Das here. I wonder how much of my resistance to their framing of the issue has been shaped by my encounters with America-land and the poems and discussions and theories it has brought me. Oh what a callow thought. All of it, of course. Where I’ve been is who I am – but I wonder if as an immigrant I’ll always retain a slight anxiety around my (inauthentic) influences? “On Stealing Beauty”, and this is the comment I left:

"I am curious about the anxieties that plagiarism brings up in artists. I think collage—the handloom emporium—is great as a method for writing poems, and no less legitimate than writing “original” poems. The question is: should the method be disclosed to the reader? Under what kind of dialogic conditions should any method be disclosed to the reader? Attribution I think is just one way in which literary influence can be disclosed as an agenda or method—we as writers/artists need to think beyond its limitations.

I recently saw someone use stanza/line breaks in a way I thought I had “invented” for my book Kala Pani which is coming out next year, and excerpts from which have been published in a couple of journals. For a second I felt proprietary, then shrugged. This is how lineages/lines of flight happen in poetry. Someone “makes” something and others “copy” it. At some point, it all gets mixed up in the belly of the poetry machine (like metaphors)—(or blown up)—and it doesn’t matter too much who was “first” except to masculine ideals (and structures) of literary scholarship.

While it is unethical that certain people are lifting off phrases from other people’s poetry and passing them off as their own, and sure, a “polite silence” does not seem to be an adequate response, I’m not comfortable with the discourse of private property aka capitalism that seems to underlie language such as “stolen lines”, “real thing”, and of course the allusion to copyright laws.

Instead of thinking of it as a “suffering”, are there new ways in which we can conceive of plagiarism—even when it does hurt our sense of the integrity of something we have lovingly created/collaged? How can we, as creative artists, engage creatively with the act of copying, even unethical copying, and show—lead by example on—what it means to engage with found texts? How can we extend generosity to second-hand texts?

For instance, can the plagiarized poem become a source text for a “new” poem? Or for many, many new poems?"

UPDATE: There's also a discussion on this going on at Montevidayo.

Spirituality: A Manifesto

2011-10-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

The first word/concept that comes to mind when I think of spirituality is openness, love. I suppose these can be seen as two different concepts, but to me, openness and love go hand in hand. A certain allowing is implied in both. A seeing, feeling of deep connection with all beings and non-beings; a sense of vastness, and oneness, and trust. A feeling of love with everything that is. Non-judgment, knowing that everything is a part of us, and we are a part of everything. That each of us is a spark of and can be the goodness. That goodness is the universal source.

Spirituality is also about the death of the ego to the extent that the ego operates by itself and for itself. It is about the ego learning to operate as an ancillary of spirit.

Spirituality is embodied spirit. The body (form) houses the soul and is thus a sacred container, but it is also the porous membrane between—the interface for—the soul and the material world. The human body is a reminder to us of our material incarnation that we cannot deny even as we move on the path of spirit. The breath—body breathing—moves life, moves spirit, and brings us back to life and spirit.

Spirituality is embrained: it’s about learning to discern right from wrong, and also about using the faculties of critical thinking as fluidly, fluently, as if they were spirit. They are.

Spirituality is play and celebration and holding the human emotions that arise in us. It is a willingness to observe the emotions and our lives and to continually interpret the information we get from them.

Living ethically and consuming consciously are a part of the picture, as is ensuring that justice is practiced.

Spirituality is alchemy. It emerges out of darkness. It is as dark as it is light. It is how the profane becomes a conduit for the sacred. It is vast energy that can change things. It is a giving away, a submitting, selflessness. We are only beginning to explore its potential, even though it wants every entity to reach its potential and to become what it truly is. It is a willingness to explore depths and heights. A willingness to hold what is found in the depths and heights with lightness and non-judgment and love, and also, if needed, with ferocity and strength and stubbornness. And humility.

Really, then, spirituality to me is the integration of body, mind, spirit; dark and light; yin and yang; the material and the spiritual; all those polarities we find so easy to construct. It is living from the heart; it is trying to live beyond duality.

Nick Demske's tour brings him to the Bay Area

2011-10-16T20:14:00.000-07:00

Nick Demske, Monica Mody, Zack Haber

Monday, 17 Oct 2011 @ 8pm

VENUE:

The Long Haul

3124 Shattuck Ave.

Berkeley, CA 94705

Nick Demske, M Kitchell, Monica Mody

Tuesday, 18 Oct 2011 @ 6pm

VENUE:

California Institute of Integral Studies, Room 565

1453 Mission Street

San Francisco, CA 94103

Bios:

NICK DEMSKE lives in Racine, Wisconsin and works at theRacine Public Library. His self-titled book was selected by Joyelle McSweeneyfor the Fence Modern Poets Series Award & published by Fence Books in 2010.He is a founder and editor of the online forum boo: a journal of terrificthings and curates the BONK! performance series in Racine.

ZACK HABER's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Moria,Everyday Genius, Boo: A Journal of Terrific Things, Inch, Plain Spoke and otherplaces. He published his first book, To Carry You Being, in 2009.

M KITCHELL is the editor & publisher of LIES/ISLE andSolar Luxuriance. He is a contributor to HTMLGiant. A collection of shortnarratives, Slow Slidings, will be out in 2012 on Blue Square Press. He livesin San Francisco and daydreams about endless labyrinthine architecture andghosts.

MONICA MODY's first book is forthcoming from 1913 Press in2012. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Notre Dame where she wonthe 2010-11 Sparks Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in East-West Psychologyat CIIS and blogs at Montevidayo.

Excerpt from "The Love Book"

2011-09-11T09:14:00.001-07:00

An excerpt from my work-in-progress, provisionally called THE LOVE BOOK, is up at RealPoetik. First show from this project, so I'm excited!

Poems in Compost

2011-09-07T00:35:00.003-07:00

I have five poems out in the first issue of Compost (which has a grandly decaying cover) and have been meaning to put up pdf's of those. Soon!

Review of Tamiko Beyer's "bough breaks"

2011-09-07T00:03:00.001-07:00

Here is a review I did of Tamiko Beyer's lovely chapbook a short while back for Lantern Review.

On Influence

2011-07-31T13:02:00.002-07:00

I have a post up on Montevidayo: (My Influence This Week) Wanted: Schizoanalyst For Me & My Babies

bootschrift out in [nether]

2011-06-26T19:17:00.005-07:00

"bootschrift" has been published in the new issue of nether [fortnight #9 + print #3].

Also, here's a video of me reading the poem at Artpost Gallery, South Bend, in March.

Free Binayak Sen Graffiti

2011-04-05T16:22:00.001-07:00

It gave me such a rush to see the pictures of these graffiti springing up everywhere in Delhi. More pictures on Montevidayo.

check it out, check it out

2011-03-15T16:49:00.000-07:00

There's a Friends & Neighbors feature about Travel & Risk on the Lantern Review blog! Thank you, Iris & LR.

A Swamp, A Cult, A Happening - Monica Mody, Jen Stockdale, CJ Waterman @ Artpost

2011-03-09T15:48:00.001-08:00

Welcome to the one reading/performance where this is all possible & this is all a mystery.

Sunday Mar 13, 2pm
Artpost Gallery, 216 W. Madison, South Bend IN

Monica Mody's work has been published in West Wind Review, apocryphal text, horse less review, Cannot Exist, LIES/ISLE, Wasafiri, Pratilipi, and nthposition, among other journals. Most recently, excerpts from her manuscript Kala Pani featured in Boston Review Poet's Sampler. She is the author of a chapbook, Travel & Risk, from Wheelchair Party, and has a book forthcoming in Fall 2012 from 1913 Press. Monica received her MFA in poetry from the University of Notre Dame last year and stayed back in Mishawaka for the 2010 postgraduate Nicholas Sparks fellowship.

Jen Stockdale is a student in the MFA program at Notre Dame and she teaches at IUSB. Her poems have appeared in alice blue, Salt Hill, Hot Metal Bridge, and elsewhere. A small chapbook, Now Puppy Teeth, is forthcoming from What to Us (Press).

C.J. Waterman hails from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution and host to the world’s longest baseball game. He is currently a second year MFA student in Poetry at Notre Dame. He produces a small chapbook series of fine literature called Wheelchair Party. Some of his poems can be found in Lamination Colony. Outside of poetry his interests include divination, walking, and children's cereal.

Get your poetry on!

$5 donation at the door.

New things

2011-02-15T12:37:00.001-08:00

1. My post on Jodorowsky, Meera, and the victims of art at Montevidayo.

2. Here's the Boston Review poet's sampler where Joyelle McSweeney introduced my work.

3. Travel & Risk (and the other Wheelchair Party chapbooks) are now available as e-books, free!

West Wind Review

2011-01-30T19:17:00.001-08:00

West Wind Review 2011 now available.

featuring Chris Alexander, Shane Allison, Brian Ang, Joe Atkins, derek beaulieu, Steve Benson, Gregory Betts, Mark Boccard, Sommer Browning, Edmond Caldwell, Dereck Clemons, Bryan Coffelt, Shanna Compton, Alan Davies, Luke Degnan, Tiffany Denman, Buck Downs, Patrick Durgin, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Micah Freeman, Kristen Gallagher, Drew Gardner, Angela Genusa, Nada Gordon, Plynn Gutman, Nadxieli Nieto Hall, Mike Hauser, Emily Hockaday, Janis Butler Holm, Paul Hoover, Uyen Hua, Jake Kennedy, Rodney Koeneke, David Lau, Emily Liebowitz, Jonathan Lohr, Travis Macdonald, Alana Madison, Adam J Maynard, Rebecca Mertz, Sharon Mesmer, Monica Mody, Adam Moorad, Rosiere Moseley, Christian Nagler, Chris Nealon, Jessea Perry, Adam Roberts, Steve Roggenbuck, Andrew Sage, Estee Schwartz, James Sherry, Josh Stanley, Erin Steinke, Christina Strong, Cole Tucker-Walton, Joshua Ware, Jeanine Webb, Elisabeth Workman, Timothy Yu, and Carolyn Zaikowski.

Editor: Sarah Cunningham
Faculty Editor: K. Silem Mohammad

Updates

2011-01-25T22:22:00.000-08:00

1. Amitava Kumar wrote an op-ed in the Indian Express after contacting Aqueel Shatir. The unabridged version (before the words were counted) is here.

2. My work features in the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of the Boston Review Poet's Sampler, with an absolutely wonderful introduction by Joyelle McSweeney. I'm thrilled! (Though in the print issue they did leave out one of the two dingbats marking off the three excerpts.)

A version of Raunaq Afroz's censored words

2010-12-22T15:49:00.004-08:00

Narendra Modi's Song
(Chorus by Gujarat Urdu Sahitya Academy)

Who finished off Urdu?
Who finished off Urdu in the State?
Who had a scheme?
Who premeditated a scheme?
Who played a game?
Who played such a naked game?
Who shamed humanity?
Who shamed all of humanity?
Who instigated incidents?
Who instigated terrible incidents?
Who created an atmosphere of terror?
Who created an atmosphere of terror in the whole country?
Who had?
May good come their way.
Who did?
May good come their way.
Who?
May good come their way.

Communal riots
(shame, shame)
Barbarity
(shame, shame)
Looting-pillaging
(shame, shame)
Murders-massacres
(shame, shame)
Rapes
(shame, shame)
Arson
(shame, shame)
Genocide of the minority
(shame, shame)
Genocide
(shame, shame)
(shame, shame)
(shame, shame)

Translation from Urdu quoted in the Indian Expess and by me

Calling all poets: "May good come the way of Narendra Modi"

2010-12-21T20:43:00.007-08:00

Ho Narendra Modi ka ke iqtedar men aate hi us ne is riyasat se Urdu ka safaya hi kar diya, Modi ne sirf itne par he iktefa nahin kiya, balke 2002 men ek soche-samjhe mansoobe ke tehat poore Gujarat men firqawaranh fasadat aur haiveaniyat ka wo nanga khel khela ke poori insaniyat he sharmsar ho kar rah gaee. Har taraf loot mar, qatl o gharatgiri, ismat dari, aatish zani aur aqliyati nasl kushi jaisi sangeen wardaar karva kar oos ne poore mulk men khauf o hirass paid kar diya tha.

[background]

Vivek Narayanan asks: "How could we repeat (exact words would be important) and transmit it so that those who were trying to block this sentence from being spoken would be forced to hear it every turn?"

How to repeat & keep looped & circulated the very art/text that has been censored; how to make it perform its own uncensoring?

Think facebook statuses, twitter backgrounds, blog headers, youtube videos, improv readings on the metro/local train/buses, armbands, notebook covers, painted t-shirts, pervasive graffiti.

Annie Zaidi suggests a creative response using "that one long sentence - either part of it or the essence of it - in our own poems"; an e-book freely downloadable; copies sent to the Gujarat Urdu Sahitya Academy. Peter Griffin has offered to design it. Please participate or engage in conversations here on facebook. If you're not on facebook, email me for more information.

haz speech? haz art? will censor.

2010-12-21T20:16:00.002-08:00

Even as the Smithsonian's sponsors are insisting it restore David Wojnarowicz's video "A Fire in My Belly", the Gujarat Urdu Sahitya Academy has asked poet Aquaal Shatir to return money he was given to publish his anthology, where the following words appeared in an opinion piece:

"Ho Narendra Modi ka ke iqtedar men aate hi us ne is riyasat se Urdu ka safaya hi kar diya, Modi ne sirf itne par he iktefa nahin kiya, balke 2002 men ek soche-samjhe mansoobe ke tehat poore Gujarat men firqawaranh fasadat aur haiveaniyat ka wo nanga khel khela ke poori insaniyat he sharmsar ho kar rah gaee. Har taraf loot mar, qatl o gharatgiri, ismat dari, aatish zani aur aqliyati nasl kushi jaisi sangeen wardaar karva kar oos ne poore mulk men khauf o hirass paid kar diya tha."

Translated into English (quoted from Indian Express):

"May good come the way of Narendra Modi, who has finished off Urdu in this State on coming to power and did not stop at that, but under a well thought-out plan, (he) played such a naked game of communal riots and barbarism which put to shame the entire humanity. By spreading terrific incidents of loot, murder and mayhem, rape, burning and genocide of the minority community, he created an atmosphere of terror in the whole country."

Shatir's 'crime' prima facie is that he faciliated anti-Narendra Modi remarks, making it 'desirable' to censor his anthology in order to protect the 'clean' image of Gujarat's Chief Minister. And, perhaps, to honour the CM's followers' protective instincts towards the CM.

"He has been told that the piece in question amounted to showing the Chief Minister in a poor light, with a potential to “spread misgivings about him in the society”."

Enough here already to foam at the mouth, no?, if you've been one of the many people appalled that Modi won the elections after the Gujarat genocide, and that he's still in power, and that the media and the corporations (of course) seem to have forgotten all about 2002 and present him as a demi-god and economic messiah.

But of course, Shatir's real 'crime' could be something else entirely. The Indian Express report ends:

"Interestingly, the notice was issued after Shatir filed a slew of RTI queries about the functioning and state of accounts of the Urdu Sahitya Academy, which according to him, reeked of many irregularities."

Such reprehensible manipulativeness, if this is true. It also confirms that there is something deeply wrong with Gujarat's 'love' for Modi.

a brief & straightforward guide on how to collaborate

2010-12-21T07:46:00.000-08:00

I'm having fun making a collaboration with Jen Stockdale. It's an amazing dance, thick with fleet arguments we masticate, reject (spit out) or undercut in quick succession. Although I'm not sure if Jen views this project in terms of argument making! Maybe it's just my inner disputant disputing away. It's confusing. We're also putting up a performance, though maybe not the same performance. A performance of hysterics of the body. A performance of the discourse of discomfort. Also a performance that has a live monstrous audience.

Barbara Jane Reyes' Diwata

2010-12-20T09:05:00.001-08:00

My review of Reyes' new book Diwata is now up on the Lantern Review blog. Her Poeta en San Francisco is one of my favorite books, and it was a pleasure to review Diwata.

Slash Slash Burn

2010-12-19T01:06:00.003-08:00

Can't get Aasif Mandvi's Today's Special out of my head, not because it totally works for me as a movie but because its sous-chef character, who works in a haute-cuisine Manhattan restaurant and lives in a swank Manhattan apartment, has parents--no, more relevantly to the film, a father, who runs a failing Tandoori restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens.

It is how this basic premise is resolved in the movie that I don't care for much. (Of course, I don't care all that much for father's-legacy-and-son sagas either, but, for the sake of argument, let's say I'm okay with all the patrimonial bonding I'm about to take you through.) But look at the premise itself. There is the American Dream, the immigrant dream. It may change as newcomers to the US of A become old-timers, not necessarily for the worse and not always in a linear direction. Does the Dream/dream possess/infect their children?

The glam successful assimilated first-generation desi may not be found taking photographs of/with the Statue of Liberty, like his father did upon first arriving in the US a generation ago, but he is just one remove away from the photographs, from framing then mounting them on the wall. The photographs of his father, Statue of Liberty in the background, don't represent for him the same Dream/dream as for his father. The photographs encode for him a linked Dream/dream, a chained Dream/dream, a Dream/dream at a remove.

So Manhattan links up to Queens and haute-cuisine restaurant links up to Tandoori restaurant. I find these links productive. Montage-vision, which will produce a more real image of diasporic realities.

Kashmir issue delayed

2010-12-18T09:25:00.001-08:00

We have received some incredible submissions for the Pratilipi special issue on Kashmir, but things have been unfortunately, unavoidably delayed.

Thank you so much to everyone who sent the call around, and to everyone who submitted. I will keep you updated. Meanwhile, do you know of The #Kashmir Daily? The current headlines are about WikiLeaks' exposé of India condoning torture in Kashmir. Even as WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange continue to get persecuted around the world with threats, smear campaigns, made-up charges and denial of financial access. The world is crazy.

Body Talk

2010-12-06T10:30:00.003-08:00

Anjali Wason has authored and put together an amazing resource for adolescent girls grappling with the complexity of sexuality and growing up in India. I contributed advice and tips in the section on sexual orientation. The gorgeous cover has been designed by Amruta Patil, who also did the illustrations inside.

::documentation:: 22 Nov 2010

2010-11-24T14:16:00.004-08:00

SETTING: An open mic night for graduate students in a private Catholic university in a midwestern American town. The lineup of 9 includes some wonderful singers and musicians. I come on at the 6th spot.

{PERFORMANCE}

OBJECTIVES:

Diversion. A revolutionary orientation. Failure. To trouble the open mic. To turn the open mic into an experimental laboratory. To double the open mic, and to other the open mic. To examine if the open mic means the same thing to the other as it does to me. To chop up the open mic into asymmetrical bodily pieces. Like a Dixie Band. To perpetuate the confusion with which the universalizing, homogenizing gaze gazes outward. Or cross-eyed. To stage a happening. To transform the audience into an accidental art collective. To interrogate the audience's expectations (from the performer; from itself). And desires. To interrogate the performer's expectations (from the audience; from herself). And desires. To renege on the pact they say the performer makes with the the audience. To invoke new pacts. To invite the possibility of an event at the end of which the audience and the performers /co-participants/ leave the site of performance with art-objects marked by presence, prophecy, and absence.

ACTIONS:

1. I distribute index cards and pencils.

2. I ask the audience (25-28 people) to write down whatever it is they would never ever want to see in an open mic.

3. I ask them to pass their card to the person on their left.

4. I say that what they hold in their hands is what they will be going home with. But if they don't like what their index card says, they could exchange it for one of the following 4 options:

Great handsome lilies of despair.
The white curve on black background we call thought.
Carrier pigeons.
Emergency kisses.

[Andre Breton made 4 each of these items available to me to distribute as I saw fit. I distributed them as index cards textuated in black, blue, pink, and green inks.]

5. Five people come forward to exchange their index cards.

6. My tally at the end of the performance:

Great handsome lilies of despair (3 nos.)
The white curve on black background we call thought (3 nos.)
Carrier pigeons (3 nos.)
Emergency kisses (2 nos.)
An execution (particularly a bloody one) (1 nos.)
Competitive pooping (1 nos.)
A land shark riding an armored bear reciting poetry (1 nos.)
A closed sign (1 nos.)
Nude ribbon dancing (1 nos.)

Winner of the photo look-alike contest

2010-11-16T10:50:00.001-08:00

The question was: Do you look like Audrey Horne or just act like her?

Our winner: Geeta Bali.

spud poetry manifesto

2010-11-14T23:13:00.001-08:00

There's already too much potato-ness we invest the potato with while cognitive-constructing the potato; why should we make a potato-potato when we can make all those other fabulous things with potato?

no smoking, got it?

2010-11-14T22:45:00.001-08:00

Just saw Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking and am blown away by it. This is theatre of the absurd. This is kryptonite black humor laced with whimsy. This is surreal. This is a nightmare you emerge from only to find minutes later that you've just been in another nightmare (and so on). This is a guy addicted to smoking, and Baba Bengali's Prayogshala (laboratory) which promises to change his smoking habits (and his life, body, and soul). If you are confused on any point, Baba Bengali will explain all. Smokers will hate this movie or they will laugh at the deliciousness of its madhouse extreme-vision.

If you find the references to Hitler and to gas chambers 'tasteless' or 'gratuitous', I would ask you to think about them allegorically, the tenor being the viciousness of morality-enforcers in contemporary India. Not that such a reading is necessary for the film to work itself inside you. In fact the symbolic in Kashyap's movies insists on breaking away from completing its meaning (I'm thinking also, and especially, of Kashyap's Gulaal, which generated much consternation about the 'meaning' of the ardhanarishwar; hint: he's a counterpart to the talkative fool played by Piyush Mishra, but he's also a delightful repository of non-utilitarianism). Such transgressions are exactly why Kashyap's films are so compelling. I hope he never stops not conforming to the industry that is Bollywood!

Call for Submissions: Pratilipi Special Issue on Kashmir

2010-10-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

I'm curating a special issue on Kashmir for Pratilipi. The immediate provocation of course is the cycle of killings and protests that has gripped the Valley since June. I've been wondering: Can art - along with what we know as analysis and activism - analyze, activate, respond? Can art change the discourse? Challenge it? At least introduce a ripple in it?

ALTERNATE CALL:

If something can change a dream, or a nightmare, art can. The dream life of art can take us outside the most relentless of curfews and also to its most relentless inside. Every stroke of a pen, a brush, on a keyboard can wrap inside itself a stone which will heal a scar, stop violence, and bring what's disappeared back. Do you believe? We must believe.

Your mandate for investigation: Kashmir.

Inviting poetry, fiction, non-fiction, genre-crossings, translations, images, artwork, sound, video, and other art practices. Entries are welcome in English, Hindi, Kashmiri, Urdu, and other languages.

Please consider submitting your work, or forwarding the call to people who you think would be interested. Not every entry might find place in the magazine, but the idea is to find other/multiple ways in which we can present/display the art and mobilize it.

Submit to artforkashmir@gmail.com by November 20, with your name and a brief bio.

HLR #8

2010-10-19T19:39:00.000-07:00

Outrageous work in the new issue of horse less review by Graeme Bezanson, Jessica Bozek, Christophe Casamassima, Juliet Cook, Tyler Flynn Dorholt, Kate Durbin, Richard Froude, Nathan Hauke, Michael Hennessey, Brian Howe, Russell Jaffe, Kirsten Jorgenson, Megan Kaminski, Mary Kasimor, Kirk Keen, Becca Klaver, Krystal Languell, Dolly Lemke, Rebecca Loudon, Erin McNellis, Monica Mody, Danielle Pafunda, Andrea Rexilius, Susan Scarlata, Chad Scheel, Mike Sikkema, Dan Louis Singer, Jordan Stempleman, Maureen Thorson, Megan Volpert, Joshua Ware, Samuel Day Wharton, and Joseph Wood.

S S Prasad's nanopoetry

2010-10-05T08:56:00.001-07:00

I have a review of S S Prasad's nanopoems, included in the book 100 Poems, on the Lantern Review Blog.

Updates, updates

2010-09-23T15:33:00.000-07:00

apocryphaltext has just published my screentext "The Menace of the Inversely Touted Universal Deprivation".
The issue also features work by Pak Nichols, and by Ofelia Hunt, Joseph P. Wood, John F. Buckley & Martin Ott, Tim Earley, Christiana Baik, Simon Perchik, Pak Nichols & Hank Lazer, Erika Ostergaard, Jeffrey Side and Jake Berry, John M. Bennett, Keith Moul, and Raymond Farr. What a treat.

There was an 'impossible' performance of a part of this work on Oct 1 last year at the Lula's Cafe, with my Notre Dame MFA buddies taking on speaking roles, of the different structural elements of the text as also its characters. Taking the performance outside the text - the impossibility outside the page - at least the perverseness - was great fun.

Kala Pani, meanwhile, made it to the semifinals in Switchback Books' Gatewood Prize 2010 (judged by Cathy Park Hong). Jennifer Tamayo's the hanging cloud of read mistakes won, and it seems fantastic - read an excerpt on Action Yes!

I'll be posting reviews and essays on the Lantern Review blog soon, as a staff writer. Will be good to get back to some disciplined critical writing!

SURFACES / 6 Younger Poets & Chapbook Launch

2010-08-03T00:52:00.007-07:00

Sarai-CSDS City As Studio & Sarai Media Lab Presents:

SURFACES / 6 Younger Poets & Chapbook Launch

Monday August 9 - Sarai Cafe - 6 PM

Featuring readings in Hindi and English by:

Geet Chaturvedi
Giriraj Kiradoo
Monica Mody
Nabina Das
Nitoo Das
Rahul Soni
Vyomesh Shukla

(Event arranged in collaboration with Pratilipi, a bilingual online literary magazine.)

The evening will also include a short discussion around innovation in poetry editing and publishing and launch of a special limited edition chapbook, made together with the visual artists of Sarai's City As Studio fellowship, featuring some of the poems that will be read.

*About the readers:*

Poet and fiction writer Geet Chaturvedi has published five books including two translations. He is Editor (Magazines), Dainik Bhaskar.

Poet and translator Giriraj Kiradoo co-edits the bilingual journal Pratilipi.

Born in Ranchi, Monica Mody just received her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Notre Dame where she won the 2010 Nicholas Sparks Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Wasafiri, Pratilipi, nthposition and elsewhere.

Nabina Das's first novel, Footprints in the Bajra, was published this year by Cedar Books. She is a poet, fiction writer and India editor for the literary journal Danse Macabre.

Nitoo Das teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her first collection, Boki, was published by Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, in September 2008.

Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator "of no fixed address". He co-edits the bilingual journal Pratilipi and works with Writer's Side among other things.

Vyomesh Shukla has published a poetry collection and is editor of a magazine, Samas.

Writing workshops at Ranchi

2010-07-06T00:47:00.000-07:00

I'm conducting two summer writing workshops at the International Library and Cultural Centre, Ranchi.

Always Old, Always New (age group 14-18 yrs): 7-8 July
Poetry in the World (age group 18-21 yrs): 9-10 July

Call ILCC at 0651-2331524 to register.

Non-fiction/India/English

2010-07-02T09:25:00.001-07:00

Uncle P asked me to recommend few recent non-fiction books from India. This is that list. He and I have had some rousing discussions on politics and culture in the past, so I'm sure he would find some of these quite provocative. I intend to provoke. I've read six books from this list and two are on my reading shelf. The rest I want to read.

1. Amitava Kumar, Evidence of Suspicion
2. Annie Zaidi, Known Turf
3. Arundhati Roy, Field Notes on Democracy
4. Baby Halder, A Life Less Ordinary
5. Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night
6. Harsh Mander, Fear and Forgiveness
7. Ira Pande, Diddi
8. Manjima Bhattacharya, ed., Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of India
9. Maria Aurora Couto, Goa: A Daughter’s Story
10. Maya Sharma, Loving Women
11. Minal Hajratwala, Leaving India
12. Namita Devidayal, The Music Room
13. Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West
14. Satnam, Jangalnama: Travels in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone

Parallel

2010-06-24T03:22:00.000-07:00

Am at Ranchi right now, the birthtown I pretty much left twelve years ago. Am hoping to conduct three writing workshops with three different age groups at the International Library and Cultural Centre in July - if there are enough sign-ups. Have my fingers crossed. Am pretty excited about teaching at Ranchi, especially at ILCC, having spent many nerd-hours at and instigated by the collection at the British Library, ILCC's earlier avatar. It's been educative trying to determine whether or not to charge fees for these workshops - if I conduct them for free, how seriously will the Ranchi "gentry" take them? If we charge even a nominal fee, it might make them unaffordable for some young people - and I would very much like to circumvent this. My suggestion of a sliding scale is apparently not feasible here. Let's see how the library words the workshop announcement.

Meanwhile, the Raavan-bashing by so-called movie reviewers has left me pretty distressed about the standards of movie reviewing in India. All right, it is possible that something which works for me does not work for you - but shouldn't you at least try to find out why the film has been made - what is it trying to say - instead of calling it a "disaster" just because it is saying/doing something you didn't want or expect? Raavan is most definitely not interested in social realism - it is interested in style and spectacle, but more so in the seams and seaminess of the myths and meta-literature that people our imagination with ten-headed monsters and god-like heroes. It wants to put these myths and archetypes in crisis and show how, irrespective of head-count, Monster and God often turn into each other. It wants these crises to conduct us to the insides of a political landscape whose values allow the heroic Indian State to play a central role in perpetuating injustices on its land.

Chapbooked

2010-05-16T09:55:00.005-07:00

My chapbook, Travel & Risk, was just brought out by the Wheelchair Party Press, started by young and awesome editor/poet CJ Waterman. This little book - like Danielle Bowen's When We're Alone which is the first title published by Wheelchair Party - has a screen-printed cover, illustrated and designed by CJ himself, and is quite gorgeous.

Photos by Tasha Matsumoto

Reading by Zachary Schomburg & Johannes Goransson - one night only!

2010-04-26T18:27:00.000-07:00

Wednesday April 28, 2010 @ 6:15
106 O'Shaughnessy, University of Notre Dame

Johannes Göransson was born in Sweden, but has lived around the US for several years. He is the author of: Dear Ra (Starcherone, 2008), Pilot (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008) and A New Quarantine Will Take My Place (Apostrophe Books, 2007)—and the chapbook Majakovskij en tragedy (Dos Press, 2008). He is also the translator of: Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonsson, Gingerbread Monuments by Victor Johansson & Klara Kallstrom, Remainland: Selected Poems by Aase Berg and Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland. He is the co-editor of Action Books and the online journal Action, Yes. He teaches at Notre Dame.

Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and several chapbooks including, most recently, Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), a collaboration with Emily Kendal Frey. His poetry translations from the Russian of Andrei Sen-Senkov are in The Agriculture Reader, Aufgabe, Harp & Altar, Circumference and others. He has co-edited Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine since 2003. He was born in Omaha in 1977, the year of the snake, but he now lives in Portland, OR.

post_moot notes

2010-04-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

Q: Is it really necessary to make such abominations?
A: It is absolutely necessary to make such abominations.

from "Meat Out of the Eater": a mixed-media installation by Lara Glenum/Josef Horacek/Jordan Dalton

post_moot notes

2010-04-23T14:26:00.001-07:00

There's been extraordinary things happening at post_moot! I'm cross-posting this at their blog here.

Ryan Downey, Daniel Citro, and I presented papers yesterday on the first panel (we called it "[INSERTMASHUPWORDHERE]: THE POETICS OF FAILURE or Are You Failing Well Today Dear?"), arriving in Oxford, Ohio with less than thirty minutes to go for our panel (several misadventures later and very late) and found ourselves in a packed hall, much to our surprise. We had expected just a few early comers. The audience, much of it comprised of innocent undergrads, were exposed to a fatal mix of love, sex and dhokha (death, desecration, bullets, failed collages, mangled text-bodies, mangled languages etc, for those not into bollywood) but I think most of them survived.

Holly Bass performed after us: I loved her "vocollage" where she sampled and spasmed between various songs. During the q+a we were getting somewhere, exhausting the audience with rambling replies and trying to dissect the expectations that get set up for "narrative"/"straight" versus "abstract"/"experimental" writing. Then we ran out of time.

Most of the poets/performers from UK/Europe got stranded because of the ash-cloud situation, so people have been stepping in last minute to fill in. During the 5pm panel, Cathy Wagner read instead of Luke Roberts (she also read out some of the work he'd emailed her) and Stan Apps, along with Miami University MA in Poetry candidate, Jacqui Kari. I love Cathy's performances. I can listen to her songs many many times.

Mairead Byrne's presentation on color, chromatic homogeneity, legibility, heiroglyphic systems etc was interesting, though I can't see myself deviating from black fonts-on-white. I wonder if she'd be open to the idea of color as fashion as excess?

Also, last night, a fascinating reading by the flarf poets (a word we dared not speak). What I remember: Adeena Karasick's preternatural and sexy verbal fireworks, K. Lorraine Graham applying her mascara onstage, K. Silem Mohammad's reconstitution of Shakespearean sonnets in perfect iambic pentameter, Mel Nichols's superpoooke, Rod Smith making us laugh a lot. It was a very long day.

at post_moot right now

2010-04-23T13:14:00.000-07:00

post_moot

poetry + performance: a convocation

featuring; papers, live writing, poets theater, sound art, talk-based poetics, voice art, physical theater and digital text, collaboration, polylingualism, lyric meditations, translation, poetry readings, writing interventions, sound poetry, visual poetry, eco-poetics, text-based installation, bookateria, late night readings, multimedia and a lot more besides that.

work by:

Maria Auxiliadora Alvarez • Stan Apps • Oana Avasilichioaei • Mike Basinski • Holly Bass • John M. Bennett • Black Took Collective • Sean Bonney • Tammy Brown • Mairéad Byrne • Shá Cage • cris cheek • Daniel Citro • A.M.J. Crawford • Jordan Dalton • Maria Damon • Ian Davidson • Ryan Downey • Alan Golding • K. Lorraine Graham • Duriel Harris • Carla Harryman • Jeff Hilson • Jen Hofer • Josef Horacek • William R. Howe • Jade Hudson • Christine Hume • Peter Jaeger • Mark Jeffery • Bonnie Jones • Pierre Joris • KBD Sound Collective • Adeena Karasick • Brian Kincaid • A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz • Jose Luna • Dawn Lundy-Martin • Mel Nichols • Hoa Nguyen • Chris Mann • Monica Mody • K. Silem Mohammad • Laura Moriarty • Judd Morrissey • Erin Moure • Jason Nelson • Mel Nichols • Tom Orange • Jessica Ponto • Luke Roberts • Jaime Robles • Ric Royer • Linda Russo • Lisa Samuels • Standard Schaefer • Jonathan Skinner • Danny Snelson • Todd Seabrook • Jessica Smith • Rod Smith • Kate Sopko • Rodrigo Toscano • Lawrence Upton • Chris Vitiello • Catherine Wagner • Mark Wallace • Dana Ward • Barrett Watten • Brian Whitener • Steve Willey • Tyrone Williams • Ronaldo Wilson

April 22-25, 2010
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio

the post _ moot collective (Maria Auxiliadora Alvarez, Tammy Brown, cris cheek, William R. Howe, Cathy Wagner)

two cool events in south bend this week

2010-04-19T12:28:00.003-07:00

Both these amazing events are happening on Friday, April 23, and I'll miss them both since I'll be at postmoot. But if you're around, you definitely shouldn't!

*

At 1pm

A Panel on "The Legacy of Futurism on Contemporary Small Press Publishing"
Matvei Yankelevich (Ugly Duckling Presse); Sandra Doller (1913, a journal of forms); Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney (Action Books and Action, Yes)
Pasquerilla Center 107, University of Notre Dame

"Except in struggle, there is no more beauty." - Manifesto of Futurism, 1909. Four guest editors will discuss the dynamic legacy of Italian and Russian Futurist publishing, print making, typography, and design on contemporary small press publishing in America. The invited presses reflect divergent yet complementary takes on Futurist models and publish in a wide range of formats and materials, from letterpress broadsides to artists' books and chapbooks to glossy journals, perfect-bound volumes and online magazines.

*

At 7:30pm

A Poetry Reading by Matvei Yankelevich, Sandra Doller, and Ben Doller
322 E. Colfax Ave Apt 207, South Bend

Matvei Yankelevich is a translator of things Russian, and a writer of things English. He is the translator and editor of TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook, 2007). He is a co-translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP, 2006). His own writing has appeared in various journals, and he is the author of a long poem, THE PRESENT WORK, presented as a chapbook by Palm Press, as well as the book, Boris by the Sea, published by Octopus Books. He teaches at Hunter College and the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.

Sandra Doller (née Miller) is the author of Oriflamme (Ahsahta, 2005) and the founder & editrice of 1913 magazine and press. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and lives way out west with her man, Ben Doller (né Doyle) and their pups Ronald Johnson and Kiki Smith. This is her second book.

Ben Doller (né Doyle) is the author of two previous books of poems: Radio, Radio (LSU Press, 2001, seleced for the 2000 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets by Susan Howe), FAQ: (Ahsahta Press, 2009). Doller co-edits the Kuhl House Contemporary Poets series from the University of Iowa Press and was recently hired as Assistant Professor in George Mason University's MFA program in Creative Writing. He lives with his lady, Sandra Doller, and their animals.

Sparks Prize!

2010-04-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

My manuscript Kala Pani has won the 2010 Nicholas Sparks Prize, a postgraduate year-long fellowship at University of Notre Dame's Creative Writing Program. The judge, Shelley Jackson, wrote:

"Kala Pani is vastly energetic, goofy and fierce; fantastic and topical. I love how stories sprout, split, and multiply amidst the slippage of sense in its formally various passages, and how politics and media mingle with its grotesquely physical and comically/poignantly anthropomorphic trees, ducks and beans. Something desperate, wonderful and slightly unhinged emerges from the cross-currents."

Wow. Overwhelmed and totally grateful.

The Double @ LIES/ISLE

2010-04-05T10:01:00.001-07:00

13 ARTISTS HAVE CREATED 13 TEXTS THAT RELATE TO OR EMBODY A THEMATIC SENSE OF "THE DOUBLE." THESE LITERARY ARTISTS INCLUDE:

NIKOLINA NEDELJKOV
MEGHAN LAMB
PAUL CUNNINGHAM
VERNON FRAZER
CHANGMING YUAN
MONICA MODY
MITCH PATRICK
ADAM MOORAD
LOUIS BURY
G. SAND TRANSLATED BY J. TIAN
M. KITCHELL
DAVID RYLANCE
AND
JIMMY CHEN

THESE TEXTS ARE NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE, FREE FOR ALL, READY TO SHOW YOU YOURSELF. PLEASE VISIT HTTP://LIESISLE.COM

FURTHER INFORMATION:

Literature: Influence, Echoes, and Systems / Influence of Systems on Literature (as Echoes)

LIES / ISLE is a journal dedicated to expanding the domain of experimental literature. While acknowledging that our work is influenced by the systems under which it operates, we also believe that it possesses the agency to affect change. From an editorial point of view, we contextually echo the history of the avant-garde, looking for pieces that approach their subjects through new aesthetic strategies.

To this end, LIES / ISLE welcomes submissions that pay particular attention to form or the hybridization of genre, including but not limited to conceptual writing, visual fiction and poetry, and works that deal with the space between static and time-based elements--conscious experimentation that subverts the idea of the homogenized system [-- a system that underlines not only the state of contemporary literature, but also the system that undermines contemporary life in general].

more on michael jackson, androgyny

2010-03-21T16:01:00.002-07:00

I had lunch with the Erskine Peters fellows on Friday and we obviously talked about Michael Jackson. These guys will be discussing the life and legacy of MJ on Thursday, March 25, at 6pm at the Eck Visitors Center (Univ of Notre Dame), and it sounds like it's going to be fun!

Drawing by Free Lauren Marsella

When the question of MJ's "gender confusion" came up, Marques Redd reminded us that androgyny has had religious and ritual uses in many traditions (of course! ardhanarishvar!) including the Western one: the androgyne in platonic thought was a figure of inner harmony, gaining power through the union of two sexes. Jackson, with his sense (I almost said "intuitive" before "sense" but stopped myself - I don't want to suggest a lack of reason) for the mythological/dramatic was almost certainly going for androgyny's symbolic power. (Redd will be talking about some of the iconography in MJ's videos, thankfully without suggesting that occult symbols prove he was a member of some secret fraternity. I'm intrigued also by the ways in which Jackson's mythological awareness and aesthetic shaped not just his work and image, but also how he constructed his relationship to the world. That's the fangirl in me, yes!)

Of course, the figure of Michael Jackson set into circulation multiple meanings, and its erotics hinged simultaneously on the numinous and the monstrous. I'm writing a paper right now drawing connections between Michael Jackson, Frankenstein's monster, Hoffmann's Sandman, and Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks.

Androgyny, Green Slime, Decadence

2010-03-17T13:52:00.002-07:00

Reading this review of Howl’s Moving Castle supplied much grist for this post: the reviewer Stephanie Zacharek claims that Howl, the hero of the movie, is “sexless”, while I had found him to be a fascinating and erotically charged figure. Zacharek links Howl’s “asexuality” to his androgynous appearance (and resemblance to Michael Jackson) – at first surprising me with her apparent ignorance of the (historical) relationship between queer desires (and aesthetics) and the androgynous body.

I'd been similarly startled when someone had quibbled with my description of a 'character' in a 'screenplay' as "flamboyantly androgynous" – he questioned the ability of these two styles to go together. But androgynous is fabulous. Susan Sontag writes:

As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex.

According to NY Times, androgynous is the new black. The figure of the androgyne is ubiquitous in the postmodern world (such as in the goth subculture) perhaps because of an ethos that is comfortable with the crossing of boundaries. There are a few parallels between the contemporary and the nineteenth century androgynes – the decadent artists and writers whose literary and artistic strategies were in very different ways meddling with boundaries, and which are still viewed by many writers and critics as dubious or second-rate.

Zacharek has another sort of androgyny in mind: the transcendent. In western Christian theology, angels are androgynous. They are “sexless,” have “no gender,” and are “unmarriageable”. (Angels must be free of sexuality just as homosexuals must be free of their homosexual desires to get “respect” and “compassion” from the Catholic Church! – but now I am muddying the waters). This idea perhaps got attached to the Western idea of androgyny itself: the androgynous were expected to transcend both sexual difference and the physical act of sex itself.

But Zacharek is, of course, mischaracterizing the young wizard’s androgyny, which comes from an aesthetic specific to Japanese art and literature – and embraced with alacrity by the anime/manga traditions. The figure of the Bishonen – “beautiful boy” – is feminine/androgynous but emphatically sexy, and desirable to a large international constituency of women and men who watch/read in these genres. Bishonen often have "masculine" traits such as "very strong martial arts abilities" and "sports talent", thus, strangely, both buying into normative constructions of gender and blurring the looks/behaviour concurrence that sometimes reifies the queer practice of gender. In this way, bishounen is an entity different from the angelic androgyne of the Western imagination which operates from the lack of, rather than an excess of, gender-expression – its androgyny, we could say, may seem inauthentic to someone looking for the ideal (western) androgyne.

Howl, when we first meet him in the movie, is an impossibly beautiful bishonen who wears tight breeches, a ruffled white shirt, pink-and-grey cape, a green stone pendant, dangling earrings, and, best of all, impeccably textured blonde hair. (He may be a dandy, but we are quickly reminded of his manliness – he saves young Sophie and flies amidst battle airships as a large black bird. Christian Bale’s voice in the English dubbed version also helps – really.) If any doubt remains that our Howl likes to take pains over his appearance, it is dispelled the moment he dashes out of the bathroom shrieking because his hair has turned orange (Sophie mixed up his magic potions). Howl’s natural hair color is black – but, unembellished, he cries, "I give up, I see no point in living if I can’t be beautiful;" brings on the Spirits of Darkness; and begins to ooze green slime.

It is interesting that Howl uses magic to perform the apparently mundane task of changing his hair color (they could just dye his hair back, Sophie reasonably points out). His method is too-much. Too-much, we know, is decadent. Too-much is a trick. Too-much fantasizes about itself, and when the fantasy is disturbed, breaks down luridly like a silly teenager.

I like Bishonen because they problematize androgyny for me, and play with the dangers of decadence.

Sophie’s response to Howl’s tantrum is, “Such drama!” But the decadent androgyne cannot but be theatrical. S/he cannot at all be invisible – s/he must go to extremes. She is not balanced – her 'two' genders don’t cancel each other out. S/he is a corrupted or awful copy of the angelic androgyne, or a campy or decaying androgyne. S/he oozes an excess of mixed-up genders and not-quite artifice. S/he will not be endorsed by those who want their androgyny straight, nor by bores. When all else fails, s/he will make unnatural overproduction of green slime.

I find it interesting that Zacharek, who encounters Howl without encountering his bishounen context, can only register his inauthentic androgyny by comparing him to the most kitschy androgyne of them all: Michael Jackson.

Incidentally, there is a symposium on MJ at Notre Dame next week. Surprise, surprise! Academia is finally willing to turn to him after his death.

Erasures of Cocteau in Cannot Exist

2010-03-10T11:48:00.001-08:00

Some of my erasures of Jean Cocteau's writings on film are in the new issue of Cannot Exist.

***

[This, from an email from Andy Gricevich]

What a pleasure it is to announce the appearance of Cannot Exist no.6!

Such pleasure derives from the 60 pages of mind-bendingly strange, heartbr(e)aking, hilarious, urgent work contributed thereto by the following masters of contemporary versification:

Michael Bernstein
David Buuck
Mairead Byrne
Jordan Dunn
Lewis Freedman
Steve Gilmartin
Bob Heman
Crag Hill
Mary Kasimor
Monica Mody
The Nonsense Company
Nicholas Ravnikar
Juliana Spahr
Jordan Stempleman
David Wolach
Joey Yearous-Algozin

You can buy the issue via http://cannotexist.blogspot.com

The real reason why Da Vinci Code must exist

2010-02-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

Jessa Crispin:

"Like a lot of people who care about books and writing and sentence structure, I was initially horrified at the success at Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Then I realized what it meant: 80 million people read a book about the removal of femininity from the Catholic Church, about how Jesus liked women and prostitutes and screw-ups and freaks, about how the Bible was edited by men in power, about how Jesus' divinity was not universally accepted. They read the book, and now it's in their brains, like a vaccination against patriarchal monotheism, even if they don't do anything with the information."

middling humor

2010-02-07T23:31:00.005-08:00

I've been watching episodes of Dekh Bhai Dekh on youtube, and while amazed and delighted by the comic capers of the DBD family, I've also felt bemused by how much of its humor seems to be at the expense of those who are not middle-class (or Hindu, upper-caste, urban). This bias shows how eager its makers must have been to position the show (like much else on Indian satellite television in the 1990s) for the middle classes, who were just coming up as the new elite.

The middle classes in the 1990s were in a way the new "normal", and television, with its scores of private channels, was an apt venue (young, flexible, starry-eyed about middle-class ideals and values) to reflect this nouveau-hegemony. While even beloved Doordarshan's programming was heavily Hindu-centric, the new middle-class centred programming in the satellite era was for the first time blatantly using economic status as a marker to separate the "all-rights" from the "not all-rights". Hence, derision for and suspicion of those with a low place in the class hierarchy.

The character of Karima itself reflects the interests and preoccupations of the middle classes: servants, after all, were the symbols of the middle class family's prosperity/income/class position. Perhaps the makers, when creating this character, also wanted to acknowledge the practice of the entire family - including the servant(s) of the family - gathering around the television at night to watch the popular shows. But just like the real-world servants' participation in the family dynamic was ambiguous/limited at best, Karima too would choose to stay on and show his loyalty to the Diwan family - who had earlier made fun of his aspirations to move to Dubai to work and his "modern" getup (ep. 19) - thus appeasing their class anxieties - servant-like, "though he was never treated like one by the family members."

Unsustainability as a Mandate...

2010-02-05T23:01:00.000-08:00

Daniel Tiffany in his essay Kitsching The Cantos, quotes Friedlander: "Cumulation is a characteristic of kitsch;" the language of kitsch is "one of accumulation, repetition and redundancy: a massive use of synonyms, an excess of similar epithets, a play of images sent back, in turn, from one to the other in echoes without end."

I'm thinking about growing this title more.

2010-02-04T20:04:00.005-08:00

I'll be reading from my "screenplay" (Mrs Screenplay) at the English Department's Intellectual Life Committee panel in a couple of weeks. The themes are nature/ecology/sustainability. I'm wondering if I can title my presentation:

“Unsustainability as a Mandate for Aesthetics/Genre/Form/Language/Media/Performance/Audience: A Gentle Reading”

I was sad today that I wasn't in India during the awesome Pink Chaddi Campaign. If I were I'd surely have sent a pink chaddi to Sri Ram Sena, and then protestors in my "screenplay" might not have drowned or dispersed.

Killing Kanoko, first thoughts only

2010-02-03T21:09:00.001-08:00

Because last night I stopped after "Logical Like a Baby" because I needed this poem for a while. It to hound and terrify and enyearn.

The writing of poetry and masturbation and diarhhea and getting fat, and other instructions, and mother and (her) father and the baby's father (who is mother's husband) and Kanoko are in competition, re-placing, mechanically but also frantically, to be possible and impossible, in memory and in story.

iiyoo

Hiromi Ito! In a translation by Jeffrey Angles. Go buy your copy now, from Action Books. Read some poems on Action Yes.

2010-02-03T20:18:00.000-08:00

Amitava Kumar in an interview:

"...it is very difficult to find and then put down words in the right order. Not just the words that describe the people coming out of a train at a crowded station, but the struggle of the self that attempts to place its own ambitions among them. The struggle for the right words is also, then, in a serious sense, the search for an attitude."

I nod, and nod vigorously. Which persona do these words inhabit, right now? What politics are they playing, right now? Are they in dark or in light, and does the dark go with them or grow in them, or does the light dazzle their eyes?

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

2010-02-01T18:32:00.003-08:00

I'd picked this book up from the Kinokuniya Bookstore at San Francisco because of its title, and also the blurbs.

“Kirino helps us aficionados of crime fiction imagine the kind of novels James M. Cain might have written if he had been a Japanese feminist." - Maureen Corrigan

and

"Natsuo Kirino, celebrated author of Out, seamlessly weaves together the stories of these women’s struggles within the conventions and restrictions of Japanese society. At once a psychological investigation of the pressures facing Japanese women and a classic work of noir fiction, Grotesque is a brilliantly twisted novel of ambition, desire, beauty, cruelty, and identity by one of our most electrifying writers."

Initially, I laughed at the claims and was ready to dismiss it as a badly written, silly page-turner. But once I started reading it, I found myself not only turning the pages but also gripped by its ideas and propositions - viz., the boundaries between physical beauty and repulsiveness, and how their fuzziness is linked to an internal landscape of need and fuzziness, perhaps of the perceiver, and how one transmutes into the other. For the unnamed narrator, her absolutely beautiful sister is preposterous and monstrous precisely because of her beauty. Interestingly enough, I was reading the myth of Cupid and Psyche in The Golden Ass almost at the same time - where Psyche suspects Eros, who embodies both physical desire and beauty, of being a monster.

The narrative of Grotesque is ostensibly a whodunit, but not really, and I love this conceit and the glorious unreliability and malice of the narrator. And I'm quite fixated with some of the questions it brings up: How can we tell the monsters from the blameless? Are the monstrous really monstrous or blamelessly so, and what about vice versa? And if we turn into monsters - when we do - how do we?

Wikipedia tells me that Knopf expunged a section of the book for its American readers. How now, censorship!

Some other covers of the book:

And a Japanese splatter movie also called Grotesque which has nothing to do with the book.

"With a name like Grotesque, who needs a plot. Will b on it like swine flu."

a theory of rational progress

2010-01-31T15:01:00.003-08:00

When I saw Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Homes, I thought it was fitting that the penetrating intellect of this decidedly English detective becomes secondary to his brawn in the movie. The movie reconstructs Hollywood's ubiquitous fantasy in which masculine, muscled, rugged heroes save the world (and, albeit distantly, America) - just like Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes saves the (wealth of the) Empire from "hell-hounds" such as Tonga (characterized of course by their "natural" criminality and stupidity).

Yup, appropriation of a colonial fantasy by a neo-colonial one. Here is a very interesting essay if you want to read more about Oriental ideologies playing out in Conan Doyle's detective fictions.

All is not well at home

2010-01-31T14:09:00.002-08:00

The irony of Shiv Sena asking that My Name is Khan be banned – a film which takes as its subject American Islamophobia after 9/11. Our wonderfully Indian, aka patriotic, aka Hindu, aka Marathi, aka goonish organization has spent the last few days being blatantly Islamophobic against several prominent Khans, such as Shahrukh, Aamir and Saif. So far, there has been no sign that the political response to this “Think Local” re-enactment of anti-Muslim backlash by the Sena will be any more severe than the responses to their previous incidents of thuggery.

bad fit

2010-01-11T21:30:00.000-08:00

Right now, just a link to Joyelle McSweeney's essay on The "Future" of "Poetry" - but I'm thinking about it. I can't stop thinking about it.

in geographical & chronological incoherency (a medley)

2010-01-07T17:18:00.003-08:00

Back to the white of South Bend after twenty three days in California. And what a perfect break! Vipassana at North Fork was of course the highlight. But also Muir Woods - old-growth redwoods! City Lights, Modern Times and other fabulous SF bookstores! I somehow managed to get away with buying just three books. The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian; Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys ed. by D H Sterry; and - this one as a gift because of its title and the back cover blurb is great too - Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino. Also walked into a a snooty gallery on Ghirardelli Square to look at a Dali collection. Found crazy stairways in Chinatown. The vistas! Sutro Baths! A planetarium show at Griffith Observatory (LA). Real stars in North Fork. Endless walking (esp in SF). Endless road drives (or, since I didn't drive at all, road rides). Avenue of the Giants. And of course the food. The crepes and the sushi and the burritos. Mehek Punjab De at Fresno. Udupi Palace at SF. And even Naan n Curry at Berkeley! etc.

some violent antinomies

2009-12-11T21:10:00.003-08:00

Surrealism lives, intensely and magnificently, having found and perfected an effective method of knowledge. (Suzanne Cesaire, "Surrealism and Us")

Such an interesting claim, this. Surrealism has perfected an effective method of knowledge. Its counter-realism, counter-rationality is effective because it subverts the design of "knowledge" as we know it. But does it also help acquire a knowledge. And what is this knowledge. Is this scum-knowledge?

a quick review + recommendation

2009-12-10T21:47:00.003-08:00

Kaminey (2009)

The entire film is a lunacy!, a la Tarantino and Monty Python, and I dig that even more because the director/scriptwriter/music director Vishal Bhardwaj had gained not a little acclaim for his two previous movies, Maqbool and Omkara, which were adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Othello – very serious! But this film revels in its black/absurdist aesthetic. And it takes on politics through its crazy desperate logic too – especially the anti-migrant rhetoric in Maharashtra and the rhetoric of “Marathi pride”. Also note the homoerotic friendship between Charlie and Mikhail, and the song promoting condom use!

I streamed Kaminey on Netflix a few days ago (and noticed that the English subtitles seemed to be attuned to much of what was going on in the dialogues. Which is important for non-Hindi speaking viewers because) the dialogues are peppered with wordplay (at one point, Charlie’s character puns between “kokh”, which is “womb” in Hindi, and “coke” i.e. cocaine!) and take much pleasure in both speech and impedimented speech. The two lead characters, Guddu and Charlie, are twins – one of them stutters, the other lisps. Both these speech disorders give rise to some hilarious – and uncomfortably hilarious – situations in the film. Charlie cannot produce the /s/ sound and substitutes it with the /f/ sound. For instance, “fortcut” instead of “shortcut”. But it seems as though instead of deterring him from using words with the /s/ phoneme, his dis-ability fuels him to disrupt "normal" speech to the maximum by using such words excessively. I love this excess.

The film also swarms with other languages – Bengali and Marathi are just two instances – and in this sense challenges conventional wisdom that the body of a Bollywood movie must speak in a unified/unifying tongue i.e. Hindi (or Hinglish), leaving regional movies to speak the “minor” languages. Bombay is a heterolingual and poly-ethnic city. One of the bad guys in the movie is a polyglot.

And the brilliant montage sequence during the climax. Oh, and the “Dhan Te Naan” riff which samples the hackneyed background theme music of action sequences from the 1970s and 80s! Delightful. B. Rangan called Kaminey a “minor movie” and felt that Bhardwaj was at times "attempting to inflate this minor material into a major movie." I cannot disagree more. Such rascals are major in their very minor-ness.

2009-12-04T07:32:00.002-08:00

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

- Franz Kafka

how to be a ghost

2009-12-02T20:57:00.002-08:00

let breath by breath
breath
simulate non-existence

you are a faker
or a non-expert

for Jeet

Poem in Wasafiri

2009-11-29T10:04:00.000-08:00

My poem "The Loose and the Sturdy are Dreaming" will be published in Wasafiri in March 2010.

Wasafiri is a pretty interesting magazine. It creates a platform where voices, new and established and diverse, concern themselves with matters that have become important to them in their postcolonial, contemporary contexts, and often begin a dialogue that allows the "new" to speak more successfully in "established" international literary landscapes.

Christine Hume's "Lullaby"

2009-11-28T16:24:00.004-08:00

I’m tempted to talk about how I put on the CD, then sat doodling about the sounds for a few minutes, waiting for the “words” to begin, before it struck me that the CD had no voice of poet/words. So I started reading the text after I had already been “listening” (half distractedly) to the music for eight odd minutes. A very interesting experience.

This is such a rich text! “Its impossible promises of killers and riches”. I had fun trying to make sense of it because when I first encountered it, I swooned into the lines – I was seduced by them, the language, the images!

I love how the poem creates an epistemology of rhythm. The title Lullaby: Speculations on the first active sense is partly misleading (though on the cover itself, the word “Lullaby” gets cleaved by the fold of the book jacket, taking away some of its valence). The text is concerned with “lullaby” only so far as it is rhythm reinvented or reclothed. Rhythmicity grants lullaby its capacity. “What a rhythm will become to stay in the world” (2). The lines themselves stage the experience of body-in-rhythm – not just through language but also through the body of the poem. The gaps (blanks) between the lines could be pauses – intervals of silence – “Seconds shedding their tick”.

It is rhythm which the ear, the “original vigilant animal”, desires – the first desire and yet the first lie. “The sweet lure and bye belies its bully language” (5). Phonetic ghosts of the word “lullaby” here – and the premise is carried on. The text of lullabies is often disconcertingly sinister: “Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop / When the wind blows, the cradle will rock / When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall / And down will come baby, cradle and all.” This intertextual reference and its terrifying implications/denotations enter the rhetoric of the poem on pages 7 & 8 especially - though they carry on till the end, carrying away the “I” of the speaker.

How necessary is the mother to the lullaby, or the lullaby to the mother? The first line of the poem seems to want to join the reader as addressee with the infant to whom the lullaby is sung, but by the page 3 it is clear that the “you” is the mother herself (“Singing lullaby, you recover your mother’s pulse”) - and the “Speculations” in the title suggests an internality to the “dialogue”. The device of the speaker addressing herself in the second person perhaps parallels another theme that the text brings up in my reading – lullabies are primarily sung by mothers for themselves and not for the infant.

(posted Nov 15, 2009 on the workshop blog)

REPLAY!

2009-11-28T16:08:00.001-08:00

We have been reading several books of contemporary poetry - and some "canonical" texts - for the graduate poetry workshop led by Joyelle McSweeney this semester. And blogging about them. It's been a fantastic exchange of ideas - vigorous and opinionated - and I have enjoyed having a community of some pretty astute readers. I thought I'll re-post excerpts from some of the things I have been posting on the workshop blog, here.

Hume & Clark visit Notre Dame

2009-11-18T20:22:00.003-08:00

Christine Hume and Jeff Clark came to the graduate poetry workshop today (before their reading at the Hammes Bookstore). It was surprising to find out that Jeff didn't currently care very much about experimental poetry - I mean, the covers he designs fit the skull of experimental books exquisitely, right? While Christine - though leaning much more towards sound - seemed much more open. I was flummoxed by how they negotiated their differences. Isn't poetics, after all, just like politics? I can't imagine being in a serious relationship with someone whose opinions are so dissimilar to mine. But I guess this is me -

Then their reading:

Christine's performance of Lullaby was fascinating. I loved how the audio track's voice/echoes (not heard on the original CD accompanying the chapbook) picked up and completed the voice of the live reading - the overlaps and the alternations, which made the audience aware of the polyvocalic depth of the text and also gave a sense of transmission, both of word and of sound. From the performer's body to the CD, from the CD to the performer's body, and back, and to the listening audience - both language and rhythm bacterial!

Yet I found myself wishing that the music, and the reading, have more energy, more contours - less lullaby-ness. These seemed to catch insufficiently the rich sonic consciousness of the text. But perhaps Hume, being a consummate thinker about sound, wanted to deliberately fail the audience. Dash our expectations and take us to a new place.

2009-08-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

how well do switcheroos work?

2009-08-05T22:24:00.001-07:00

t a k e o v e r f a i l e d r e t u r n i t t o n o r m a l c y u n t i l n e x t l o g o n

2009-08-05T22:22:00.001-07:00

Posted by

2009-08-05T22:20:00.001-07:00

h a ! ha! h o wzzat

ha! ha posted by

2009-08-05T22:12:00.003-07:00

the order of an insect - an insect of the order - screen shots

single spaced this is h e r

o h d e a r r r

2009-08-05T22:06:00.001-07:00

a t t e m p t e d t a k e o v e r

s h e i s t r y i n g t o s w a t u s a w a y l i k e f l i e s

Ha! Ha! Houdini!

2009-07-26T07:20:00.002-07:00

... ...

"One night when you least expect it. the moon will crack like an egg. and sliding down that long gold stream will be no easter chick...

It will be Houdini! Harry Houdini. with a wave a flourish and a smile that willbreak the heart of every locksmith in America."

(Smith, Patti, 1973-74)

this -

2009-07-25T21:15:00.006-07:00

Almost with disbelief I realize: there are things I cannot find more about - simply cannot find - on google. Yesterday I was trying to search for Idam, written by Dr. Rajananda and published by Kavita Prakashan, Bikaner, in 1990, and - zilch. I paled and cursed and fluttered my hands but could still unearth nothing about the book or the author.

I'm reading it right now - it is a fictionalized retelling of the beginning chapters of the Mahabharat. The narrative moves forward because of the dramatis personae - Satyavati, Bhishma, Ambika, Ambalika and Krishna Dwaipayana aka Vyas - who experience the events comprising the epic story like good literary characters and introspect, feel conflicted, resolve issues or stay unresolved. I really like the book.

I love how Hindi is slugging its way back to into my tongue and my brain. The more I read. Also, my brain recognizes the story of the Mahabharat - the stories of its characters - as mythic in way it does not recognize those that were not part of its socio-cultural-linguistic environment when I was growing up. So, the appeal and payoffs of encountering the familiar made unfamiliar.

Even though the word itself has not been mentioned in the text of the novel so far, it popped into my head yesterday. The characters - especially Bhishma - are driven to try and understand their ethical obligations: their "dharma". Such an interesting notion. Your being located at a different place may entail a different dharma for you. I have been thinking about my place and my dharma.

2009-07-16T21:07:00.002-07:00

At ZestPoets we were talking about the age limit for the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, and how poets in India, when they are not-so-young, have few opportunities for publication of full collections.

Sridala Swami told us a little about Rayaprol (and Vivek found this letter to him from William Carlos Williams), and I realised I had this need to hear the stories of poets in India. When I was in Delhi and could badger poets who had been around longer for stories, I did not do so nearly enough. Because I was young - younger?

And then Vivek's point that what fuels chapbooks in the West, after all, is "collaborative energy and idealism". And that is what we need in India, even though there aren't any MFA programs yet turning the wheel and little money. We need to start journals. And stitch chapbooks. And sell them on railway platforms and in paan shops. Of course people will laugh. Of course and so?

The internet has made things wonderfully easy but I cannot imagine poetry without the pleasure of book-objects. I stitched my first chapbooks in April as a requirement for Cornelius Eady's poetry workshop. I could have ordered them, but I chose to stitch them - two of them. I went a little crazy with the first. It had a dark purple cardstock cover and deep pink liner sheets. Very smart. Then I glued silver-and-black paper on the spine. Which made it very very gay.

And I still loved it. I couldn't help loving these chapbooks of my poems I'd made with my own hands. Not like the anti-climactic feeling you get (I've heard) when you see your book "published". Okay. Perhaps I am romanticising a wee much. But you have to make them to get it. Go on.

It was not too hot only eighties, and djs floated beautiful gay music

2009-06-28T20:36:00.012-07:00

At Boystown - 40th anniversary of Chicago Pride - floats of the governor, mayor, councillors, aldermen, judges, police department (very sexy!), fire department, candidates, etc. I'm thinking, so much support from state and political actors. I'm thinking, it took a while to get here. I'm thinking, one day this will happen in India.

Dykes on Bikes. Rev, and the crowd goes ecstatic. How amazing to see once-icons. I'm thinking, did D and S get on bikes in Delhi this year.

A two year old sitting on his dad's shoulder. His mum is at the frontlines, cheering and waving and dancing. Dad waves and marchers throw beads in the direction of the boy. Dad tells him, "we have to get thousands of them. This is just like Mardi Gras - only a little different." By the end, the boy is wearing thousands of beads. Every color. By the end, he has too many beads and his mum takes them from him and wears them around her neck.

In Chicago the weekend before last

2009-06-24T20:29:00.003-07:00

Don't quite fit into the narratives of desi writing (and, guess what, one of my panels at Kriti was What If I Don't Want to Write About India) but there was something about being among South Asian writers. Such as discovering I am not quite done being one either. No, I haven't been trying to escape my "culture", but certain modes of writing which it seems "Indian writing" has made a culture out of. Am I less Indian because they are more so? And other such anxieties about forefathers; especially forefathers. My literary heritage - ill-fittingly and not-so-snugly there I stand - after Kolatkar and Jussawala. But what about mothers of my choosing. Or sisters. Or queens. Or gay boys. Or crazy playwrights. Or companions.

All such anxieties are in all such heads, I know. Identities, I told a friend yesterday, are dubious. But isn't it difficult to remember to be cunning and edgy when using identities. Isn't it easy to want to become an identity.

But Amitava Kumar during his Q&A reminded us that we don't have to choose. Audiences - and by extension, meanings. Many meanings can be made on many different occasions. Now I sound like this. Any other moment, I will revel in sounding a clarion for something else. Then something else.

Don't let that deflate you.

At the Not-India panel we talked about much more.

Keh Mukarni

2009-06-19T13:29:00.005-07:00

My "Archaisms" for Joyelle McSweeney's Issues in Contemporary Poetics class. Had such fun writing these. More on Keh-Mukarni at Caferati.

*

My breath snagged, fell, rose;
heart knocked against the sternum – soft blows.
He pressed against my chest – groped.
Was it a lover? No, girl, stethoscope!

*

His taut skin rippled under my fingers –
I dragged my nails light as feathers
revelling in his rough rine.
Was it a lover? No, girl, lime!

*

Tasted his wide uncouth mouth,
then, buzzed, on the love seat we slouched,
nuzzled – it was unplanned, it was a whimsy!
Was it a lover? No, girl, fifth of a whiskey!

*

I evaluated my satisfaction narrow,
his staying power zero –
still, his love for my exposed body was transparent.
Was it a lover? No, girl, mosquito repellent!

blog conversations

2009-06-19T12:45:00.006-07:00

In Feb, this interview with Kinjal Dagli - which had then bemused me, and which already seems dated, what with twitter and other "social media" added to the fray (or I in the fray, adding and subtracting). The feature, written up by Kalindi Sheth, here.

***

KD: Your identity. Your name, age, profession, and where you live.

Monica Mody, writer, currently in the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame. I lived in Delhi from 2003-08.

KD: When did you start this blog? Why? What is it/does it aim to be about? Why such a title?

This is my second blog - I started posting on it in May 2008.

By Aug 2007 I had started to feel that "In Small Pieces", my first blog, did not reflect who I was any longer. I had started the latter in Sep 2004 when I was a very different person. Despite blogs being such eccentric, changeable creatures, I had somehow outgrown it.

Blogs for me are nets where I collect my writings, thoughts, observations - or such things as catch my eye. This is how I was using "In Small Pieces" - and funnily enough, I use "An Imperfect Blog" in a similar manner - as a multifarious net.

The blog, poor thing, has wanted to be about just this one thing or just that, at various points, but failed. So it has to be all and serve in many different capacities. It is the doppelganger of Monica the writer. Monica the queer feminist. Monica the movie-lover, the book-lover, the cat-lover. Monica the beyond labels. Etc.

It is an imperfect blog. I update it idiosyncratically. Often or not very often, depending on my moods/what is happening in my "real" life. Blogging is not my religion as it is for many people, and I used to feel quite upset with myself because of that. Peer pressure. But now finally, I own its imperfection.

KD: What does blogging do for/mean to you? Do you feel Indian women express themselves better on blogs; is it an outlet for just the modern, i-have-something-to-say woman, or can it be used as a tool for those hitherto unheard as well?

The connections one makes with other bloggers - this whole world of comments and communication - that is remarkable.

Is there a unified identity called "Indian women"? If you ever run into it, point me to it too. What do you mean by a "modern, i-have-something-to-say woman"? Are "less modern" women without things to say? Who is "modern" anyway? Please examine your categories.

Blogging is a tool. It is not messianic; it is not the solution to all troubles. Yes, it has allowed many adolescents, women, queer people, people with crazy/interesting hobbies, old women, right wing fundamentalists, you name it - to record their thoughts/observations and articulate them - and find sympathizers/allies out there - sometimes much more easily than in their immediate surroundings. Which means that blogging can be a progressive or regressive force depending on who is blogging.

These two processes of (a) articulating the self, and (b) finding a community have been/can be extremely powerful for certain women - women whose experiences of power might otherwise be limited. It does not matter whether these women are "modern" or "not modern" - as long as they understand the potential of this tool - as long as they blog.

Blogging should not be understood "as a tool for" but "as a tool by".

KD: Finally, is your online identity different from your offline persona? I notice that unlike several other blogs, you've put up your photograph and use your true name, right? Does it make you feel at all vulnerable that just about anybody can see/monitor you?

The self, interesting enough, does not need to be fully disclosed when blogging.

Is my online identity different from my "offline persona" (I love this!)? Of course. I monitor what goes on my blog - what I put on it - precisely because I am aware that it is a public realm. The lines I draw protect my personal life to the extent I want to keep it "private" from the "public eye". What else should I feel vulnerable about? Having certain beliefs and convictions, which might be unpopular/unacceptable in certain quarters? No. I don't worry about that because I know I have the resources to be relatively worry-free.

Many people don't have this privilege, my privileges. These could be people who, in their "offline" lives, are forced - because of gender/ sexuality/ caste/ class/ hetero-patriarchy/ other power structures - to be too nice too coy (too Indian). Who feel safer, in their virtual anonymous avatars, to express their real selves. That is sad and terrible. And yet, is it - entirely?

Crying Wolf

2009-04-11T15:22:00.001-07:00

Shot a glass of silk potion
in annoyance
to point thermal sequences -
roasted bananas tropicalized
to a gestural yellow.

Open Space in Ranchi!

2009-04-06T20:04:00.003-07:00

And a gender workshop using Strength in Action! Which I worked on!

Oh, this is so gladsome. My birthtown is rocking.

beyond precision

2009-03-03T06:13:00.002-08:00

Imagine each poem as a room you walk into.

Wouldn't you want the room to be roomy?

Minor spheres

2009-02-24T06:43:00.003-08:00

Laura Miller comes up with a brilliant term when reviewing Elaine Showalter's history of American women writers: GLANS, or "Great Literary American Novel Syndrome". Equally pleasurable is the phrase "cult of the he-man novelist as personified by Ernest Hemingway." Ah, don't we love irreverence served cleverly for the cause of feminism!

Women writing about family and relationships is still regarded as minor literature, yes, and writing the spiritual is seen with even more suspicion and disdain. Perhaps because the spiritual is marginalized merely as anti-intellectual in many of our lives.

On Minor Days

2009-02-19T07:01:00.001-08:00

I wake up stamped
by seals

in dreams
their love like a fishnet

Hilton Gloves

2009-02-15T10:53:00.002-08:00

Like a pair of black crows
perched solemnly
self-contained
amidst general hubub.

Ranting up the wrong street

2009-01-25T08:02:00.005-08:00

When we begin talking about freedom of speech and expression, it is necessary to pick out the strand of radical Islamist fundamentalism but it is important to do this in a context that recognizes the concurrent existence of radical Christian, Hindu and Jewish fundamentalisms. There are enough instances of the impact these have had in recent years on writers and artists; say, for the sake of an argument, you have been out of the loop: less than a minute on google gave me this, this, and this.

Which is why I am taken aback by Christopher Hitchens' enthusiastic but lopsided article in Vanity Fair where he refuses to acknowledge anything but Islamic extremism. Is he being deliberately ignorant or obtusely ignorant? And what is this refusal if not an irresponsible indulgence in demagoguery?