12 or 20 (second series) questions with Biswamit Dwibedy

Biswamit Dwibedy [photo credit: Ashwini A Singh] is the author of Ozalid (1913 Press, 2010), and Hubble Gardener and Erode, both forthcoming from 1913 Press. He was born in Orissa, India, and lives in Bangalore. He has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Bard College, New York. He's also a visual artist and translator, and recently edited a collection of contemporary poetry in translation from seven Indian languages for Litmus Press’s Aufgabe # 13. In India, he works for Ogilvy and Mather, and is the founder and editor of Annew Press, a small, independent publishing effort focusing on translations, reissues and new voices in contemporary poetry from India and abroad.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
1913 Press published my book Ozalid shortly after I’d just moved to India—my life had just changed somewhat drastically and the book was as if a souvenir of the time I’d spent in America, a reminder of this other life I had just given up. It was life-changing because I’d just never thought I’d publish a book of poetry that would look like that—the Dollars did a wonderful job. The shapes of my poems surprised me, though it was my own work. I think I find less of that element of surprise when it comes to formal experiments in my poetry now. Though I am branching out into me forms, things were less familiar then and I didn’t know I was writing a book. I had nothing to say and I wanted nothing. That’s not the case now, I guess. My most recent work also feels drastically different especially because I am writing from within India now; I am home, but I don’t know really know who my audience is. But of course for that one person you write for.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Through the women poets whose work I fell in love with Leslie Scalapino’s Defoe, Considering How Exaggerated Music is, everything by Cole Swensen, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Barbara Guest’s Seeking Air. All of them question genre, form, and work with others modes of thinking. I love Fanny Howe’s Radical Love, I can never tell if it is poetry or some new religion. So I guess I came to poetry in a way that included prose as well; I came to it precisely because I saw it as a place where disparate things could co-exist.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

There was a time when many writing projects sparked up one after the others, ideas I am working on slowly, each its own book, it’s kind of sad and very unorganized of me. And together they make any sort of progress very slow. I don’t know yet what they will look like finally, but yes, they do come out of lots on notes, reading and research, at least the last two books did. It is a process of I slowly sculpting out the shape of a poem or a book from a sea of fluid matter.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I have a series of seemingly unrelated poems always going on—things that I might later realize are in fact one solid train of thought I am trying to give shape to. I like the idea of the book as unit, and am occupied with a few projects recently that are thematic books, but progress is slow.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
They weren’t till recently, when I had to record a talk for a conference at the University of Montana, and I realized how great it was to hear myself and then edit things according. I’d always been told to do that, but I never tried it I guess. I am terrified of reading in public, but I don’t mind recording at all.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Writing is a form of desire for me, a place where you maneuver what you can and cannot say. Theoretical concerns change as one moves from one book to another, slightly, maybe, but it’s always about desire, and using language to give it some form, to be in a dialogue with its double. I’m always reading Deleuze, but lately I seem to be interested in theories of religion and queer identity, and diving into ancient forms of knowledge that we know little about to create a living theory for one’s own life that might resonate with our times.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Of course the writer plays an important role in any culture; but I am more interested in the kind of role that a writer can play in my own—Indian—culture. There’s possibility of making real change in the world through one’s words here. I do sometimes believe that it is more exciting to be a writer here now because the audience dynamics is completely different. We don’t have MFA programs. We are fascinated by new ways of telling a story, social media. We might be majorly conservative about some things but we are also open to some very freaky traditions. It’s a fun mix and I think writers should take advantage of that; be more creative in their storytelling, formally, and dive into the mysteries of our fascinating culture.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I always found it to be an amazingly helpful experience. I just recent

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Poets never finish anything. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

It’s a difficult transition for me, to write sentences, one after the other, but the most appealing thing about prose, or the fiction I am writing is the amount of freedom I find there to write what I want, as a story and between, in sentences. Somehow, surprisingly, it’s something I find missing in my poetry now.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It is difficult to have a routine revolving around my day-job, which requires crazy hours, so I tend to write, take notes, as and when I can, at home or at work, and then somehow collect them all later, in the night, but not daily, into a piece or poem.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Cole Swensen.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

A particular brand of incense called Bharat Darshan.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I am influenced by all of those, and history, particularly, seems to be a driving force for my work now.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

The list is endless, but Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is my bible.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Go on a trip abroad with a dear friend of mine.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d love to work in a neuroscience lab. I moved to the US to study Biomedical Engineering before becoming a poet, so I guess I would have ended up somewhere along those lines, though I can’t imagine that. But yeah, neuroscience is wild fun.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t know, but I was copying lyrics of pop-songs and calling them my own since I was a child. That impulse, to plagiarize, to cut and paste, to play with language was always there I guess.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last book that made me go wow! was The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam. And I don’t know about the last great movie, but the last movie I greatly enjoyed was Need for Speed. Great fun!

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on a book of poems that play with the idea of the vicarious. I want to sort of wash it off its serious Christian denotations and understand it as a way of life, of selflessness that is alive in everyday actions. I am also working a novel of historical fiction about the first Indian man to write a book in English. I am calling it The Hair Surgeon.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Aufgabe 12

What does it matter now? What matters now? What is the matter now? What is now’s matter? All possible transversions of Jean-Marc Desgent’s questioning title Qu’importe maintenant? The following work of fourteen writers, presented in American and Canadian English translations from the Quebecoise French by twelve translators, are possible responses.

            The selection of this work is based on which poetries in Quebec’s Francophone literary weather feel vital right now; which works seem utterly relevant and current to this moment (which is always a multiple and refracted moment); which poetries are speaking, calling, urging, moaning, crying to the reader in us; which works, in their lexicons and syntax, their movements and music, wake us up, make us feel excited and alive in language. In short, which poetries give a damn.

            The selection is not historical, generational, ideological, chronological. It is expansive, diverse, rigorous, stretching and straying linguistic, poetical and genre boundaries. It is also entirely contemporary, in the way that Giorgio Agamben thinks of contemporariness, where one has an anachronistic and disjunctive relation to one’s time. Therefore, the featured writers (and translators) represent a range of generations and experience, approaches and interests; they are artists with thirty books or one book to their name (even posthumous in one case), and their poetics touch on other fields and media. (Oana Avasilichioaei, “Now’s Matter: Work in Translation from Quebecois French”)

Out of Litmus Press in Brooklyn, New York, comes the twelfth annual issue of the literary journal Aufgabe, a journal with a deep, critical and abiding love for literary works in translation, as well as a strong machinery in place for allowing such works to be published, distributed and discussed (Litmus Press as a literary publisher is well known, also, for producing numerous book-length translated works). Issue #12 includes an opening section edited by Montreal poet, translator and critic Oana Avasilichioaei, titled “Now’s Matter: Work in Translation from Quebecois French,” including works by Geneviève Desrosiers, Benoit Jutras, Nicole Brossard, Chantel Neveu, Franz Schürch, Suzanne Leblanc, Steve Savage, Phillipe Charron, Renée Gagnon, Daniel Canty, François Turcot, Martine Audet, Kim Doré and Jean-Marc Desgent. Over the past decade or so, works translated into English has become far more prevalent in Canadian writing generally, and Canadian poetry specifically, thanks in part to a dedicated series of champions and translators such as Avasilichioaei, as well as Erín Moure, Angela Carr, Nathanaël, françois luong, Bronwyn Haslam and Robert Majzels. Through a hundred pages of translated works, this is an impressive collection of writing, and, unfortunately, highlights the oddity of the fact that it takes a foreign journal to show Canadian work to other Canadians (apart from the generous, yet much smaller, recent section of same in The Capilano Review [see my review here]), akin to the one hundred page section that Chicago Review did a few years ago on poet Lisa Robertson [see my review on such here], long before an equivalent critical exploration occurred anywhere in a Canadian journal. Why do such acknowledgements not happen up here? Or are our literary journals simply not large enough to encompass that amount of work in a single section?

Checkmated Chessboard

EXCERPTS FROM PATIENCE

Nathaniel Hawthorne, on a visit to Herman Melville, at the time employed with the U.S. Customs House for the port of New York, gave him this chessboard, adorned with two whales, no doubt to console his friend for the critical and commercial failure of his masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

            The two friends began a game that resulted in a draw, in which the black king and queen could no longer pursue the white king and queen. The final configuration remained in place until the office moved. Melville’s colleagues say that he refused invitations to play a match with the same retort that Bartleby, the Wall Street recluse walled up in infinite refusal, gave to all that life offered him: “I would prefer not to.” (Daniel Canty, trans. by Oana Avasilichioaei, “from Wigrum”)

A note at the end of the work (there are notes at the end of each of the translated works, adding information to illuminate the pieces) that reads: “Romping between fact and fiction, serial and document, neologism and collection, the misplaced and the disappeared, erudition and invention, the encyclopedia and the internet, Wigrum is the account, catalogue and legacy of Sebastian Wigrum’s (and his succcessors’) collections of surprising and sundry objects, the stories imagined through the objects’ materiality. Perec, Queneau, Borges, Pynchon, Ponge are some of the literary shadows flitting above its webs. Following Canty’s/Wigrum’s maxim, if I can believe all the stories I am told, so can you, I translated and wrote on the edge of invention.” Canty’s biographical note also notes that his first novel, translated into English by Avasilichioaei, is forthcoming with Talonbooks. The wealth of work here is incredible, and there is something about the poetic line that is entirely different done through the Quebecoise French than by English-language Canadian writers. One can only hope that all the writing covered here might possibly be available in trade form as well, without too much of a wait for those of us who never managed to learn a second language.

Chorale VII

The house was as a book. I wrote through each of its doors to each of its floors. I circulated in its syntax beyond the moulded words, the sculpted sentences. I spread my thought throughout the house, hybridized it to the foreign shape. Henceforth, its spatiality was added to my language. Through this philosopher’s house, I reflected on the convincing work, on the admirable life.

South-west servant’s bedroom

Second floor (Suzanne Leblanc, trans. by Oana Avasilichioaei and Ingrid Pam Dick, “from The House As P.’s Thinking”)

Even aside from all of that, there is still nearly three hundred pages of other writing which could easily be discussed on its own in another blog post or two, including some two hundred pages of poetry by Rusty Morrison, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Claire Donato, Edric Mesmer, Karen Garthe, Emily Abendroth and a whole ton of other writers.

THE CONFLICT BEGAN WHEN, the conflict began when the tendency to discard what doesn’t fit leads to narrative, Ahmed looked me in the eye before we drove so, to speak as one would, one-third children, one million, refugee told me EVERYTHING’S OKAY doesn’t mean it didn’t happen by its name

IT’S NOT THE WORK OF A PROPHET to rate a person on a scale of one to ten by her ability to call death death what’s the difference for example between I’m thinking about her and I remember her I’ll tell you Ahmed said but it’s a long story meaning’s going to change the way this room looks (Emily Carson, “from Sleeping with Phosphorus”)

The end of the issue includes a section of essays, notes and reviews, including a short memoir by Pierre Joris, titled “The Idiot,” that begins:

In the beginning were the words. And the words were double from the word go: the cool black on white words in the book, & the loud, fast & hot words on the radio. To begin with the word on the radio let me cold, while the word on the page was what asked me to light up my nights with a flashlight under the covers. This happened, age 5: I remember the room—it was dark & thus I do not remember what was in it except for the bed in which I lay with covers drawn up, trying to read. Later on, in daylight, this room became or had become a living room, & I sat on the daybed & I watched the green eye of Normende, the box from which the hot works came.

Another highlight of the journal is an interview Nathanaël (the Canadian poet formerly known as nathalie stephens) conducted with Catherine Mavrikakis (translated into English by Nathanaël). Over the past couple of years, Nathanaël has not only produced an incredible amount of writing (the last few titles produced by Nightboat Books), but translated a great deal of literature from French into English, including a novel by Mavrikakis, produced in English as Flowers of Spit (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012). Nearly a dozen pages long, the interview digs deep into the work and working lives of both writers. It opens:

N: Flowers of Spit is well in the distance now. It was published by Leméac in 2005 and again in English six years later, which is more or less now, by BookThug. I am curious to ask you about this dislocation. Which, it seems to me, is constitutive of the text itself (historical disturbance especially, but not exclusively, on the part of the Crackpot who has lost his share of the present—or at any rate, he reads in the present a resolutely ineradicable past), but of our friendship as well. Dislocation of places—you born in Chicago and living in Montréal, me born in Montréal and living in Chicago. The exchange is, so to speak, inscribed in our respective geographies.

C.M.: Yes, Flowers of Spit is far. But oddly, it represents a stumbling block in my life, something I think about often and which remains present. There is in this book a relationship to time that the Crackpot has in fact, a relationship in which different periods of time are confused. The Crackpot can never mourn the past. I am like him. It is very hard for me to understand that time has passed. I am sometimes in anachronic hours. It isn’t nostalgia, it’s that I think the past has us by the throat. It torments us. Maybe that is why I like Proust so much. My father who is at the hospital right now and has gone mad (more mad, in fat, than he already was…) is now completely mixing up all time periods. The other day, he wanted to take me to his office which disappeared more than forty years ago and complained that a friend who has been dead since the ‘70s wasn’t visiting him. I’m barely exaggerating when I say that I inherited from both my parents this near impossible relationship to the present. My mother is still caught up in the Second World War.

Chicago is far, it’s my past, my birth, precisely because of the Second World War, because my aunt, my mother’s sister, went and married in Chicago an American soldier whom she met during the landings. My mother was able to give birth at her sister’s. But Chicago is your own present. As though you were haunting a time that never belonged to me (I left as an infant), as though you were giving me news of my history. I know, on the other hand, how difficult Montréal was for you. That you had to flee. Sometimes I haven’t the courage to speak to you of it. As though I didn’t want to trouble you with that city you didn’t know what to make of … Me, I have settled there a thousand times, wanting always to leave. Perplexed, like you … But I stayed, not knowing where I would be more at home. Yesterday someone was telling me that he became Quebecois reading Hubert Aquin, and I think he said something that is valid for me. It was in reading certain Quebecois texts that I became Quebecoise. In addition to which, I published here, which strangely anchored me. But you are from here also, from Montréal. There is nonetheless a tie that the publication of your books creates, isn’t there? And then between us, there is Chicago, Montréal, yes … but also France and North Africa. Our imaginations have covered the same territories. Don’t you find that strange?

Aufgabe 11

What am I doing—catless—here,

level-headed and certain,

without cause to judge?

What am I doing without my own face,

without either feet or staggering? Who is it that seeks me out

and doesn’t discover my telephone on its tiny coffee table?

    I am but scarcely

the description of someone that knows me,

an identity card that has cast off first one foot

and then the other

and who will sleep until it is far too early.

(My flesh does not know of flesh. The saliva

coagulates and, oh, once again it is mid-afternoon

and the rain has not arrived.)

What time will I be born, that I don’t remember the light?

What time will I be dead, that my hands don’t hurt? (“Untitled,” Rafael Menjivar Ochoa, trans. Emily Abendroth)

I recently received a copy of the eleventh annual Aufgabe, a journal produced out of Brooklyn, New York through Litmus Press, and edited by an editorial board of E.Tracy Grinnell, Julian Talamentez Brolaski, erica kaufman, Jen Hofer and Canadian poet Nathanaël. Along with their usual generous amount of poetry and “essays, notes, reviews,” this issue features a section of Salvadoran poetry, guest edited by Christian Nagler, including translations from the Spanish by Emily Abendroth, Karen Lepri, Christian Nagler, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brian Whitener. In Nagler’s lengthy introduction to the section on Salvadoran poetry, he writes:

‘The quest for identity’ is a concept that perhaps signifies anachronistically in the intellectual climate of North America, where a ‘post-identity’ discourse provides some semblance of a contemporary mood, even if is not embraced or fully elaborated. We—some of us—are perhaps experiencing a milder form of what Huezo-Mixco cites as the presiding trend of the 1970s and 80s in El Salvador, when the “collision of social movements with entrenched power tend[ed] to displace identity issues.” In his lecture, Huezo-Mixco tracks the continued vitality of the concept of identity with regards to mass-events that have served to vitally confuse the idea of interior and exterior, namely a thirty year mass migration that now locates a quarter to a third of Salvadoran citizens outside the national borders. At the end of his lecture, Huezo-Mixco, arrives at a provocative conclusion that the younger generation of writers “re-creates the catastrophe of a fragmented and impoverished society.” It’s a gernation that does not write with “any enthusiasm for the political gains wrested from one of the bloodiest periods in Latin America.”

I’m impressed that a journal would so heavily and regularly be involved with translation, interested in engaging with other poetries, poetics and cultures, and in seeing the differences of subject matter, cadence and the line, as the issue features not only the special section but translated works within the section of general works. Some of the highlights of the issue include works by Noah Eli Gordon and j/j hastain, as well as Mathieu Bergeron (translated by Nathanaël). The pieces by Gordon are from a work-in-progress I’ve seen sections from before, his “The Problem,” which feature drawings by Sommer Browning. Given the drawings appear to be tailor-made for the work, one can only hope that a trade edition of the finished work might also include drawings?

What is to be done? A note on a page torn from a notebook says: a note in a defused cage. Further along, as a matter of fact, the grey skeleton of a human cage: a whole series of sawed, twisted bars. At the back, in the hay, as they say, lies a page torn from a notebook. From here, it is impossible to read it, but the repeated patterns trick the field: we are holding the page in our hand, we have already, necessarily, entered. On the front, we read: Turn the page; on the back: Turn around. Do you follow me? (“The Unformed Suite,” Mathieu Bergeron)

From the previous issue [see my review of such here] to this current one, there seems an entire different flavour, a different cadence of the works presented, and I’m uncertain if this is accident of submissions or a deliberate attempt to shape different issues (or if the difference is entirely in my own mind). 

Still, a particularly interesting feature of the current issue is an essay by Ariel Goldberg, “Selections from The Estrangement Principle: A Poetic Criticism,” which questions a number of different directions of art and writing, in regards to definition, self-definition and the question of “queer,” writing “NPR tells the news with clips from an old interview, with no mention Ryan is a lesbian. If there is nothing about being a dyke in her poetry then should the word lesbian be uttered? Is Kay Ryan making history as the first out lesbian Poet Laureate with a Pulitzer Prize, or is this actively not being treated as history?” The piece continues:

The term “queer art” is both persisting and failing at a rapid pace, and for multiple reasons. Mostly the anti-definition catchall capability of the word “queer” sets the stage. For instance, I am resistant to a dead on defining of the word. Different queernesses float up here, and more specific identifiers inside of the “LGBTQ” acronym come in to sharper focus. I am working backwards, piecing together scraps. There is a sort of pact, in the word queer, anyway, to resist the task of definition. I am identifying with it, but also varying from it, throwing back to lesbian, or dyke. I pluck and examine. I am inconsistent. As important as it is to identify a gender or sexuality, so is it to name my race, my white privilege. My excellent education privilege. Being Jewish, whatever that means. The identifiers don’t exactly end. Being gender queer or a dyke or both collapses in this long exhale where it’s not important that I know the answer to a question someone is always asking.

Aufgabe 10

It makes no sense to speak of contemporary French poetry—except in the sense that, increasingly, all literature that doesn't fit into any other category gets called poetry, a trend I highly champion, as it broadens the definition of the art. And that's also what contemporary French poets are doing: broadening the definition of la poésie to include and encourage an ever-diversifying array of approaches and forms. The one constant is exploration, and much of that is eroding the boundaries of the genre, of genre itself, and even of media.

Much pressure has been put on the line in contemporary French poetry, to such an extent that for many writers it has disappeared altogether as a formal principle, and in many cases that pressure has been transferred to syntax, either underscored through elaborately formal or distorted sentence structures or spotlighted through inventive violations and innovations. Where the line does remain, it is often given a performative stance and at times, in turn, performs an immediate graphic gesture on the page. (Cole Swensen, “Dossier: Contemporary Poetry in France”)

The tenth annual issue of the poetry journal Aufgabe, produced out of Brooklyn, New York by Litmus Press under the poetry editorship of E. Tracy Grinnell, Paul Foster Johnson and Julian T. Brolaski, includes a lengthy feature on “French poetry & poetics guest edited by Cole Swensen.” With works by various poets unknown to larger North American poetry audiences, it includes writing by Oscarine Bosquet, Marie-Louise Chapelle, Sabine Macher, Anne Parian, Nathalie Quintane and plenty of others, and seemingly extend a series of conversations throughout American publications, from Verse magazine's triple-issue on French poetry and poetics (2007), or even back to an anthology of French writing edited by Norma Cole, one of the translators of the current issue, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000). Given the amount of attention that English-language American journals and publications (Burning Deck features regular book-length translated works, and has for years), might the south-of-the-border audiences have the ability to be far better informed of such French-language works than we, here? Even translated works from French from Quebec seem harder to find, since the days of Coach House Press, or even more recent Anansi works. Where has all the translation disappeared to?

Africa is a Flat Tint

On the entirely devoured dirt the difference

between consonants hardly

distinguishes

O O / I O

I O / I

E IA /

A /

A E OU /

the ones lilt in the others

it is between them that savagely we say

indistinct in the haze of the land far from here

Africa is a flat tint

I'm afraid of the you

shine up to here the precious names of ore bed

and it is not about loosing your grip. (Oscarine Bosquet, “from Present Participle,” trans. Ellen Leblond-Schrader and Sarah Riggs)

I, myself, have been fascinated, specifically, with the movement of the poetic line over the past few years, and so many of the translators in this issue, themselves, are poets that have altered my consideration of what is possible with the line, including Norma Cole, Lisa Robertson, Eleni Sikelianos, Cole Swensen, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop and Andrew Zawacki (one of the editors, also, of Verse). Many of the translators and translated in this issue also seem to work heavily within the prose poem, some of whom are doing some quite magnificent things.

3.

I myself will I haunt. Maybe one day find an elbow a hand of Harry to mark them later on their side of the wall to be a memory in the body of the other a shadow in a movement.

An elbow in a gesture in two parts for who knows how to play the rerun and when I'm already dead then while the one to feel immense sky the other to stay around friends become (Caroline Dubois, “from How's that I say not sleep,” trans. Stacy Doris and Chet Wiener)

On top of this, it might even be easy to overlook that the issue also includes over a hundred pages of poetry not included in this feature, with new works by G.C. Waldrep, Robert Glück, Catherine Meng, Alli Warren, Harold Abramowitz, Joan Retallack, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, her “Draft 107: Meant to Say,” that includes:

I wanted to know about making art and telling the truth.

Where does this thing come from

why does this engineered apple taste dull, how did we get here

from what to what and

how did we decide to? or what flood of slough

drowned us where we stood.

The issue also includes a number of critical prose works at the end, including Robert Glück's “CUNY Talk: Uncertain Reading.” As he writes to introduce the piece, Glück's talk “was for TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice, a series at the CUNY Graduate Center curated by Tim Peterson. My panel included Trish Salah and Rachel Zolf and took place on October 29, 2009. TENDENCIES explores the poetic manifesto as it intersects with writing practice, queer theory and pedagogy.” I'm intrigued by such a series; might a collection of such pieces appear in print at some point, or might these pieces be available somewhere online?

Many of Acker's strategies keep the reader off-balance. That's why it's rather difficult to write about her work, because the best reading is an uncertain reading. I want to offer my confusion as an ideal. Rather than drawing conclusions, developing identifications or thematic connections, that is, making judgements that lead to knowledge, Acker creates a reader who is lost in strangeness. She pitches the reader into a welter of contradictions that do not resolve themselves, but replace each other continuously: a text that hates itself but wants me to love it, sex that dissolves and amalgamates, a disempowered self that tops its heated bottom-act with cold manipulations, a confession that is therapeutic without the possibility of health. Her aesthetic is founded on double binds whose brilliance captivates me as I struggle against them.