"Praxis » Here are some feminist compositional strategies and mindsets I’ve employed: 1. Polyvocality within specific poems, or polyaesthetics across the body of work. Women and all oppressed peoples know we’ve learned to speak in many registers just to get along. The languages my sisters and I created as girls, academic and theoretical terminology, the riffing and wandering intimacies of friends, the professional veneer (friendly but not too friendly), the tearing down of artifice that a partner demands (which can also be the understanding of the uses of artifice)—all of these languages and registers, and many others, enter my poems. For me, writing as a feminist doesn’t mean resuscitating the lost feminine voices of myths, or discovering my essentially feminine voice: it means recognizing how women code-switch, and enacting the powers of those switches, or bucking their constraints. I feel various, and I want my poems to know motley pleasures, too. 2. Foregrounding the quotidian, the domestic, the interior, and the relational—then stranging, estranging, sometimes strangling them. Works of imagination and performance are important to my reading and my feminism, but in my own work, I find autobiography is plenty ripe (pliable, bursting, sticky). Subjectivity and the details of my “real life”—including found or overheard text, songs stuck in my head, and dreams (“poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know,” Rich said)—feel so complex and mysterious that I’m sure I could farm them forever, even if the activities of my life stopped right now and I were henceforth boarded up in a bedroom in Amherst, Mass. (My feminist aesthetic loves Whitman, too—see #1.) Beyond our American poetic grandparents, I also have to thank poets like Joanne Kyger, Lyn Hejinian, Eileen Myles, and Hoa Nguyen for leading the way into the quotidian bizarro. 3. Stream-of-consciousness: as unedited as possible, which allows me to inhabit the turns of my mind—and to reify, and maybe even fetishize them—in order to inscribe a psychological document. Peeks into the minds of women of the past (Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Emily Brontë) have introduced me to new corners of my own mind (or carved them out), and I want to read and write poems that hold this type of surprise and self-revelation. > (X. Is this enough? What of the “overtly” feminist? —No, I didn’t say “dirty” feminist. Am I afraid that if I don’t sugarcoat my strategies, no one will swallow them? I’m bored with being afraid of being afraid… . And what’s up with preaching to the choir? The poets swaying in robes, bellowing their lyrics, don’t they already see all of this—the problems not yet laserpointed, the consciousnesses not yet articulated—in their peripheral vision, too? Is anyone listening, does anyone care? …"
-
Becca Klaver for Delirious Hem, 2009
Polyvocality seems esp. relevant wrt tumblr poetics, and stream-of-consciousness overlaps with the diaristic, at least for me. There’s this thing I do, of writing and writing and collecting quotes and theory in a gros melange of a word document, and it becomes a sort of manic polyvocal diary, generally unedited as most diaries are. I am trying to begin to imagine that as writing. Once when I was fifteen or so I mentioned to my father that I don’t like writing prose, I just like my diary, and he responded, “That’s because you’re lazy.” But if laziness is the problem what of the hours and hours I spent writing, and we know why my dad didn’t conceive of that as real effort and real work. Elizabeth Gumport’s article on Chris Kraus, relevant: “that constant feeling of being told, you are telling your life the wrong way. You are taking your life personally, which is to say: not like an artist”. I was fifteen when my dad told me I was a lazy writer and that was the year I started writing Adrienne Rich’s “you all die at fifteen” Diderot reference on all of my binders and plotting my survival, the way I’d show all those fuckers someday. Also the year (or was I sixteen?) that I made an art project for class, a barbie doll in a shoebox covered in quotes, the inside of the box painted like a stream and scattered with flowers and anti-depressants, Barbie naked and lying half-dead like Ophelia in that Waterhouse painting. I carried that shoebox around school all day even though I could have hidden it in my locker, but the curious looks were too gratifying to pass up, I was performing teenage depression with my head high, for once, I never spoke in class except to the teachers but I carried my shoebox and that said enough.
Someday I’ll publish my grade 8 diary and everyone will be exposed, and the world will see my glued-in horoscopes and fears that my “relationship” was “dysunctional” and my desperation to be a “hot girl” and the denim platform heels I wore to school with blue eyeshadow (in 2003, but my idea of a hot girl then was a cross between Cher Horowitz and Romy and Michele) and the quotes I diligently copied, later that year, after I broke up with my boyfriend and he started dating my best friend and I was friendless and alone and my skintight pink t-shirts became humiliating, no longer sexy. Quotes like Margaret Cho’s, “I don’t think I’m gay. I don’t think I’m straight. I think I’m just slutty. Where’s my parade?” and “Divorce? No. Murder? Yes!”, the latter of which I read giggling to my father and didn’t understand why he couldn’t get the joke.
Last weekend a poet friend asked me about my writing practice outside of tumblr and I couldn’t think what to say, I said that I don’t write at all, but looking through my laptop I see that that is blatantly untrue unless you belong to a school of thought that doesn’t see Chris Kraus as a writer, or any of the other “girls with their livejournals and tumblrs”. I write and write and write, I always have, but I’ve rarely called it that. I have so many old poems from when I was eighteen about how I was unworthy of the boy I wanted to be with because he was a real writer and I wasn’t anything. Someday I’ll post those poems, get beyond my embarrassment because the point isn’t how well-written they are or are not, it’s that they were angry and pathetic and portraits of Being a Girl and Losing and something in there was so much more vital about my crush’s entitled poems about women’s miraculous sexuality.
(Source: delirioushem.blogspot.com)
