Experimental Women’s Writing
Creating New Forms 🖊
Innovating Old Forms ♻
Gertrude Stein
Critiquing the Poetry World 👥
Constraint Based Writing
Harryette Mullen
Robin Coste Lewis
M. NourbeSe Phillip
Micheal North
Three Lives and Tender Buttons
Rewriting History 💥
Layli Long Soldier
Bhanu Kapil
On Stein And Mullen
Cathy Park Hong
Harryette Mullen
"Poetry and Identity"
Whereas
Humanimal
Zong!
Voyage of the Sable Venus
Recyclopedia
Sarah Dowling Article on Humanimal
Saying Kapil is saying civilization is violence, active civilizing, project of the british empire = project of turning humanimals into hum :
Brings up the question: What does it mean to civilize the non-normative body?
~ Prose Text
~ Kapil travels to the Bengal jungle to recreate and discover more about the true story of the two girls (Kamala and Amala) who were found living with wolves
~ Important contradiction between the natural instinct that Kapil feels when she visits India (where she has never lived) vs. Kamala and Amala never having that feeling when they are becoming humanized. Their natural sense of home lies with the wolves because that is the culture they grew up being exposed to
~Kapil makes it unclear to the reader who is speaking in each prose piece
~ Three stories are being told at the same time: the story of Amala and Kamala, Kapil's trip to India, and the story of Kapil's father who also experienced violence in the form of colonization (resisting the poetic idea of one subject)
~ What the author does make clear is the bodily violence that the two girls experienced during their "humanization."
~ Parallel between the violence Kapil's father faced and what the girls experienced
Otherness: Disability, Race Gender
Girls do not fit in either world
and Colonialism separates people from what they are used to
Tender Buttons
Schisms in the poetry world create limitations, and by overlooking minority writers, people ignore the multiple voices within the poetry because of prejudice. A White American's version of what poetry was in the 20th century is very white and untrue to what poetry actually looked like
~ Prose Poems
~ Declaritive, fragmented sentences
~Captures moments of consciousness independent of time and memory
~ Everyday objects from multiple and somewhat private perspectives
~ Making mundane objects feel strange and different to the reader
~Written within in a way that makes the reader feel like they are in Stein's domestic sphere
~ Language is ordered chaos
~ Descriptions of items are not catagorized by gender or race
~ Repetiton of objects and colors (ex. red)
~ Many of the descriptions symbolize feminity
~ Native American poet responding to the document, "A joint resolution to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United State"
Olympia Painting: Mullen writes a poem in response to this painting and Steins's "A Petticoat" peom.
- A story that "cannot be told but must be told"
- Found language (legal language) from Gregson vs. Gilbert case
- Gives voices to the lost African American men, women, and children
- Phillip does not write in an ordered, narrative manner because the enslaved people were not given voices or ever able to tell their narrative
- Innovates the language of the legal document to establish the true horror of the event
- Repeats terms such as, "water," and "evidence"
- The first poem gives voices to the dead and when read allowed by Phillip, her emotional delivery makes it feel like the reader/listener is experiancing someone drowning or dying of thirst
~ Enjambment for emphasize
~ Institutional critique that holds museums and institutions accountable for changing names of art
~ Rewriting tradition from an African American's standpoint, in hopes of more accurately and truthfully representing the history of minority groups
~ Writing about thousands of years of history through titles of artwork and descriptions of the art
~ She brings light to works of African American artists that were historically not properly recognized
~ Reoccuring theme of brokenness and descriptions of African American men and women as objects
"Modernism's African Mask: The Stein-Picasso Collabaratun"
"Delusions of Whiteness in Avant-Garde
Poetry on Current Events 🚩
Claudia Rankine
Citizen
Racism is not just part of the past but it is shaping the world we are living in today
Most explicitly political author read in the class
~ Tracks microaggressions until they turn into major aggressions between white people and people of color
~ Turns on events such as shootings to keep these events present in hopes of the US recognizing these injustices
~Uses poetry to uncover the moments that lead to racism
~Creates moments of recognition for many different readers
~Example: p.55, Rankine asks the reader to harry things that might not belong to them, hinting to the white audience, that they are involved and need to be better at recognizing the small microaggressions
Citizen ends with the Turner slave ship massacre image that is described by Phillip in Zong! (p.160)
Lessons: Long Soldier needs to teach people how to read her text much like how, Rankine needs to show people how to read events of racism
Like Melantha which has stereotypes of black men being “beasts” → instances that have quite real effects and Citizen points out these instances of black people being killed due to biases
Example poem: p.256 "A PETTICOAT. A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm."
Melanctha
Story about a mixed-race woman, either too black or too white
Unlike Tender Buttons because there are characters and a storyline. Additionally, Stein uses racist language and describes the black characters in a negative light (biased narrator).
This text is more clearly meant for the audience to understand because Stein uses conversation and descriptions that are more accessible to the reader.
There is a reoccurring theme of wandering throughout the novel. Stein uses all of the multiple definitions of the term throughout her repetition. In some instances it means promiscuous, and in others, it means the characters are mentally lost, as well as the act of physically wandering.
Poem: p.11 “A light white disgraceful sugar looks pink, wears an air, pale compared to shadow standing by. To plump recliner, naked truth lies. Behind her shadow wears her color, arms full of flowers. A rosy charm is pink. And she is ink. The mistress wears no petticoat or leaves. The other in shadow, a large, pink dress."
Mullen actively incorporates Stein's words and descriptions of the Olympia painting to criticize Western cultures' version of the perfect, "blush" white woman's femininity.
Trimmings
~ Allows for a multiplicity of interpretations
~Intertextual writing using found language from folk songs, and other writers and artists
~Interested in femininity and the "ideal woman" in the 20th Century
~ Trimmings are literally acessories/unnessary items
~ Mullen is operating metonymically, she is interested in associations
~ For example: garters, stockings, and shoes (trimmings) stand in place of/are associated with women and femininity
~ Perspective of issues of feminity from a person of color
Lewis's poetry works in conversation with artists and authors like Phillip and Mullen
Lewis critisizes the original "Birth of Venus" painting and compares it to the etching from 1787 "Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies."
~Long Soldier is very aware of her audience
~Circular story, starting and ending with the theme of grass which represents both the land that was taken from the Native American people and the fact that White Americans must start listening to the concerns and feeling of other nonwhite individuals
~ The author mockingly criticizes the disclaimer section of the Apology in that the U.S says that regardless of anything said, no action can be taken
~ Through her poetry, Long Soldier shows that the Apology was more for the US Government to have proof that they recognized what happened, but the Native American people did not benefit from the document
~ Diction in the poem creates dualities in meanings
~ White writers and artists used other traditions without properly acknowledging them
~ Black avant-gardes are tokenized
~Minority poets get pushed into mainstream poetry because historically to write about race is to write about self and is not " avant-gardes."
~ Explains Stein and Picasso's use of racial otherness as a form of representation
~ Criticizing their use of representations of otherness to make an aesthetic interest for white people
Epigraph: "Now make room in the mouth for grassesgrassesgrasses."
Fragmented Sentences
Themes: Assimilation and conforming to the ways of white people
Questions what it means to be a citizen in the United States
Minority poet who broke out of the "mainstream" category although she was writing about her own culture
Through poetry, these works both address horrific moments of racism
