suzanne nixon

*

I'm going to be sexy 69 next month
I don't watch TV
so I don't see the images
nor do I read "women's" magazines

the only place I encounter
the anti-ageing business
is on the Net
they have me targeted
at yahoo
for all kinds of obviously
terribly done photoshopped
anti-wrinkle lotions potions and masks

or I see some ads at msnbc
wherein young women
in their 30's and younger
are being sales pitched
for anti-wrinkle creams
PUUUULEEEEZ!

I've taken a frank
photographic record
of some years for some years
of my ageing
it's been a fascinating learning experience for me

I haven't found the experience
of growing old
to be anything like I thought it would
biggest best surprise of my life
(along with the pleasures of birthing and raising my sons)

I am totally healthy
so the illness chronic or otherwise
aspect is not in play

I have a high energy level
I work out sporadically weight training
{my mian weight lifting is the little contest I have
when I grocery shop
to try getting everything in the house
in one trip
which frequently means 6 or 7 bags at once
easily 60 pounds}

I have had more and more varied
and with more partners sex
since I turned 55 than all the time
before that

my hair which is moonstruck silver
actually beautiful which it NEVER
was in the mouse brown stage of my life

though in the last year or so
it's started to thin
and as it is my greatest physical
vanity I'm about to try some hormonal balance
alternative medicine formulas

and my skin
this is really
the only thing about ageing that irritates me
crepey thin skin
just no restorative bounce in it

it's almost as though I have to chose
between the infamous "second belly"
of abdomonal fat

or slimmer but with crepey skin

*laughing*

it doesn't seem to matter
to the man who lives with me
who is, just for the record
(okay ___and a little boast)
a quarter century younger than I am

and in terms of my sexuality
I've never been so engaged sexually

the things you hear about and dread:
vaginal dryness reduced sex drive
atrophied sexual parts

absolutely none of that
going on here

so in some senses I am off the grid
where the horrors of ageing
are so frequently and slickly articulated
and visualized

I wonder some about how I'll Be
when I'm 80 90. . .

and yeah I do think
about my death
I've having such a splendid time
being alive
and I have stuffed
am still stuffing my head
with so much Wonder
it puzzles and pisses me
to think all "that" will just
vanish
all of it assembled from the life experience
whhich has been so enriching
it seems unseemly
for it to just vanish

but exploding super novae
probably think the same

so I forego anyone else's definition
of how a woman ages
and only go by this experience
I'm having

and I'm telling you
with the thought it might
alleviate some anxieties

being able to find positives
in anything that happens
(even the horrendous ones:
my favorite mantra at those times is
"but it'll make for good poems")
i.e., being able to say and believe
"There is no better life than this one."
will prevent you
hagging up
and you can transform instead
into
a pussy crone

*

suzanne nixon:

in my soul I'm a middlewesterner
through and through
gobs of formal education:
PhD (History of Science)
post-doc (Psychology):
mainly though from
life and
reading and writing
spent my working life as a therapist (primarily border-line personality
diagnosed women)
and a planner of medical education curriculum change
I started writing poetry as soon as I learned how to write
then stopped for several decades before starting seriously
again when I was 55.

carrie etter


*

The Occupation of Iraq

Wounds under plaster or gauze are not wounds
to the beholder. These early daffodils come to bloom
and die in four days. The trick is to lose well,
which is not the same thing as losing profoundly,
not always. The swaddled wound appears already
on its way to recovery; it must, to preserve the pallor
of the bandage, have been washed clean, loose skin
trimmed. The idea was to fill the flat with buds and leave
for France. No bodily injury produces more pain
than that to the nerve, yet the eye cannot perceive it.
We left for France. The dentist overfilled
the canal, sent the sealant six millimeters into
the lingual nerve, delivered six hectares of misery.
On the first night, someone said Canadienne when I
feared Américaine, and I smiled. Winning comes with
a dictionary, all the right words without rules for syntax.
There is no exponent to relate my worst pain
to an entire country's wounds. We came back
from France, and the room was yellow with dying.
All we could see was loss.

*

this poem first appeared in Shearsman

Carrie Etter's is an American expatriate resident in England since 2001. She has two books forthcoming: The Tethers (Seren, 2009) and Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2010). She is member of the creative writing faculty at Bath Spa University.

elisa gabbert

*

WALKS ARE USELESS II
..................After Chris Tonelli

There’s nothing to be sad about.
My sadness grows restless, nostalgic

for a better bore, the tragic bore
of yesteryear. The stink of the city

grows worse, but at the same rate
that we get used to it. ‘Tis a bore

and nothing more. Even the clouds
are bored, arrange themselves into more

and more exotic vegetables.
Where is the war? I can’t see it.

I feel incredible. What I mean is,
I feel like no one would believe me.

*

Elisa Gabbert's recent work can be found in Colorado Review, Diagram, Eleven Eleven, Meridian, Pleiades, Typo, Washington Square, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks from Kitchen Press, Thanks for Sending the Engine (2007) and My Fear of X (forthcoming). She is also co-author, with Kathleen Rooney, of Something Really Wonderful (dancing girl press, 2007) and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008).

The poem originally appear in COMBATIVES, the print offshoot of H_NGM-N.

elisabeth workman

*

ABRAMOVIC ABRAMOVICH

Pour $100,000 champagne plus a kilo
of honey over the city of Reykjavík.

Call it a yacht, a leak, a cataract of
angel juice gushing and still famished.

We were left in the scarcity terminal
with an aura strictly American.

A real killjoy depleted of Billy the Kid
reduced to cynical art timers of hunger.

Strike thousands of years of living together
you say it was like pouring everything out

in the way that rocks are documentary
Los Angeles oozing quasi-imaginary

epochs of icy blankness blinking
into being the ancestral city rim.

Beauty brain freeze the proper noun
walking barefoot over diamonds

the world rolling in ecstasy at its feet.

*

Elisabeth Workman's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in fourW, Absent, Alice Blue Review, and West Wind Review, among others. Her chapbooks include _a city_a cloud_ (Dusie 2006) and _Opolis_ (Dusie 2007). She works for a visual art museum in Minneapolis.

lara glenum

*

Normalcore


Beware the Normopath............. knocking honey
into your facegrill

Crustyflaps
will crush your teeth into smiling

Give the Normopath a flabjob
&
watch his boomstick blow & break
open your eye

Minkycore


I’m flexing my eye-pods
& feeling nasty
...........................I milk
...........................the Normopath
............& lube out into a sea of congealed pig organs





..............The woods laugh out a skin




My eye-pods break open &
A hundred other eyes
roll out

I’m filing down my hooves


I’m waiting for Mino
with a thousand open legs





*








Lara Glenum is the author of The Hounds of No (Action Books, 2005) and the about-to-be-released Maximum Gaga (Action Books), from which the above poems are taken. She is also the co-editor of Gurlesque, an anthology of contemporary women's poetry and visual art, with Arielle Greenberg (Saturnalia Books, 2009). She lives in Athens, GA.

evie shockley

*

a sonnet for stanley tookie williams (12/29/1953 -12/13/2005)


won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom?
‘cause all i ever have: redemption songs.
--bob marley

all month this country has careened toward cold
and winter’s celebrations: what a star
announced—a birth—and then a chance to fold
a year away, pull one fresh from the drawer,

if not clean, well, unworn. in just a few
months arrives the ice-hot day of the dead-
come-back-to-life—time then to ask how new
and re- beginnings differ. mary bled

for the december miracle, as some-
one must. did you imagine sacrifice
as you called the crips to life? did they come,
those youngbloods, at the crackling of your voice,

like lazarus to christ? vigilant night.
on the road to san quentin, candlelight.

December 19, 2005

this poem first appeared in, the southern review.

to see the minus

the ghost. the thing we could touch if its throbbing
absence were any more vast, any more like a molecule

of jupiter, all mass, weighing us down, but nothing
we can put a finger on. we squint to see the minus: water
take away holy, take away book, take away tree, take away

phantom limb, a connection our brains keep trying to make
with the dead and gone. minus family, minus portrait,

minus heirloom, minus hand-me-down, minus hand.
subtract the noise in the streets. subtract the streets. minus

keepsake, minus god’s sake, minus evidence of things unseen:
the ghost. the thing we could touch if our throbbing

phantom limb really connected. our brains keep trying to make
sense of it. the life’s work, the first or second generation’s
at last accumulated wealth, gone with the wind, washed clean

away in polluted water. if ever there were ample space
for faith and despair, it is here. room enough to tackle a vision.

this poem first appeared in, PMS: poemmemoirstory

*

Evie Shockley is the author of a half-red sea (2006) and two chapbooks, 31 words * prose poems (2007) and The Gorgon Goddess (2001). In 2007, she guest edited ~QUEST~, a special issue of MiPoesias featuring the work of contemporary African American poets. Currently a guest editor of jubilat, she teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

hoa nguyen


*



I LIKE BEING LUCKY

...........Stupid in-box
Time...............a shimmery
autumn backdrop

Long precise shadows.....I clutch
a powder-blue pillbox purse
and brooding eyebrows

and stepping on the undead
the suburb-surviving zombies

I spear the bloody head onto the fence post

Trumpet
..........The Flood Next Time




BIG HEART SMALL HEART

Growing a heart ............another heart
A deep cavity in the shape of an X

The eyes are hollow or covered
...........Good fix ........God ............Bad boy
Percale sheets and cooking spray


What isn’t an historic moment
crossing it out
.....................bundled

War—Mouth—Eyes
(Shiva/Horus)

..........The will to live/die
is not incompatible

*

Hoa Nguyen lives in Austin TX with the poet Dale Smith and their two sons. Together they edit the book imprint Skanky Possum and curate a reading series. Forthcoming books by Hoa include "Kiss A Bomb Tattoo" (effing) and "Hecate Lochia" (Hot Whiskey). She is an Aquarius and a Fire Horse.

stephanie strickland

*



HURACAN’S HARP 121




without knowledge to obtain the effects of knowledge
...............carpenter bee
...............cervical ganglia

heaped up wave hanging in the air for centuries
...............key conservation
...............(not a hair lost)

effected inside glial cells not volumes what is
...............storied
...............in volumes or in acid-free bits is

on (the) line constantly conversing with the blowing sheet
...............impeding
...............the bee



*


Stephanie Strickland’s fifth book of poems, Zone : Zero, just published by Ahsahta, includes two interactive poems on CD. She co-edited Electronic Literature Collection/1 and a recent issue of the Iowa Review Web. She has taught experimental poetry and hypermedia literature at many colleges and universities, most recently the University of Utah.

"Huracan’s Harp 121,” was first published in A Sing Economy, Flim Forum Press, 2008.

elizabeth treadwell


3 from "Virginia or the
mud-flap girl"




*



Gentry



suspect & friend
the missing guard, the holy nightblock
these smally cells, fair linguist
as extreme as a worn & fractured bank-note
the folks who'd been attending their lives arrived late
in soiled dresses
the daffy windbreak, the goody bell-hop,
this flophouse ale





P. vivax


a little god comes in & protests
will as extensity holler
in all your original flapping sins,
your 17th century arcade
beating down staunchest river
some summer slag-heap
in theory butler
bitten, plow
some jailed hintback
in the doctorlight







Doily Construct School of Itself



crown head refracture
in filth up to its teeth
the haughty unhinged
this armored petty
implies the fractious
vanilla half-shot
(just another puckered asshole
caught fingering the moon)
in our task-mask, crown-girls
buried in logic, grasping at straws
all the pickled magic of the spheres






*


Elizabeth Treadwell is a proud member of the Irish, English, & Cherokee diasporas. She lives with her family in northern California. These are parts of her long poem, " Virginia or the mud-flap girl," which was inspired in part by Jimmie Durham's sculpture "Pocahontas' underwear." Her books include Chantry, Cornstarch Figurine, Birds &Fancies, and Wardolly.









http://elizabethtreadwell.com/

http://contpo.blogspot.com/

kirsten kaschock



*

MOTET


In artistry and largess, rearrange them.
In anger, they are to be arranged, re-
arranged, then done again. They are angels—
rearrange them. They are disastrous. They will
resist. Yet, do not cease. Glacial
in their garments, regal in glades and groves,

in dense grasses—distressful—
as they, in-inebriate, sling back sober growlers
of lager, or indifferently wrangle geraniums
into itty pots, better at to tend
and to protect than obstetric nurses
are, or prostitutes heeled precariously above

loved window boxes—rearrange them.
Their glands and ovaries. Make their knotless
hearts bear the pendulous weight of
bowels. Make them start
to resemble humanity. Deform them
with anatomy. Given the difficulty of insides,

they would not be so aether. Flawlessness
is mere, a porcelain mug in which such
unbearabilities steep: terrible
symmetry and so forth. It is time
they were not right. It is time they were
treated to the vast interior they lack.

Next to the sofa—sit the wingback, float
the ottoman in front of puddled drapes.
Curl up inside an angel: be
the fetus. In this way, they
could be made to matter. Off heads
of pins, not new age schtick, no longer

beads on philosophical abaci, nor tendrils
withering in the schizophrenic mind
—but bodied. So they may truly be
ours and us theirs, we'd say. All the while
we'd know—bothered not—the translation
into mother to be exaltation. Murder also.


*

Kirsten Kaschock is the author of _Unfathoms_ (Slope Editions 2004) and _a beautiful name/for a girl_ (upcoming from Ahsahta Press). She is a PhD student in dance at Temple University in Philadelphia where she lives with her three sons and their father.

Gurlesque, part 3

Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Responses elsewhere

---

[An aside from Lara Glenum, Greenberg's coeditor on the Gurlesque anthology, due out from Saturnalia in 2009.]

To me, the gurlesque is very much about performing the female grotesque. In “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Sianne Ngai rolls out an astute theory about how violence implicitly lurks in the aesthetic of the “cute.” Ngai notes, “The formal attributes associated with cuteness—smallness, compactness, softness, simplicity, and pliancy—call forth specific affects: helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency.” And further, “In its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle.”

There are currently a number of women poets who locate “cuteness” in the realm of the female grotesque and, in extended poetic sequences, actively perform the dialectic between “cuteness,” violence, and female monstrosity (think Aase Berg’s guinea pigs, Ariana Reines’s cows, Anne Boyer’s “Dark Deer,” Danielle Pafunda’s peek-a-boo violence). These poets redefine female “cuteness” as a trope of self-willed (or culturally-willed) deformity. By appropriating and violently animating stereotypes attached to desirable female behavior, these poets are attempting to make an register of derogatory signification to collapse. (There are certainly male counterparts to this project of gender-bending violence: Johannes, Tao Lin, Joe Wenderoth and Jon Leon, for example).

Cuteness, though, is prototypically the realm of pre-pubescent girls and their small, furry companions, which is the territory of Aase Berg’s guinea pig poems. Berg’s work radically upends the notion that women, young girls in particular, are free from sadistic compulsion and cruelty (Chelsea Minnis and Cathy Wagner’s poems often do this, too). The term “cute” also surfaces when teenage girls (and even grown women) talk about men they’re aroused by. To call a sexual object “cute” thus expresses a linguistic deformation – girls and women have traditionally been forbidden to speak about (or even experience) the stirrings of sexual desire. The demotion a sexually arousing man to the status of a puppy or a cupcake represents a phenomena of stunted female sexuality (which is only achieved through a kind of cultural pruning and binding through which women are divorced form their own sexual response). Cuteness, then, reveals a state of deformity or monstrosity.

All this is something that gurlesque poetry plays with and attempts to reverse, though not through Sharon Olds-style confession. Gurlesque poets, on the whole, don’t believe in a stable, unified self, which is why their work is performance and not confession or persona (persona implies a person/self behind the mask). The gurlesque acknowledges its own artifice as well as the radical artifice of gender. The gurlesque is also very much about paratactic identity: saying I am X *and* Y *and* Z, when all these identity categories (X, Y and Z) seem to contradict one another. This kind of monstrous amalgam not only upends assumptions about gender, it also radically distorts the stability of the speaking “I.”

To close, I wouldn’t say the gurlesque is strictly limited to the cuteness and violence thing, but it’s certainly a place that Arielle’s original theory and my interest in the female grotesque overlap. (Hence, the birth of the Gurlesque anthology, which is due out from Saturnalia in 2009.)

[Danielle & Arielle continue...]

Well, then I've got to ask what’s happened to the Gurlesque poets you originally noticed? Are they still Gurlesque? How have they developed, or recalibrated the aesthetic? How is the larger poetry community responding to this work?

I think it’s a bit too soon to say. Brenda Shaughnessy’s second book is about to come out, and when Becca Klaver, one of my graduate students, presented on Shaughnessy’s work in the fall of 2006, there was evidence that Shaunessy had undergone a pretty dramatic shift in aesthetic and content. She gave an interview in which she talked about casting off the loveliness and connected obliquity of her first book for a much more straight-forward, even tough, voice. And I know she’s pregnant now, so I wonder if motherhood will change her work again.

Chelsey Minnis’s second book, BAD BAD, is just out and is wonderful, a definite continuation and furthering of what was going on in Zirconia; I’m very excited. Brenda Coultas has a book of ghost stories coming out from Coffee House this fall which I think will be a masterpiece—and certainly, with its interest in the romance of hauntings and the instability of storytelling, it has Gurlesque overtones, but I don’t know how female, or feminine, the book will ultimately be.

Devil’s advocate: Have any of the Gurlesque poets grown up? Has anyone rejected girly, sweet, or flirty, opting for more womanesque tropes? Does the link to girlhood compromise our standing as serious poets, or does it serve to undermine the conventional literary hierarchy wherein avuncular older men usher in virile young boys, and women poets (hard old crones, delirious sex kittens, drag-geniuses) are granted honorary membership?

Well, of course, these are things the Gurlesque poets risk: the potential limits of a girly world of images, the desire or need to outgrow such a world, and the chance of not being taken seriously with girlhood as your subject matter. But, I mean, I’m sorry, if the world does not think that girls and girlhoods are important and serious, fuck them! That’s the whole point. Girls are serious, interesting, and their development and childhood experiences impact the whole culture and the whole world. I also think the presumed limitation of girly images is something of a fallacy: why would girlhood and the girly be any more limited than, say, tropes of nature, or of romantic love, or of any number of other traditional poetic subjects?

As for growing up and out of the Gurlesque, I’ve thought about this in my own work. Certainly My Kafka Century—which is about faith and Jewish ethnicity and the Holocaust—is less attached to issue of the girly, in many ways, than my first Given, which had no such thematic thread in play. But my second book is actually still full of ponies and hair and female anatomy. After that book was completed, I had a baby, a girl, and I became far less prolific and also much more direct and urgent and less playful than I’d been, I think. We’ll see what happens next. But the truth is, now I am mothering a daughter, and I’m going to be writing during her girlhood, so I don’t imagine any of these interests or tropes will be left that far behind, though they will of course be altered by her different, and 21st century, experiences.

Our girls are about the same age, and I'm hoping they see girlhood as a privileged strangeness. When my daughter first started looking more like a girl and less like a baby, it was like seeing my kid in drag. I'd squint and think, can she look like a boy? Can she look like a human? We didn't really use the words "girl" or "boy" with her until her grandparents introduced them a few months ago. We'd say "baby" or "big kid." But, now people make a big deal out of her girl-ness, and I want her to think of that as a desirable quality--one that opens up bizarre realms of subjectivity, rife with existential possibility.

Yeah, girlhood as an option, and an option that is at once strong, weird, fragile, wild, creative—all those things. Willa, my daughter, said the other day, “I be a big boy when I grow up?” and I said, “Sure!” So for a day or two she wanted me to call her “Big Boy” every where we went, but other days she’s a ballerina or a character from a book named Junie—all sorts of people. I want her to feel that ability to morph and identity-shift for her whole life.

On the other hand, sometimes we’ll be passing a construction site and talking about the trucks and she’ll say “big boys fix that street” and I’ll say “well, yes, and big girls, too” and she says, “No, just big boys.” It’s worrisome, and possibly inevitable. You can fight your fight in your own home but the larger culture still exists—we just have to keep working on modeling the critical thinking!

Finally, do you see evidence of a Gurlesque aesthetic in other arts?

One thing I’ve noticed is a trend towards Gurlesque visual art by young women artists. Notable artists like Amy Cutler and Laura Owens play with childlike images of girls in braids and cute baby animals and bluebirds as a way to draw attention to the beauty and magnetism of such images as well as to subvert them, demystify them, complicate them. These artists, like the poets, are unafraid to delve into the dark recesses of girlhood imagination and playacting. I see Amy Cutler especially as epitomizing the Gurlesque visually, and I believe she has already had an influence among even younger artists.

It’s happening in film, too, in woman-centered (though not always woman-directed) narratives. I remember being so impressed when I saw Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures when it first came out in 1994 because here was a film that showed the imaginative games of two girlfriends as being utterly hallucinogenic, brilliant, violent, powerful--so powerful that these very sweet, smart adolescent girls end up killing one of their mothers (and it was based on a true story, of course). The way Jackson shoots the imaginary sequences is so lush, over the top and dizzying, and not just because it’s fanciful, but because it is incredibly potent: the combined mental energies of two girls!

I was likewise taken with Secretary (dir. Steven Shainberg 2002), mostly for the utterly Gurlesque scene of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character lovingly fondling her special box of tools which she uses to cut herself: tools of mutilation and self-loathing, and they are in a pretty, girly box covered in glitter and decoupage. This is just one detail in a film filled with very Gurlesque depictions of desire and lyricism. Most recently, and directed by the marvelous Miranda July, Me, You and Everyone We Know (2005) has such a weird tone that veers from cheery to brutal and is able to be somehow cheery and brutal at once, too. It’s also a film that allows its child characters to possess sexualities that are complicated and perverse (a word I do not mean as any kind of slur--I am all for perversity).

I’m also interested in the connections between the Gurlesque and the freak-folk movement, with musicians like Joanna Newsom who looks and sings like an elf but is also very self-possessed. I think there are other young women musicians who embody the Gurlesque, but I’d need some help on this. One artist I know about, though (as mentioned in Part 2), is Kimya Dawson, an “anti-folk” musician whose album my cute fiend sweet princess seems very Gurlesque to me, as one might expect from the title. (It’s such a Gurlesque title! Rock on!) On MySpace she describes her own music as “happy and sad and scared and brave all mixed up together,” which is a great way to talk about the Gurlesque. I just saw on Livejournal that Kimya had a baby girl recently…interesting considering our discussion on motherhood.

I’d love to curate a show that explored the parallel Gurlesque happening in visual arts, film, music and poetry. I’m hoping one day to get such a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago and tour it around. I dream big.

More broadly, I’m curious about the rise of the neo-Burlesque movement, which is especially prevalent—and interesting—within the queer community. Do young queer women and transgendered people feel safe enough now, finally, to fuck with the performance of gender in this very public and playful and sexy way? It seems to me that using Burlesque, which was historically a marginalized and male-centered subculture, reclaiming it as a space to celebrate female-centered sexuality and gender fluidity, is a kind of frontier for art-making.

Feed Your Gurliosity

The blogs are a'buzz. Love, hate, boredom, cooler than thou, less cool than thou, deformed lust, where did I put my pseudo-vacuous speakface?

Fraught stuff over at Johannes Goransson's. You can read them in order with their attendant resplendent comment streams:

1. Gurlesque
2. Gurlesque (few more notes)
3. Gurlesque (brief note)
4. Valley Girl
5. Gurlesque
6. Lara Glenum on Gurlesque (see above post coming soon!)

K. Lorraine Graham reflects and questions in her ever-sharp fashion, and reminds us what it means to got back:
1. Still thinking about bad girls, and also Gurlesque
2. I like the grotesque. Going back to the moment of horror again and again is soothing.
3. My butt is like, so not big, but whatever

Elizabeth Treadwell gives good disgust with OMG, coy?

Jilly Dybka muses on why her work hasn't got that Gurlesque thing, but has got plenty of nails up noses and other such thrills!

And K. Silem Mohammad is totally using up the culture trash poem garbage--leave some unicorns for the rest of us, Kasey! You are a unicorn hog!

Sianne Ngai's indispensable in relation.

Also, Johannes points us to this great poetics statement by Ariana Reines, "Sucking"

and if you haven't read this story by my admired co-conspirator Alissa Nutting, then you are missing the heartsmashing business of a Gurlesque-ish fiction. If that's shameless friend-promotion, I don't care. It's a really good story. It has poop, psychedelics, mastectomies, and clam shaped bed love.

The final segment of my chat with Arielle will go up over the weekend.

Gurlesque, part 2

Introduction
Part 1

[Danielle & Arielle continue where they left off in Part 1...]

That makes me wonder if Gurlesque happens in poetries other than US American. Lyn Crosbie, a Canadian poet, comes to mind. Pam Brown’s review of Kate Lilley’s Versary compares her tactics to the Gurlesque. And Don Mee Choi’s translations of Kim Hyesoon or Johannes Goransson’s of Aase Berg might speak to the more grotesque end of the Gurlesque spectrum? At any rate, it seems there’s a potential for dialing out in Gurlesque, for the strategy morphing across communities, perhaps precisely because of it’s identity play—it’s reanimation of the lyric I—that post-avant poetics might benefit from. Or so I’ve been thinking of late, but that’s a whole other volume of worms!

Let’s back up a bit. Originally, you link Gurlesque tendencies to the influence of Second Wave mothers (and their conflicted relationship to feminism), and to the images of women on television and in movies in the 70s and 80s. How do the shifts in feminist practices and theories as of 2007 inform the work of Gurlesque poets? Are we resolving our mothers’ conflicts?

No, I don’t think we’re resolving our mothers' conflicts. I think all you have to do is look at the recent spate of books on the issue of motherhood—the work/home debate, the rise of the parenting expert, the “anxiety of motherhood,” etc.—to see that women’s roles and the question of how to be a fulfilled and balanced woman in this culture are still very much at issue. (I am only using motherhood as an example here; I don’t mean to suggest it is the sole or most vital issue within feminism.)

But I think we are at least giving voice to those conflicts, engaging in them, and a poetry that avoids linearity is a smart way to do this, to recognize the complexity and weirdness and variability of our experiences. I do think our generation—or perhaps the one just behind us—is more able to see gender as a fluid or unstable, to recognize the importance of race and class on issues of sexuality. Many of my feminist students simply accept gender as fluid, recognize it as such, rather than being stuck in many of the dualities under which the previous feminist movements labored. It seems to me that this acceptance of instability and fluidity is the fertile ground for the next wave of art-making, and that it will appear not only through content, but through form: art that is more conscious of breaking genre conventions as it moves toward a hybridity we are only starting to see emerge in our lived experience.

Wait, let me interrupt--it's exciting, but how can you tell your students have more fluid senses of gender? What does that look like in the classroom or on the page?

In the classroom, it’s rooms full of students who see themselves as queer, polysexual, who identify not as any one label or thing but as humans dipping in and out of various gendered experiences. And I have young women poets who are writing very frank poems about their vaginas, for example, using all sorts of words I personally have never used in a poem. On the page, too, my students shape-shift through first person narrative, enacting various sloppy personas that do not stand still. I guess what I’m saying is that it would have seemed brave, when I was in college or graduate school, to “come out” in a poem as a lesbian or gay man and write about those experiences, but my current students would think that was pretty banal or sentimental. They’re beyond that kind of confessional narrative, into something more hybrid, more shrugging (as in, “so what if I do this or don’t do this?” and all-encompassing (as in, “yes, I’m this, but I’m also this”). It is really very exciting.

And this isn't all twenty-somethings in America, right? In more conservative environs, I've tripped over such rotten chestnuts as: feminism is dead, feminism is for baby-killers, men really are smarter than women, men and women are already totally equal and we don't need feminism, etc. Your students, young adults who experience gender as fluid despite the desperate national insistence on static roles: do you think they feel driven to represent? To express a lived experience that so obviously contradicts the party line?

I don’t know that they’re even aware of the party line. It’s a blessing and a curse to exist in a progressive bubble like Columbia College, a downtown arts school in a major metropolitan area that typically votes Democrat. Their whole world--at school at least--is extremely accepting of the further reaches of lived experience. Though of course I know some of their families of origin or hometowns are much more typically American in ideology. So maybe my students just feel free to be these people at Columbia. Maybe they have that twenty-something immortality/invisibility going on, or maybe they know how lucky they are. I know how lucky I am to teach them.

If Second Wave mothers helped produce this generation of Gurlesque poets (whose presentation and performance of gender differ from those of women poets in the Second Wave generations), what happens to the Gurlesque when these poets begin to take on childbirth and/or motherhood from the first-person perspective?

Again, I think it’s a little early to say, but the place to find the answers will no doubt be in Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff’s Not for Mothers Only. The anthology is just out from Fence Books, a press that, under Rebecca’s editorial direction, has been at the forefront of bringing out the most exciting Gurlesque literature, I think. I might also look toward Cathy’s recent poems themselves.

Another good press to look at is Action Books, which, in its first year, brought out three books, all by younger women and mothers: my second book My Kafka Century (which, as I’ve said, is not too Gurlesque, though I think some of the pregnancy poems in there get closest), the Swedish poets Aase Berg’s terrifying and hysterical Remainland in translation, and, most importantly here, Lara Glenum’s book The Hounds of No, which, in its manifesto bravado and fascination with the grotesque and voluptuously monstrous female body, is a great place to start. At the time these books were published, Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson found it odd that they’d rather randomly chosen to publish three books “about” motherhood, but now they are themselves parents, so I wonder how this will impact the press.

So many interesting young women poets are choosing to become mothers now, which is very exciting for poetry, and for the Gurlesque—and for the world! Not for Mothers Only documents this in a thrilling way.

How does Gurlesque disarm, destabilize, or creep out the patriarchy?

Oh, in what ways doesn’t it! At its best—I mean, if it is doing the work I imagine—then it should be completely directed toward disarming, destabilizing and creeping out the patriarchy: by owning a sexuality that is at once “innocent” and very dark; by positing girl-childish ephemera as important and central to the culture; by taking on a tone that is flirty and coy and also angry and potentially violent. Hell, just by positing a woman’s voice which is unapologetically girly, and which views girliness—a weird, conflicted, desirous, callous, fantastic, strong, mean, sweet, loud girliness, which to me is the only true girliness there is, because little girls are indeed all these things—as a legitimate mode for art-making. Unfortunately, I think we are in a place where that alone is still radical.

I do, though, worry about a trend I am seeing in poetry of a sort of second-tier, bland Gurlesque; one that takes on the imagery and motifs of girlhood, Victoriana, the burlesque, etc., but simply reifies its prettiness without risking anything. Perhaps now that these Gurlesque poets, and other Gurlesque artists, have been around for a decade or so, there is a trickle-down effect, or perhaps it’s just that other women who grew up in the same historical moment are bringing the same flotsam—mermaids, sparkles, unicorns, petticoats, etc.—into their work without the attention to politics or avant-garde practice. And that seems a real shame to me. I am reading a lot of work by young women poets these days that traverses a very pretty—and, at this point, very familiar—landscape that ultimately seems rather hollow, because I don’t see much vulnerability, either on the part of the speaker or in how the work functions.

Does the Gurlesque produce a corporeal female subject that reinscribes or reclaims the conventional literary female body? How does this differ from the corporeal in work by Plath, for example?

I’m not sure of the answer to this, but my hunch or hope is that the female body in the Gurlesque is a less victimized—though no less endangered—one. Or, that if it is victimized, it takes a more sado-masochistic/pleasured view of this, if that makes any sense. The body in Plath is a literal battleground: in those poems, the body is often dissected, dismantled. It is, to use standard feminist theory jargon, the object of the Gaze. The body in a Gurlesque poem is just as likely to be enacting the Gaze, or the violence, or the objectification, as receiving it, or might possibly reassemble as soon as it’s been disassembled, magically and monstrously.

For example, in Plath’s “Tulips,” the speaker says “I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses/And my history to the anesthetist and my body to the surgeons” and “…I have no face,/I have wanted to efface myself” but in Minnis’s “Big Doves,” “wrath spills out” of the speaker’s “heart” and the speaker “want[s] to be…flexed…thrashed…spiraled…and neurally lathed.”

Of course, one can find seething, strong poems in Plath as well, but I do believe the Gurlesque poems mark a shift from lack of sexual agency or ownership to intense vying for or owning of sexual agency, even if the Gurlesque poems also acknowledges the difficult struggle therein.

I see what you're saying about the body-as-object in a poem like "Tulips", the abdication of ownership, but I think, too that Plath is doing some fabulous violence to the Gaze. Rather than proffering up the classical female body (all surface, smooth and pleasingly inert), she's locking the Gaze on a seething (to use your term) carapace, a worm and hate and passion-filled paradox. Body the prison and body the vehicle, body the grave and body the birth bag, etc. The germ of dissembling/reassembling and the magical-monstrous female Frankenstein self seem really present in Plath. I think these tendencies have been edited out of too many readings. Plath's not the only contemporary woman poet folks like to look at slant, but you're on the editorial board of Court Green, so she's an ideal inquiry--have you noticed a Gurlesque response to your Plath issue? Are we rewriting our reading of Plath?

We’re still in the midst of that issue, so it’s perhaps too soon to say, but thus far, I’d have to say no, sadly. Most of the poetry we’ve been sent is in tribute to Plath, and if it is out of Plath’s aesthetic, then it focuses on her (wonderous) use of sound, but not the grotesque pleasures you’re mentioning. I just co-wrote an essay on the importance of a new reading of Plath with Becca Klaver, but our focus was on the ways in which teenaged girl readers connect with her (which I’m sure has something to do with the Gurlesqueness!), not on Plath’s use of monstorous female image. Plath, goddess love her, is so endlessly worth reexamining.

Back to the present day poets. Likely you’ve come across more agents of Gurlesque in the past four years. Are they more widely published? Are the first Gurlesque poets influencing others? And has your original essay noticeably influenced any of them?

I’m not sure; it’s only been a few years, really. But I’ll offer these two personal anecdotes: I received Sarah Vap’s manuscript American Spikenard (which features a handmade and rather ominous doll on the cover, by the way) from Iowa Press because they wanted me to comment on it, and as I read it, I thought “This poet has read my essay on the Gurlesque and written a book that fulfills every characteristic I talk about!” It was uncanny, and I was sure that was why Iowa sent it to me. But when I got in touch with Sarah (who is only slightly younger than I am, I think), she said she had never read my essay.

And as a professor, I teach women in their 20s who have read, and are very excited by, poets like Matthea Harvey, Shanna Compton, Olena Kalytiak Davis--poets I’d consider within the Gurlesque spectrum. I certainly didn’t have any poets like that given to me in college classes. Access to poetry like this is no doubt influencing these young poets, but, then, I don’t presume that most college students are accessing these poets as easily as mine, who live in a large city, often consider themselves bohemian and radical, and attend a program that favors innovative aesthetics.

It also seems to me that you, Danielle, were part of a Gurlesque mini-movement at the University of Georgia, with some of the women who were in the Creative Writing PhD program at the same time as you were: Kirsten Kaschock, Sabrina Orah Mark, Lara Glenum and you all make work that is Gurlesque. Obviously your work is all very different, but I like to think that the group of you (and maybe others I don’t know about?) worked in concert, supporting one another as friends and poets, and the result was work that has pushed the grotesque/medical end of the Gurlesque spectrum, which is something I see the four of you as having in common. Do you think there’s anything to that?

Danielle Pafunda responds and offers an aside:

I really cut my teeth at Bard College in the nineties where a senior project might entail traveling to Amsterdam to learn from a revered stripper, and then coming home to perform a political commentary strip show for the faculty and students. I spent years experimenting in perhaps slightly less scintillating fashion (that is, more or less clothed) with the seemingly inarticulable lived experience of dense subject position meets conflicting cultural allegiances meets the multiple layers of gender performativity—in other words trying to write poems that didn’t edit out the incompatible layers. I still felt like a girl a lot of the time, and that still felt spooky, dangerous, explosive. I often felt mannish, and sometimes I just felt like the immune-compromised creature I’ve been from the get-go. Each of these selves was (still is!) thoroughly disgruntled, critical, morbidly optimistic despite, and looking for a way to dismantle and reanimate. By the time I got to Athens in 2002, I’d read and/or seen a slew of startling young women poets. Shanna Compton and I were in the same MFA workshops. Every time I read one of these poets, I thought, “okay, so that’s possible. That’s a tool.”

My first year in Athens, I met Heidi Lynn Staples and Lara Glenum. I remember hearing Lara read for the first time—I’d known her for months, and I don’t think I’d read a lick of her poetry. Hillariously shocking moment for me. I felt almost duped—why hadn’t she told me she was writing like this? And I’d already figured out what a barnstormer Heidi was. These super smart, compassionate, funny women playing fiercely with language and flipping the gaze on its cock-a-roachy back. Athens is a small town; we had a lot of access to each other, a lot of late night dinner party discussions. It wasn’t long before I entered the Creative Writing PhD Program at the University of Georgia. Kirsten Kaschock and Sabrina Orah Mark showed up, as did poet Heather Matesich and fiction writer Kristen Iskandrian. Also, Johannes Göransson, who’s own work may be a complement to the Gurlesque—I think of it as a sort of technological sublime—a post-avant male hysteria of the most gorgeous variety (and that meant we had visits from the inimitable Joyelle McSweeney! [McSweeney & Göransson are married. -DH]). While it wasn’t unusual for me to be in workshop with more women than men, or to have the men be wonderfully supportive and capable of commenting on even the most female/feminine of poems (like, say the ones in which someone’s ovaries multiply exponentially, or a dozen frothy pink ponies flit through), it was unusual to be in a room full of poets pushing the biocultural and socio-historical boundaries in such an aggressive fashion. Plus, we were all reading a decent amount of theory, and my new grasp on postmodern and feminist theories (um, that is actually reading the texts I suspected might be important to my work) gave me the push I needed to scale some of the aesthetic obstacles.

I can’t say quite how each poet ended up invested in the surreal, grotesque, medical, etc. We were selected for this program for rather different reasons, and the body/gender work has been a peculiar coincidence. If you look at the program as a whole, it’s not all alien-pod spinal cords, lactating cyborgs, festooned wooden dolls in the image of the woman cuddling the festooned wooden dolls, etc. (I know, what else is there? Hee hee. Teasing!) So maybe it’s one of those quirks of time and place. I think for Lara, Kirsten, and myself, pregnancy and childbirth reinforced our compulsion to detail the lived female body. Enough strangers pet your belly like it’s a fluffy kitten, and you feel obliged to point out that they are fondling your uterus. Or so I did. And going through pregnancy together gave me confidence to voice the lesser known bombasts of that experience. I remember showing up at the Alice Notley reading on campus. Kirsten, Lara, and I, front row in our black maternity wear. Witches of Eastwick, says Kiki. Indeed, says I.

When I first read Arielle’s first Gurlesque essay—sometime in the midst of all this Athens hoopla—it was a thrill. When Given was picked up by Verse Press, I cornered the publishers at a KGB reading in New York to tell them what a wise decision they’d made (ay yi yi, my youthful enthusiasm!). I felt the same way when SPT put out Arielle’s essay. A curious new phenomenon had its foot in the door. A way to talk about these aesthetic strains—a way to group and explore them, without homogenizing or normalizing them. So, I’d say the essay provided a real touchstone for me as poet and critic—a shifting, complex touchstone, to be sure--while Athens provided a much needed boot camp and sanctuary. And some durned tasty dinner parties.

[To be continued...]

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Introduction
Part 1
Responses elsewhere
Part 3

On the Gurlesque: Introduction

In November 2002, Arielle Greenberg gave a talk called "On the Gurlesque" at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, which recognized and described what Greenberg found to be a vibrant new tendency in contemporary poetry, a "veering away from traditional narrative" combined with "a postmodern sense of humor, invoking brand names and cultural ephemera," "a frank attitude towards sexuality and a deep, lush interest in the corporeal," coming through in poems that were "'dolled up' in a specifically girly kitsch." Greenberg pointed to the work of poets like Catherine Wagner, Chelsey Minnis, and others, positing that this generation of writers were the first to so unabashedly enact a literary interest in girlhood—such freedom being a significant inheritance from their feminist predecessors—to claim their share of an exciting art-making frontier.

Since its original publication, others have found the critical concept of the Gurlesque useful for discussing contemporary work, including Pam Brown, Joshua Corey, and E.M. Selinger, among others. In the following interview, Danielle Pafunda checks in with Greenberg to find out how the Gurlesque has evolved and where it may be headed next. This exclusive interview was conducted via email and will be published here at Delirious Hem in three installments.

Preliminary reading:

The text of Greenberg's 2002 talk, "On the Gurlesque"

Greenberg's review of Chelsea Minnis's Zirconia

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Arielle Greenberg is the author of two collections of poetry, My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse, 2002), and editor, along with Rachel Zucker, of a new anthology of essays, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections (Iowa, 2008). She is also an editor of Youth Subcultures: Exploring Underground America (Longman, 2006), editor at the literary magazines Court Green and Black Clock. Her poems have appeared in journals including the American Poetry Review and the Denver Quarterly and were featured in the 2004 and 2005 volumes of Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of a Saltonstall Artist's Grant and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She is currently at work on Gurlesque, a theory-driven poetry anthology coedited with Lara Glenum (Saturnalia, 2009); and with Becca Klaver, an anthology of contemporary poetry on girlhood (Switchback, 2008). She is Assistant Director to the Poetry Programs at Columbia College Chicago.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of My Zorba (Bloof Books, 2008), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull, 2005), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press, forthcoming) and the chapbook A Primer for Cyborgs: The Corpse (Coconut Books, forthcoming). Her poems have been chosen three times for Best American Poetry (2004, 2006, and 2007). Other poems and reviews have appeared in such publications as American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions, the Georgia Review, and TriQuarterly. She is coeditor of the online journal La Petite Zine and Spring 2008 Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago. She recently received her doctorate from the University of Georgia's Creative Writing Program.

Part 1
Part 2
Responses elsewhere
Part 3