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.
July 11, 2008
June 24, 2008
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?
[To be continued...]
Introduction
Part 1
Responses elsewhere
Part 3
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...]
Introduction
Part 1
Responses elsewhere
Part 3
May 4, 2008
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:
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
Gurlesque, part 1
Give us an abstract of the aesthetic category Gurlesque as you conceived of it in 2002?
The whole thing came about as I was reading through first books by young women and noticing what seemed a new and widespread approach to femininity and feminism. I noticed this, of course, because it was something I was interested in doing in my own work—giving myself permission, for the first time, to be unabashedly girly, to talk about things like ponies and
sequins, while also trying to be fierce, carnal, funny, political, irreverent…all these things at once. Chelsey Minnis,[1] Brenda Shaughnessy,[2] and Matthea Harvey[3] were some premier examples of what I was seeing then.
Though the poets could in some ways seem very different—for example, I would say that Minnis’s tone in her first book is dark and brazen and employs Gothic tropes, while Harvey’s tone is a much more effervescent and whimsical one, and Shaughnessy's somewhere in between—more domestic and interior in its details than either of the other two—I wondered why these women seemed to be tapping into a similar vein.
My theory is that it has something to do with our collective girlhood in the throes of Second Wave feminism: we are the first generation to access and receive the privilege of our foremothers’ successes. Most girls I grew up with (and I want to recognize that these were mostly middle class white girls) did, I think, feel like they had many choices and possibilities ahead of them. We had Sesame Street, which provided a slightly more egalitarian representation of girlhood, and the idea of “mommies are people” from Free to Be…You and Me[4] we had Jodie Foster and Ramona the Great.[5] But of course we also had problematic depictions of “strong” womanhood, like Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels and we had stuff like those busty Hee-Haw gals and Barbie dolls hanging around, too.
Throw into that heady mix the super-saccharine romance iconography of a 70s girlhood; unicorns and rainbows socks and sunsets painted on vans, and then don’t forget the popular culture whispers of sexual “swinging,” or the trickle-down androgyny chic of glam and disco it all combined to give us a very new foundation for what “female poetry” could be; one that draws simultaneously from senses of empowerment and marginalization, carnality and innocence, cuteness and toughness.
And I should say here that the term Gurlesque came from three socio-historical strands that I see unite in this poetry: Mikhal Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque,[6] in which commonly accepted roles and ideologies are turned on their heads for pleasure and humor; the teasing glamour and self-conscious parodies of sexuality in burlesque performance (which is itself enjoying a revival among young feminist artists right now[7]); and the riot grrrl punk/political movement of the early 1990s,[8] in which young women reclaimed both misogynist language—writing “brat” or “cunt,” on their bodies with markers—as well as “girly” costuming—knee-high socks and plastic barrettes—to call attention to the ways in which the mainstream and punk cultures dismiss girls.
There’s an interesting relationship to irony here: My generation (Gen X) was known for being cynical and glib, but I think a lot of what seemed posturing nostalgia—the way riot grrls, for example, carried kiddie lunchboxes—was an actual longing for the (complicated) promise of a 70s childhood, which itself was overshadowed by our parents’ cynicism, Watergate, Vietnam, the recession, etc. I think perhaps the reasons we return to these images from girlhood have to do with a longing for sincerity, for passion.
So how do these Gurlesque poets construct poems that have room for so many ostensibly contradictory elements?
I think a Gurlesque poem is interested in confronting the issue of narrative, both as an arcing line that needs to be punctured and in its use of a stable speaker. A linear narrative poem imagines the world to have order, and since a Gurlesque poem is most enamored or obsessed with the world’s utter chaos, linear narrative doesn’t make much sense as a mode for a Gurlesque voice. Pandamonium should reign in a Gurlesque poem—this is the carnivalesque part of it—and this happens best in a poem where the speaker(s) and story are constantly shifting.
Likewise, a Gurlesque poem understands gender as something unsettled, to be worn or removed at will or whim, rather than something set in place. Sexuality, too—fluid and morphing. This, of course, is oppositional not only to our culture’s view of gender and sexuality, but also to mainstream poetry’s representation of these constructs. A Gurlesque poem fucks with the traditional notion of the love poem, the muse, all the trappings of romance and gender. The less linear, less narrative modes that many young poets are working in now—grounded in, but departing from semi-autobiographical experience—are well-suited to this ambiguous gender and sexual performativity.
So is this post-confessional poetry?
Most of the poets I see as Gurlesque are also those who get called "elliptical"[9] or “post-Language” or “post-Confessional” or all those terms, which means their fundamental aesthetic is one that calls the Confessional—or, at least, the first person autobiographical linear narrative—into question. But one could also ask what the Confessional was in the first place, as enacted by Sylvia Plath [10] and Anne Sexton [11], its two poster girls. Sexton, who I admittedly know less about, seems to have dressed her autobiography up in mythos and fairy tale, subverting it, and Plath likewise rarely told a story straight, so caught up was she in assonance and allusion. So I think, in some ways, the Gurlesque poets are harkening back to Plath and Sexton in this, while rejecting—though nodding to—the work of someone like Sharon Olds[12], whose work is most in line with what I think we want to mean when we use the term “Confessional.”
In your essay, you smartly site the riot grrls as agents of a nascent Gurlesque. You say of them, “these young women transported themselves back to a time before they felt constrained by behavioral norms and body image disorders.” Whether reading Judith Butler[13] or watching my child interact with other toddlers on the playground, I wonder if there actually is a time before which we’re constrained by behavioral norms. Likely, young children feel less pressured to perform frigid tableaus of femininity or masculinity, but don't we risk sentimentalizing life before puberty? Are the girly tropes for which we feel nostalgic at all dangerous or limiting to the real-time little girls who must still traffic in them?
You’re right, of course—there is little hope for a pre-gendered experience in this culture. But I do think that in my own 70s childhood, I was as aware of my ability, or privilege, or need, to change the status quo. I was raised with feminism in the home. Others were not. But I don’t think I’m lying or misremembering when I say I wasn’t aware of the pressure to, say, shave my legs until I was deep into middle school. I remember thinking about my “figure” for the very first time when I was twelve. That means I had a lovely long decade before I was aware of my body as a cultural commodity—not that I wasn’t sexual or aware of sex before then. I was. But it was my own sexuality.
I was a fortunate girl-kid, in many ways. I was given tremendous agency within my small sphere, and my family prioritized my academic talents and performance over my social graces or physical appearance. I was also, biologically and culturally, a sexually happy kid (meaning I saw myself as sexual, I was in contact with my sexuality in a self-driven way, and also that I was taught not to fear or be ashamed of my sexuality. No one ever abused me or made me feel anything less than proud, sexually).
I wish to give the same, or better, to my daughter, but I do think that her generation faces even more early sexual commodification. I consciously avoid buying her clothing that looks like miniaturized versions of hipster-sexy—she’s two!—and it’s hard. This is what is sold in mainstream America. Therefore, I choose clothing that looks vintage, or retro, in its simplicity or androgyny or girliness—my child wears a big 1920s-style bow to keep her hair out of her eyes. I think I want her to look like a child of an earlier time, and that this kind of nostalgia is a simulation, to reach for the Baudrillard sense of that word. There’s been a lot recently written on the phenomenon of my generation enacting its 70s childhood dreams on its young children in a very Gen X ironic sort of way—the whole “alterna-dad” thing that Neal Pollack[14] writes about. As riot grrls/Gen X punks we attired ourselves in sneering-cum-sentimental bowling shirts and lunchboxes and now these same folks who collected action figures from their own childhoods are passing them on to their actual children as if to say “Here, have my predigested childhood, nostalgia already included!”, and I am definitely not interested in that. But I’m getting a little off-topic now.
That's funny—I think about how fucked up I felt trying to figure out sex and gender as a kid. When I started dissecting and/or flaunting girly tropes in my writing, it was, in large, an attempt to catalogue my shame and my complicated relationship to gender performance. Also an attempt to turn those feelings on the gazer (the geezer)—that is: here, I'll turn you on and then gross you out in quick succession; I'll leave you vertiginous, nauseated, panicked, and how do YOU like it? I wonder if overwriting, seizing control of those darker childhood moments doesn't appeal to some of these retro-nostalgic parents, too. All the fun, none of the schoolyard humiliation. So, I guess the question is: Is there a Gurlesque spectrum? Do you see some of the poets celebrating these tropes and others eviscerating them?
You know, in my original thinking about the Gurlesque, I was so taken with the move toward unabashed prettiness that I think this overshadowed the parallel importance of darkness in the work: of a sort of Goth delight in the bloody and macabre. I am feeling more now that something nauseating or panic-inducing, to use your words, is central to this aesthetic, and is what separates it, crucially, from something that feels merely like decorative Victoriana.
One very recent book in the grotesque vein is Ariana Reines’The Cow.[15] It’s truly scatological, so much so that I don’t know that there’s a pretty, girly moment in it. Maybe this is where the Gurlesque is next headed?
In general, US poetry presents a disturbingly white face for a lot of nefarious reasons, but it strikes me that there may be an intriguing explanation for why so many white women writers take up the Gurlesque in particular. Perhaps this aesthetic helps us to define and deconstruct whiteness as an actual quality, something other than a point of pseudo-normalcy from which all else is deviation?
This is an interesting thought. I do think that in its interest in performativity, the Gurlesque plays with and around all sorts of dynamics of privilege and power, including femininity/masculinity, straightness/queerness, victim/perpetrator, etc., and perhaps whiteness/nonwhiteness is another level of performance/playing that goes on in some of this work.
But I would also say that we should maybe reframe this question not as "why so many white woman writers take up the Gurlesque"—because I don't think it's an enormous number or percentage—but more "why Gurlesque strategies or aesthetics may not be as useful or relevant to innovative women writers of color."
In answering that question, I would have to remind us first that the Gurlesque is still a relatively small, emergent, subversive, nonmainstream strand of American poetry, and so it doesn't seem fully appropriate to talk about those in its ranks too much: the ranks are so few and so new in general. They are still in formation. But in theory, I speculate that in the same way that the Gurlesque poets use a kind of Third Wave[16] feminist privilege to engage in scatological, frilly, or otherwise irreverent modes of gendered representation, a privilege and vantage point which could not be afforded in the same way during the heyday of the Second Wave feminist movement or before, that perhaps nonwhite poets don't feel the same access to privilege that would allow them to be "frivolous" in quite the way that Gurlesque poets are. There are still much larger battles to be fought for women poets of color, important battles, and so perhaps not as much room for coy playfulness in this particular way.
But also, there are, no doubt, nonwhite Gurlesque poets. Brenda Shaughnessy is bi- or multiracial. I love a Tinfish chapbook by the Hawaiian poet Kathy Dee Kaleokealoha Kaloloahilani Banggo[17] called 4evaz Anna which I think could be called Gurlesque. There are poets like Dawn Lundy Martin[18], Cathy Park Hong[19], CM Burroughs[20], and Geraldine Kim[21] whose recent work might be looked at through this lens. There are several other Gurlesque poets whose own racial identity I frankly just don’t know. It can be hard to know all the identity politics underpinnings of a Gurlesque poet, because, again, so much of the Gurlesque is about subterfuge, mask wearing, and play-acting. And because these poets might not choose to self-identify in these ways. Fluidity across identities is key in this poetics.
When I think about the Gurlesque happening in other art media, though, I do think women of color are making some amazing Gurlesque works which are also very much informed by race. One of the singer/songwriters I’m most interested in thinking about as Gurlesque is Kimya Dawson, who is multiracial, I believe. And I would even argue that Kara Walker’s acclaimed silhouettes[22]—which often feature scatological and “cutesy” elements as well as really graphic and disturbing images, all done in a form (the silhouette) traditionally thought of as decorative and craftsy (and therefore female and lesser)—are Gurlesque, and her work is all about race.
One might well ask similar questions about class, ethnicity, ability, and other issues of power and privilege. Where are the Gurlesque poets writing about these things, or where are the _____ poets who are writing the Gurlesque? Again, I’d say much of this is about the coquettishness of the Gurlesque that only a certain kind of privilege affords, and that, on the other side, there are poets of all kinds writing the Gurlesque, as well as Gurlesque poems about these and other issues. (One example: Brenda Coultas, whose most recent work I find among the most interesting contemporary poetry about class issues, earlier in her career wrote poems I think of as very Gurlesque.) The one area for which I do not think this is so much an issue is sexual orientation: I think of the Gurlesque in general as a queer vantage point, because of its close relationship to issues of androgyny and performed femininity and masculinity, and of perversion or kinkiness (and I mean this in the best sense!). I don’t think of Gurlesque poetics as straight, even if the poets themselves are in heterosexual relationships.
[To be continued...]
Introduction
Part 2
Responses elsewhere
Part 3
The whole thing came about as I was reading through first books by young women and noticing what seemed a new and widespread approach to femininity and feminism. I noticed this, of course, because it was something I was interested in doing in my own work—giving myself permission, for the first time, to be unabashedly girly, to talk about things like ponies and
sequins, while also trying to be fierce, carnal, funny, political, irreverent…all these things at once. Chelsey Minnis,[1] Brenda Shaughnessy,[2] and Matthea Harvey[3] were some premier examples of what I was seeing then.Though the poets could in some ways seem very different—for example, I would say that Minnis’s tone in her first book is dark and brazen and employs Gothic tropes, while Harvey’s tone is a much more effervescent and whimsical one, and Shaughnessy's somewhere in between—more domestic and interior in its details than either of the other two—I wondered why these women seemed to be tapping into a similar vein.
My theory is that it has something to do with our collective girlhood in the throes of Second Wave feminism: we are the first generation to access and receive the privilege of our foremothers’ successes. Most girls I grew up with (and I want to recognize that these were mostly middle class white girls) did, I think, feel like they had many choices and possibilities ahead of them. We had Sesame Street, which provided a slightly more egalitarian representation of girlhood, and the idea of “mommies are people” from Free to Be…You and Me[4] we had Jodie Foster and Ramona the Great.[5] But of course we also had problematic depictions of “strong” womanhood, like Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels and we had stuff like those busty Hee-Haw gals and Barbie dolls hanging around, too. Throw into that heady mix the super-saccharine romance iconography of a 70s girlhood; unicorns and rainbows socks and sunsets painted on vans, and then don’t forget the popular culture whispers of sexual “swinging,” or the trickle-down androgyny chic of glam and disco it all combined to give us a very new foundation for what “female poetry” could be; one that draws simultaneously from senses of empowerment and marginalization, carnality and innocence, cuteness and toughness. And I should say here that the term Gurlesque came from three socio-historical strands that I see unite in this poetry: Mikhal Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque,[6] in which commonly accepted roles and ideologies are turned on their heads for pleasure and humor; the teasing glamour and self-conscious parodies of sexuality in burlesque performance (which is itself enjoying a revival among young feminist artists right now[7]); and the riot grrrl punk/political movement of the early 1990s,[8] in which young women reclaimed both misogynist language—writing “brat” or “cunt,” on their bodies with markers—as well as “girly” costuming—knee-high socks and plastic barrettes—to call attention to the ways in which the mainstream and punk cultures dismiss girls.There’s an interesting relationship to irony here: My generation (Gen X) was known for being cynical and glib, but I think a lot of what seemed posturing nostalgia—the way riot grrls, for example, carried kiddie lunchboxes—was an actual longing for the (complicated) promise of a 70s childhood, which itself was overshadowed by our parents’ cynicism, Watergate, Vietnam, the recession, etc. I think perhaps the reasons we return to these images from girlhood have to do with a longing for sincerity, for passion.So how do these Gurlesque poets construct poems that have room for so many ostensibly contradictory elements?
I think a Gurlesque poem is interested in confronting the issue of narrative, both as an arcing line that needs to be punctured and in its use of a stable speaker. A linear narrative poem imagines the world to have order, and since a Gurlesque poem is most enamored or obsessed with the world’s utter chaos, linear narrative doesn’t make much sense as a mode for a Gurlesque voice. Pandamonium should reign in a Gurlesque poem—this is the carnivalesque part of it—and this happens best in a poem where the speaker(s) and story are constantly shifting.
Likewise, a Gurlesque poem understands gender as something unsettled, to be worn or removed at will or whim, rather than something set in place. Sexuality, too—fluid and morphing. This, of course, is oppositional not only to our culture’s view of gender and sexuality, but also to mainstream poetry’s representation of these constructs. A Gurlesque poem fucks with the traditional notion of the love poem, the muse, all the trappings of romance and gender. The less linear, less narrative modes that many young poets are working in now—grounded in, but departing from semi-autobiographical experience—are well-suited to this ambiguous gender and sexual performativity.So is this post-confessional poetry?
Most of the poets I see as Gurlesque are also those who get called "elliptical"[9] or “post-Language” or “post-Confessional” or all those terms, which means their fundamental aesthetic is one that calls the Confessional—or, at least, the first person autobiographical linear narrative—into question. But one could also ask what the Confessional was in the first place, as enacted by Sylvia Plath [10] and Anne Sexton [11], its two poster girls. Sexton, who I admittedly know less about, seems to have dressed her autobiography up in mythos and fairy tale, subverting it, and Plath likewise rarely told a story straight, so caught up was she in assonance and allusion. So I think, in some ways, the Gurlesque poets are harkening back to Plath and Sexton in this, while rejecting—though nodding to—the work of someone like Sharon Olds[12], whose work is most in line with what I think we want to mean when we use the term “Confessional.”
In your essay, you smartly site the riot grrls as agents of a nascent Gurlesque. You say of them, “these young women transported themselves back to a time before they felt constrained by behavioral norms and body image disorders.” Whether reading Judith Butler[13] or watching my child interact with other toddlers on the playground, I wonder if there actually is a time before which we’re constrained by behavioral norms. Likely, young children feel less pressured to perform frigid tableaus of femininity or masculinity, but don't we risk sentimentalizing life before puberty? Are the girly tropes for which we feel nostalgic at all dangerous or limiting to the real-time little girls who must still traffic in them?You’re right, of course—there is little hope for a pre-gendered experience in this culture. But I do think that in my own 70s childhood, I was as aware of my ability, or privilege, or need, to change the status quo. I was raised with feminism in the home. Others were not. But I don’t think I’m lying or misremembering when I say I wasn’t aware of the pressure to, say, shave my legs until I was deep into middle school. I remember thinking about my “figure” for the very first time when I was twelve. That means I had a lovely long decade before I was aware of my body as a cultural commodity—not that I wasn’t sexual or aware of sex before then. I was. But it was my own sexuality.
I was a fortunate girl-kid, in many ways. I was given tremendous agency within my small sphere, and my family prioritized my academic talents and performance over my social graces or physical appearance. I was also, biologically and culturally, a sexually happy kid (meaning I saw myself as sexual, I was in contact with my sexuality in a self-driven way, and also that I was taught not to fear or be ashamed of my sexuality. No one ever abused me or made me feel anything less than proud, sexually).
I wish to give the same, or better, to my daughter, but I do think that her generation faces even more early sexual commodification. I consciously avoid buying her clothing that looks like miniaturized versions of hipster-sexy—she’s two!—and it’s hard. This is what is sold in mainstream America. Therefore, I choose clothing that looks vintage, or retro, in its simplicity or androgyny or girliness—my child wears a big 1920s-style bow to keep her hair out of her eyes. I think I want her to look like a child of an earlier time, and that this kind of nostalgia is a simulation, to reach for the Baudrillard sense of that word. There’s been a lot recently written on the phenomenon of my generation enacting its 70s childhood dreams on its young children in a very Gen X ironic sort of way—the whole “alterna-dad” thing that Neal Pollack[14] writes about. As riot grrls/Gen X punks we attired ourselves in sneering-cum-sentimental bowling shirts and lunchboxes and now these same folks who collected action figures from their own childhoods are passing them on to their actual children as if to say “Here, have my predigested childhood, nostalgia already included!”, and I am definitely not interested in that. But I’m getting a little off-topic now.That's funny—I think about how fucked up I felt trying to figure out sex and gender as a kid. When I started dissecting and/or flaunting girly tropes in my writing, it was, in large, an attempt to catalogue my shame and my complicated relationship to gender performance. Also an attempt to turn those feelings on the gazer (the geezer)—that is: here, I'll turn you on and then gross you out in quick succession; I'll leave you vertiginous, nauseated, panicked, and how do YOU like it? I wonder if overwriting, seizing control of those darker childhood moments doesn't appeal to some of these retro-nostalgic parents, too. All the fun, none of the schoolyard humiliation. So, I guess the question is: Is there a Gurlesque spectrum? Do you see some of the poets celebrating these tropes and others eviscerating them?
You know, in my original thinking about the Gurlesque, I was so taken with the move toward unabashed prettiness that I think this overshadowed the parallel importance of darkness in the work: of a sort of Goth delight in the bloody and macabre. I am feeling more now that something nauseating or panic-inducing, to use your words, is central to this aesthetic, and is what separates it, crucially, from something that feels merely like decorative Victoriana.
One very recent book in the grotesque vein is Ariana Reines’The Cow.[15] It’s truly scatological, so much so that I don’t know that there’s a pretty, girly moment in it. Maybe this is where the Gurlesque is next headed?
In general, US poetry presents a disturbingly white face for a lot of nefarious reasons, but it strikes me that there may be an intriguing explanation for why so many white women writers take up the Gurlesque in particular. Perhaps this aesthetic helps us to define and deconstruct whiteness as an actual quality, something other than a point of pseudo-normalcy from which all else is deviation?
This is an interesting thought. I do think that in its interest in performativity, the Gurlesque plays with and around all sorts of dynamics of privilege and power, including femininity/masculinity, straightness/queerness, victim/perpetrator, etc., and perhaps whiteness/nonwhiteness is another level of performance/playing that goes on in some of this work. But I would also say that we should maybe reframe this question not as "why so many white woman writers take up the Gurlesque"—because I don't think it's an enormous number or percentage—but more "why Gurlesque strategies or aesthetics may not be as useful or relevant to innovative women writers of color."
In answering that question, I would have to remind us first that the Gurlesque is still a relatively small, emergent, subversive, nonmainstream strand of American poetry, and so it doesn't seem fully appropriate to talk about those in its ranks too much: the ranks are so few and so new in general. They are still in formation. But in theory, I speculate that in the same way that the Gurlesque poets use a kind of Third Wave[16] feminist privilege to engage in scatological, frilly, or otherwise irreverent modes of gendered representation, a privilege and vantage point which could not be afforded in the same way during the heyday of the Second Wave feminist movement or before, that perhaps nonwhite poets don't feel the same access to privilege that would allow them to be "frivolous" in quite the way that Gurlesque poets are. There are still much larger battles to be fought for women poets of color, important battles, and so perhaps not as much room for coy playfulness in this particular way.
But also, there are, no doubt, nonwhite Gurlesque poets. Brenda Shaughnessy is bi- or multiracial. I love a Tinfish chapbook by the Hawaiian poet Kathy Dee Kaleokealoha Kaloloahilani Banggo[17] called 4evaz Anna which I think could be called Gurlesque. There are poets like Dawn Lundy Martin[18], Cathy Park Hong[19], CM Burroughs[20], and Geraldine Kim[21] whose recent work might be looked at through this lens. There are several other Gurlesque poets whose own racial identity I frankly just don’t know. It can be hard to know all the identity politics underpinnings of a Gurlesque poet, because, again, so much of the Gurlesque is about subterfuge, mask wearing, and play-acting. And because these poets might not choose to self-identify in these ways. Fluidity across identities is key in this poetics.When I think about the Gurlesque happening in other art media, though, I do think women of color are making some amazing Gurlesque works which are also very much informed by race. One of the singer/songwriters I’m most interested in thinking about as Gurlesque is Kimya Dawson, who is multiracial, I believe. And I would even argue that Kara Walker’s acclaimed silhouettes[22]—which often feature scatological and “cutesy” elements as well as really graphic and disturbing images, all done in a form (the silhouette) traditionally thought of as decorative and craftsy (and therefore female and lesser)—are Gurlesque, and her work is all about race.One might well ask similar questions about class, ethnicity, ability, and other issues of power and privilege. Where are the Gurlesque poets writing about these things, or where are the _____ poets who are writing the Gurlesque? Again, I’d say much of this is about the coquettishness of the Gurlesque that only a certain kind of privilege affords, and that, on the other side, there are poets of all kinds writing the Gurlesque, as well as Gurlesque poems about these and other issues. (One example: Brenda Coultas, whose most recent work I find among the most interesting contemporary poetry about class issues, earlier in her career wrote poems I think of as very Gurlesque.) The one area for which I do not think this is so much an issue is sexual orientation: I think of the Gurlesque in general as a queer vantage point, because of its close relationship to issues of androgyny and performed femininity and masculinity, and of perversion or kinkiness (and I mean this in the best sense!). I don’t think of Gurlesque poetics as straight, even if the poets themselves are in heterosexual relationships.
[To be continued...]
Introduction
Part 2
Responses elsewhere
Part 3
April 28, 2008
Antiphones
"Antiphonies is a primer on some of the most exciting work in contemporary Canadian poetry. These essays deal with the period from the 1980s to the present, and discuss a wide range of work, from books already acclaimed as modern classics--such as Erin Mouré’s O Cidadán, Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic, and Karen Mac Cormack’s Implexures--to the equally remarkable work of Susan Clark, Catriona Strang, Lissa Wolsak, Christine Stewart, Deanna Ferguson, Lise Downe, Nancy Shaw, a. rawlings, Marie Annharte Baker and others. The essays are complemented by brief selections of poems and poetics statements."CONTENTS
Edward Byrne | The Women (First Reel): On Susan Clark
Susan Clark | from Bad Infinity
Peter Larkin | Lisa Robertson: How Pastoral Is More and More Possible
Susan M. Schultz | “The Ark I”: Lissa Wolsak’s The Garcia Family Co-Mercy
Tom Beckett | An Interview with Lissa Wolsak
Peter O’Leary | “What Lies Beneath My Copy of Eternity?”: A Religious Reading of Lissa Wolsak’s Poetry
Pete Smith | 63 Out-takes from the D.F. Show
Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang | On Collaboration
Christine Stewart | This Then Would Be the Conversation
Edward Byrne | Raddle Moon: A Talk
Reg Johanson | Straight Forward Approach: Annharte’s Exercises in Lip Pointing
Miriam Nichols | Toward a Poetics of the Commons: O Cidadán and Occasional Work
Caroline Bergvall & Erín Moure | O Yes
Chris Daniels & Erín Moure |An Exchange on Translation
a. rawlings | Articulate/Punctuate: Tracking an Obsession with Collaborative Performance
Lise Downe | Five Poems
Gerald L. Bruns | Karen Mac Cormack Among the Pagans
Alan Halsey | Responses to & for Karen Mac Cormack
Stephen Cain | An Interview with Karen Mac Cormack
John Hall | Karen Mac Cormack’s Implexures: An Implicated Reading
256pp, 5.5" x 8.75", perfectbound; ISBN 978-0-9735875-4-8.
$20 CDN/US (includes postage in North America)
£16/€23 (includes airmail overseas).
Make out cheques to Nate Dorward (not “The Gig”). Address: 109 Hounslow Ave., North York, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada.
More info.
April 20, 2008
Women Poets on Mentorship
Women Poets on Mentorship is a collection of 24 essays by young women poets about living women poets that have inspired or mentored them. The essays are funny, articulate, touching, and sometimes gossipy. From the jacket:
The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women's poetry.
We hope this anthology will be of great interest to poetry enthusiasts, feminists, readers and writers (and we hope everyone in the world fits into at least one of these categories!).
Here is the link to amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Poets-Mentorship-Efforts-Affections/dp/158729639X
The link to the University of Iowa page:
http://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/2008-spring/greenbergwom.htm
Please buy the book and buy another for a friend. And, if you like it, consider writing us a short amazon review (we've heard that helps with sales). If you are interested in teaching the book or reviewing the book, please let me know and I can pass your request along to Iowa.
Thank you all so much!
Rachel (and Arielle)
And in case you're wondering: Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker, Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel, Miranda Field on Fanny Howe, Katie Ford on Jorie Graham, Daphne Gottlieb on the Circle of Mentorship, Matthea Harvey on Anna Rabinowitz, Kirsten Kaschock on Being Non-mentored, Joy Katz on Sharon Olds, Katy Lederer on Lyn Hejinian, Valerie Martínez on Joy Harjo, Erika Meitner on Rita Dove, Jennifer Moxley on Susan Howe, Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye, Mendi Lewis Obadike on Toi Derricotte, Danielle Pafunda on Susan Wheeler, Kristin Prevallet on Anne Waldman, Cin Salach on Maureen Seaton, Robyn Schiff on Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Kathy Lou Schultz on Myung Mi Kim, Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley, Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido, Elizabeth Treadwell on Paula Gunn Allen, Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton, and Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock
April 15, 2008
Coming soon: On the Gurlesque
We keep promising, but we're so busy. This time, really, it's coming soon. Like hopefully part 1 this weekend.
In the meantime, a few things we've noticed elsewhere:
In the meantime, a few things we've noticed elsewhere:
"But he just continued on his way. She had to say, 'That's her book' three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless--for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped."From "Men Explain Things to Me"
by Rebecca Solnit at TomDispatch.com
"Margaret Drabble's booklet on Plath and Nicholas Wroe's article on the entire series both emphasised Plath's importance aside from her 'suicide' poems... by invoking the cliché of redemptive motherhood: '... the vivid colours of giving birth, the pleasures of breast-feeding and the "power and mystery of the maternal bond."' Phew. It's a good thing she had kids. Otherwise what could be said about the work!
Drabble describes Plath's 'appalling - and 'exhilarating' - poetry as the kind from the 'heart' rather than the head, in this way minimising that poet's formal dexterity and finesse. Apparently, it's radical to attribute her fame to the usual criteria: an exceptional feel for language, outstanding technical skills, a powerful vision and mastery of form."From "How to Trivialize Women's Poetry"
by Eva Salzman at the Guardian Online book blog
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