February 4, 2010

Michelle Detorie


Michelle Detorie lives in Goleta, CA where she edits Hex Presse and Womb. Her pamphlet about humans and animals and seabird rescue, How Hate Got Hand, was recently published by eohippus labs. She is currently working on a series of synesthetically coded visual poems that investigate the question of women and animals and whether or not they are real. She blogs at ovariessequins.blogspot.com.


I. How do you see yourself as a participant in feminism?
I see my participation in feminism as constant: how could it not be?

Despite this constancy, at this time, I do not know where to begin when I am asked to describe my feminism to others. It is easier to describe my history with feminism than it is to articulate the ways I attempt to engage my feminism in order to manifest creative work. Increasingly, I think the difficulty has to do with an escalating anxiety of being misunderstood, isolated, or punished for articulating my feminism.

Time has a politics (see this recent article on sleep as a feminist issue). In the same way that “color blind” ideologies try to hide inequalities created by asymmetrical demands on the time of African Americans and whites (for example, in the academy, African American scholars are often commanded to be on every committee—not to mention to be the de facto expert on all things black for their colleagues, a la Wanda Sykes in Curb Your Enthusiasm—in order to give the appearance of inclusiveness, and thus have much less time to do their research), sexism continues to operate by requiring women, but not men, to work many many extra unpaid hours. Marginality is not the only cost of doing feminist work in the realm of poetry and art: exhaustion, the sapping of resources from precious time for creative work, and the expenditure of energy steeling oneself against and recovering from insults and trauma are all very real costs, too.

As an editor and publisher, I’ve encountered what I imagine to be the usual amount of criticism regarding my publishing ethos. I have been criticized most for my decision to publish only people who self-identify as women. Several people who self-identify as men have taken issue with this. A few of these men have published in publications I admire and are professed "feminists,” and I have been surprised by the ire and disdain directed at me in the correspondence that ensues when I reiterate the mission of the journal in my responses to their submissions. I’ve also experienced persistent guilt around how long it has taken me to respond to submissions, lay out an issue, or complete the printing and assembly of chapbooks because I have not had the time or money that I had hoped. I’ve have also had to push back time-lines and delay publications because of the events in the world of “everyday politics” (intimidation, harassment) that result from gender inequality.

I am frustrated that this anxiety elicited by these experiences has hindered me from bringing certain projects to fruition and has prevented me from fully engaging in particular communities. My relationship to my feminism is not conflicted, but as a feminist I am determined to remain vigilant in my resistance to sexism, racism, and classism, and this has meant that I must participate in – and sometimes initiate – conflict. And to do this requires energy, enthusiasm, and optimism. And it is this energy-enthusiasm-optimism that always most scandalizes the defenders of the status quo when revolutionary movements arise. Women, minorities, subalterns of all sorts are not only supposed to be too stupid to resist—they are also supposed to be too tired.

I have been reflecting lately on the challenges of remaining energetic, enthusiastic, and optimistic as a working feminist poet without the stimuli of a feminist popular culture, and outside the hothouse of the academy. Like many other women born between the late 1960s and early 1980s, my sense of feminism when I was a teenager was a rush of idealistic enthusiasm infused with Bikini Kill, Sylvia Plath, baby doll dresses, Sassy Magazine and Queen Latifah. My pop-culture was feminism. And in college, reading Hélène Cixous and Simone de Beauvoir, taking classes in women’s studies and post-colonial theory and writing papers about bell hooks and Toni Morrison, my academics were feminism. And as I wrote more poetry, my poetry became my feminism. In each of these milieus, I found power and comfort and friends. Feminism has been a source of energy, creativity, and community. And yet I must admit that I’m experiencing a period of decreased energy, although I now see this period as transitional: a sort of necessary hibernation. What I would like to see is for feminist poets to reinvigorate two tendencies of feminist social movements of the 1970s: the emphasis on consciousness-raising as a political act, and the foregrounding of solidarity.
II.:: Items from my Commonplace Book ::
:: Women and animals: Are they real?::
Figure 2 Photo from "Puppy Love" PHOTOGRAPHY: LEDA & ST-JACQUES, MODELS: FANNY AT NEXT, JACKSON

“The large cat is like a spirit animal, a white tiger perhaps. The woman, a young Chinese student in the United States, figures that which is human, the universal, the generic. The "woman of color," a very paraticular, problematic, recent collective identity, resonates with local and global conversations. In this paintinig, she embodies the still oxymoronic simultaneous statuses of woman, "Third World" person, human, organism, communications technology, mathematician, writer, worker, engineer, scientist, spiritual guide, lover of the earth. This is the kind of "symbolic action" transnational feminisms have made legible, S/he is not finished.”

-Donna Harraway, from “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inapproriate/d Others”

“But art is not simply the expression, recognition or celebration of an animal past, a pre-historical allegiance with the forces that make one; it is not memorialization, the confirmation of a shared past, but above all the transformation of the materials from the past into resources for the future, the sensations not available now but to be unleashed in the future on a people now ready to perceive and be affected by them.”

-Elizabeth Grosz “Art and the animal”

“This happens over and over again, but the heterografts work on dogs – close up to a dog torso with a perfectly square patch of foreign dog hair growing and thriving, its edges sharp as astroturf. ‘Why, why, why does this work on dogs but not women,’ frets the scientist who tortures out of necessity, not evil. It’s hard on him, finding places to bury all the faceless women, and the dogs’ incessant howling is driving him crazy.”

-Dodie Bellamy, “Dogs without a Face,” Academonia
Figure 8 "Cute Magic Bunny Costume Adult: A Magician's Dream Come True" by Party City
Figure 11 Mermaid Swim Fins by Bluewave Products
Figure 12 "Portrait of a Girl Covered in Hair" by Lavinia Fontona (1594-95)

BEDIENT: Do you play with the image of mules in your poem because of Mules and Men, a title re-echoed, in a warped way, in the title Muse and Drudge?

MULLEN: Yes. Who are the mules and who are the men? If you think about black and white, then the black people are the mules and the white people are men. If you think about the black community, then the women are the mules and the men are the men. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the grandmother says the black woman is the mule of the world. I changed that to muse of the world.

-Harryette Mullen and Calvin Bedient, from “THE SOLO MYSTERIOSO BLUES: An Interview with Harryette Mullen” Callaloo 19.3 (1996) 651-669

Figure 13 Bjork in her infamous swan dress, designed by Marjan Pejoski

“Anthropornography is the depiction of non-humans as prostitute-animals who desire to be eaten. From this month’s Vanity Fair with a dead chicken in high heels, to the ‘Turkey Hooker,’ animals’ suffering is made into sexualized fun. With anthropornography the inequality of species conveys the inequality of gender; desire hides dominance. While vegetarians, vegans and animal activists are accused of anthropomorphizing animals—of projecting human qualities onto nonhuman animals—it seems that really it is meat eaters and anthropornographers who do this. Animal activists know that animals are like human beings because human beings are animals. ‘Animorphs,’ through its sympathetic magic theme, suggests this truth too.”

-Carol J. Adams, interview

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Stephanie Strickland


Stephanie Strickland’s recent book, Zone : Zero (book + CD), includes two interactive digital poems. Her prize-winning volumes include V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L’una, True North, and The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil. Her latest collaborative hypermedia poem, slippingglimpse, was introduced in Paris and shown at the 2009 e-Poetry festival in Barcelona. She teaches at many colleges and universities, most recently the University of Utah, and is a director of the Electronic Literature Organization.




∂


Beatrix Potter
long before Peter proffered “exquisite
drawings” and her discovery
—symbiotic mycology—
in her paper
(1897)
“Germination of the spores of Agaricineae”


a voice unseen
unseeable at Kew requisitely
male
eschewed “unnatural union
between a captive Algal damsel and a tyrant
Fungal master”


Beatrix Potter
“It is extraordinary how botanists have . . . not in the least
seen the broad bearing of it.”


Beatrix Potter
“I was not shy, not at all. I had it up and down
with him. His line was on the outside
of civil . . . . I informed


him that it would all be in the books in ten years, whether or
no, and departed
giggling. I ought to wear
blue spectacles on these occasions.”





"Beatrix" first appeared in 2009 in 1913 a journal of forms, issue 3
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February 3, 2010

Kirsten Kaschock


Kirsten Kaschock is the author of Unfathoms (Slope Editions) and a beautiful name/for a girl (upcoming from Ahsahta Press). She holds a Ph.D. from University of Georgia in English and is currently a doctoral fellow in dance at Temple University. She lives and writes inPhiladelphia.


1

I don’t like them. Ever confessing boredom, vampires have no inner resources. They deign to still be interested in sex only marginally—or else, in extremis. In my memory, only in The Hunger did I watch vampires who had become musicians. Who spent some of their time on pursuits that put their stolen blood to use. Time is borrowed from death for most of us—for vampires it is stolen from the living, yet they are not grateful. Vampires, despite their European or Egyptian pedigrees, are quintessentially American. Ever youthful, ever beautiful, ever vicious—ever living in the privilege. Where is the vampire scholar? The vampiric philanthropist or scientist? Vampires are the pale idea that we do not learn, that we do not grow, that to live forever is only to go around again and again and again. I am a feminist because I am the anti-vampire.


2

My first conscious act as a feminist was a refusal: I would not take my husband’s name, would not be possessed. This was the third grade, and the husband and children were givens, but somehow the name was ridiculous. If, as I knew, men and women were exactly equal, if different—then to change my call-sign for a boy was simply an outdated idea, and wrong. This was also how my ex-Catholic parents taught me to think about religion. It helped that I didn’t much like other people’s families, that I didn’t want to leave mine to cleave to anyone else’s. Truly, my logic on this issue was deeply conservative: relinquishing my surname offended my very warped concept of fairness—also, I didn’t feel like embracing change. I could be both married and Kaschock. Why not?

I cut my hair pixie-short soon after this decision. This, I did with my father one summer afternoon and it earned me a year and a half of derision from an insane ballet teacher—until it grew back to bun-length. I didn’t quit ballet, but I was from this point on deeply ambivalent about it. I love it now, still take classes, also ambivalently. I snapped my Achilles two years ago in a dance class while trying to fly. At thirty-seven, the recovery has been slower than I would like, but ballet classes help. Two of my three sons are enrolled in dance, doing their first pliés and tendus—in the same traditional black tights, white shoes and t-shirts my brothers wore from ages five to twenty-five in their classes. If my boys stay enrolled, their best friends may very well be young women. A gift I would like to give them. Ballet, that most feminine and self-image-damaging of endeavors, is both much more than that and not quite that at all, engaged in deeply.

3

Vampires are unused potential. They are the manifestation of the extra-hour-in-the-day that is lacking for the weary. Why are none of them artists? Community activists? I know that small time is not an obstacle to accomplishment. This is a myth that harms those who must, in their non-extended lives, perform many roles. Or simply want to. The lack of time does not prevent art, but believing that it does invites artistic paralysis. The belief that there is a single recipe for beauty, for art-making, for governance, for social organization, for what a family is, for what it means to read a book or be a woman—this is the blood-drainer. Total immersion and time given to one area of interest: this is the anorexic myth of greatness. I refuse it based on my knowledge of vampires. If time devoted to singular passion were the measure—to be a person of note would be to be a long-lived if not deathless hermit with a cache of stingy materials. In actuality, this is only one path.

4

I didn’t have a theory of feminism when I was a teenager. And I don’t. I love theory—I read it for fun and profit. Well, I read it. I claimed my feminisms despite ignorance: I was a feminist in college when Rush Limbaugh convinced my father to refer to me as a femi-nazi (rough period for Dad… now he says he was listening to Rush “ironically”). But Yale was deeply conservative and my education there (I was not really a self-director) consisted of reading great books by great men (I say now, ironical as my father), the occasional Elizabeth Bishop poem, and then, senior year—Virginia Woolf—who wasn’t (it was clear—wasn’t it?) as smart as Joyce. I liked Woolf better and felt less smart. I liked how her arguments looped around each other. I liked how they tripped me up with digressions and tangents that were actually central, if you took the time to follow her circuitry. She didn’t edit her electric excess, she hooked it back in. And so, for me, there was more power to her.

5

Vampires produce each other on purpose—acts of animal magnetism, ownership, and punishment. Since they view their life as a privileged sort of hell, those whom they elect to join them are both being elevated and tortured. They choose their own chosen. They are both gods and servants, the made and makers. In a strange way, there is no mystery since there is no recombination—only a sort-of blood purchase. There is little accident to increase in the vampire community, and there is much homogeneity. Humanity is the clay they fashion themselves and each other from, but it is the physical form and attraction to it in vampire literature that serves as the primary evaluative criteria. To recreate oneself so calculatedly, with swap of blood but no crossing of minds—no allowance for the bloom of the wholly new from out of the detritus—is to deny meaningful growth. In extending themselves and their image, vampires do not go deep, do not surrender themselves to the fullness of their creations, they make instead copies.

6

I kept going to school. I moved to New York after my undergraduate BA in English and temped while I took dance classes. But I wanted to choreograph—not to audition where bodies were targets of evaluation as often as the dancing—so I ended up in Iowa City, working on an MFA in choreography. That’s where I met Danny, budding future geneticist and his huge Midwestern Italian-American family. I was at the time purposefully bald. We moved quickly back East. In pursuit of my sanity and his doctorate. I got accidently pregnant and, thinking dance (so body-bound) was over, started writing poetry again—the terror of failing the great-books by great-men test having worn off a bit. I had Simon, started an MFA in poetry, wrote a book, had a second child, Bishop. We applied to Danny’s post-doc and my doctorate in English together. Emory took him, UGA took me. Another superb accident: we named him Koen. After the deep south, we moved to Philadelphia for a job—Danny’s. I did the adjunct thing around town before beginning a doctorate in dance on a fellowship that pays far better than adjuncting. Far better.

I view all my institutions as having offered patronage to a dilettante. I can’t refuse that label. I can’t refuse any label thrust at me so violently. I look at the facts as given above and know some would say (some have said) I have chosen to capitulate, to hand my head over as I procreated. But I kept my head, and chose to spend the years with my young children feeding it. During these years, I have written four manuscripts (3 poetic, 1 fiction), and I have read those female writers and studied the work of those female choreographers I was not exposed to earlier in my education. I choreographed and began dancing again. But I have also begun to understand what my early feminisms did for me. They made me able to keep going, to refuse the necessity of choosing any one thing over another, to keep gathering labels and identities as they came without discarding any. I am scholar, poet, choreographer, mother, dancer, daughter, lover, friend. I did not give up my humanity, once bitten, twice bitten, thrice.

My feminisms allowed me to go into my several inseparable interests deeply over time, rather than pick one for total immersion. I can’t devote twelve hours a day to writing, or to dance, or to my children, or to eating or sex, or to hunting for blood. But I never could. Even if only one of those interested me, twelve hours is too long—as would be eternity—I admit it. My feminisms have slowly allowed me to become okay with my sprawling finitude.

7

I want to raise feminists. My boys are, I hope, on their way. They are themselves, and I am encouraging them to accrue identities rather than eschew any. They are also learning who I am—which is key to my project for them since I have failed (more accurately, genetically, their father’s sperm has failed) to produce for them a sister to love and to witness in the fullness of her multiplicities. I would like to be a cognitive neuroscientist, a cellist, a linguist, an architect. I would like to adopt more children, or to foster them—this I may still do. The interesting thing about the label mother is that, like writer, it encompasses several others: cook, confidante, nurse, coach, lullabyist, protector, mentor, and disciplinarian among them. I didn’t know when I first became pregnant that the one role I was wary of accepting because I thought it might limit my feminisms would actually be the one role that would most expand them. That has been a surprise. I look like a feminist because I now look for opportunities to be surprised and to surprise myself and others. To engage in the expected so deeply, so broadly, that it is both much more and not quite at all what I once thought it to be.

I seek to embrace other feminisms as I encounter them, to be moved and changed by how other choices and other refusals and other engagements have created humans invested in the expansion of human possibility rather than in its narrowing, or in the dismissal of such engagement as cliché. I am not a vampire—life does not bore me. I am a feminist because I know I will die, and I want to get somewhere, and I want the world to get somewhere else, before I do.

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