What is my poetics? I can’t answer in a singular, so it’s qualifiedly delightful that the word poetics is ambiguously numbered, can work singularly or plurally, singingly or cryingly: it pl(e)urs in my core as I contemplate this assignment. The question, like “What is poetry?” is never fully answerable but rather a provocation to some (m)adlib onscreen thinking.
My poetics, I’m in some ways sorry to say, work differently when I think of myself as scholar/commentator and when I think of myself as creator. Theoretically I don’t believe in this difference. My scholarship has been noted for its writerliness, informality, or digressive nature, but it is very much in the paragraphy, discursive mode — “about” a subject, most often a set of works or a poet whose work appeals to me, work which tends to be outsiderly, maverick, underdoggy doggerel or fragmentary brilliance (John Wieners, Bob Kaufman, Hannah Weiner, poetry by non-recognized poets, the “poetry of everyday life,” “post-literary” poetry, micropoetries, and so forth). My own “poetry” in the last ten or fifteen years has been primarily collaborative, loopy, or textilically contained in small, aphoristic tokens cross-stitched on rough-weave linen reminiscent of old samplers. I am happy that these collaborations and this text/ile visual poetry are accepted in the poetry world, but I feel perennially the fellow-traveller, the friend-of-poets, the poetry-enabler, rather than a true-blue. In my critical work, indeed, I resist the idea of a “true-blue” poesie at all, and have been heartened by the pronouncements coming out of the U.S. West Coast (“Poetry and Revolution” conferences, etc.) that anyone can be a poet, that any activity can be poetry. These projects join prior ones such as Cecilia Vicuña’s short film “What is Poetry to You?” in casting the net as capaciously as possible — a net not to capture but to sustain and shelter. Now we’re getting somewhere. This is a world view that can function independent of hard politics, but it is also exciting when linked to a program of life-wide liberation. Freedom not just for poetry, but for people. And not just poetic freedom, but freedom from injustice and economic hardship, inequality, debased life-circumstances, unnecessary illness, and suffering of all kinds, social and private. Too grandiose for a poetics? Okay, but a girl can dream, can’t she? I feel as if others are doing the hard work on the ground to initiate and sustain these conversations, and to articulate them to some kind of action and grass-roots institutions (the 99¢ Skool, ad hoc literary/poetic events arising out of the Occupy movements, etc.), while I’m the mavuncular cheerleader who embraces failure, especially my own.
The proliferation of engaged writing and publishing activity all around me is exceptionally heartening: I’m thinking of the many small presses that are collectives, that valorize the handmade, the rough-hewn, the non-“professional” — or that seek out explicitly “politically engaged” work to publish, and the buzzing friendship networks that seem inextricable from the work that is produced within them, or as spinoffs of them. It’s exciting. It thrills me. The socialite impulse merges with a rather romantic (i.e. under-theorized, insufficiently dialectical) socialism (also, oh no, the target of Walter Benjamin’s ire in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” my favourite poetry essay of all time!). “My” “own” “creative” endeavours have taken a strange and different turn, particularly in this text/textile path that is unspooling in what remains of my life. Stitching with embroidery floss allows me to work with colour, which has become increasingly vital to my everyday well-being, in a way that hand-writing or composing onscreen does not allow, as well as providing a texturally satisfying, tactile experience I no longer want to divorce from my cerebral verbal work. Much of my recent writing has involved riffing off of this haptic practice: collaborating with Adeena Karasick on a piece that puns on shmatte (rag) and shma’ata (the text at hand);1 writing a mutual interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis about what these visual practices do for/with/around our “real” work;2 creating captions for the slide shows that comprise my public “readings” or end up in a chapbook.3 The conversations around “poetry” also comprise poetry.
This reluctance to limit poetry is connected to what I value as raw, rough, unfinished potential, the urgent stutter of the asemic or the semi-articulate, the emergent, the in-between one thing and another, the transitional and the trapped, the DIY that is also UDIY (undo it yourself). (I once taught a class for the University of Minnesota’s MFA writing program entitled “Unfinishing Your Work.” More than a decade passed before this became a general principle among the writing students rather than an eccentric recess from the rigours of polishing jewelled lyrics.)
As for “the knowledge or information informing [my] writing practice,” I would point to relationality as a “knowledge” base. Thus knowledge is a practice, rather than a fixed, quantifiable resource such as my schooling, my ecological, social, and geographic locations, my family crucible and its multi-outcomes. My work is almost always a response, either to an explicit request to contribute to a project such as this anthology, or, in the case of the x-stitching/textile work, a desire to share with someone a non-cerebral insight — a moment of crystallization, where “things come together” — in a few letters, a word, an image, or a feeling. Thus they are made for specific people, often to commemorate specific events: a conference, a conversation, a piece of art made by the dedicatee. They are usually given away after I’ve created an image (photo or scan) that I can use for publication. Working on a tiny scale with a warm appreciation for the overview of the ubiquity of networks of empowerment gives me some faith that our flamboyant micro-practices can still be effective activities in the face of an increasingly catastrophic public sphere. Faith, but not hope. Committed, but not sanguine. Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect.
1 Maria Damon and Adeena Karasick, “Intertextile Text in Exile: Shmatta Mash-up: A Jewette for Two Voices” in Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 15: 1 (Fall 2012), 70–80.
2 Maria Damon and Rachel Blau Duplessis, “Desiring Visual Texts: A Collage and Embroidery Dialogue” in Jacket2 (March 25, 2013), http://jacket2.org/article/desiring-visual-texts.
3 Maria Damon, Meshwards (Zurich: Dusie Kollektiv, 2011).