December B/))))))))OOOOO<<<<<<<<<KS, Articles, Word-plasm read ///// In December, I didn’t finish much. I’m fine with that. We can’t treat ourselves like wood-chippers for texts; literary activity for its own sake has no inherent value. Sometimes we need to think. Or grieve. Or fight. And I found my energy particularly dissipated this December for reasons which have nothing to do with the next sentence, no. I’m more aware of the silences the resurgent U.S. fascism creates, the great suppression of voices. It’s made me interested in what it means to cultivate archives and discourse networks that can weather institution destruction, that can flourish, even outside of the traditional networks of mass culture. Poetry has been good at that in the past. And I’ve found myself treasuring printouts of some obscure rad poet that a friend scanned five years ago, of a book someone passed along of a Red Scare suppressed proletarian poet. Of the poems friends pass along by writers whose words could get their asses fired. Anyway, speaking of fearless writers: Karen Brodine, “Politics of Women Writing,” The Second Wave, Vol 5., Issue 3, 1979. Brodine calls for a revolutionary, intersectional, class-conscious approach in feminist writing in explicit opposition to what she characterizes as bourgeoisie separatist strains and biological determinism in radical feminist literature. Brodine never minces words; she’s not guilty of the kind of riddling indirection a lot of poets suffer from when they have to say what they mean in prose. So it’s not much of a surprise that Brodine’s critique met sustained backlash in the subsequent issues of the The Second Wave (also read) and some (hedged) defense by no less than Joanna Russ. What got lost in the ensuing debate was Brodine’s theorization of the role of the poet in political movement and what she has to say about revolutionary feminist poetics (she also, through citation, elevates the names of a number of working class and socialist female poets that remain in various degrees of obscurity). A few quotes: “The poem I write, by itself, will not organize for affirmative action, or abortion. Action, organizing with other people, has to do that. New different poems come out of that organizing experience. I can give a new poem, copied secretly on the office machine, to my fellow workers. Because the images in it come from us, our anger, our resistance, my co-workers care for the poem, and it becomes a part of the gathering force of our solidarity”; “In much political writing, there is a sharp awareness of the false uses of language, a knowledge that words are angled against us. Words, manipulated by the ruling class, turn into the most subtle of weapons. There is an irony that often accompanies rage and bitterness. This is not the irony of detachment or cynicism, but a sharp knowledge of the paradox between what society says—and what it is….There is a tremendous energy released when a word is restored to its rightful meaning.” Some passages shiver in the cold light of our historical moment: “The judge at Wendy Yoshimura’s trial refused to allow her to call prison by its honest name. Yoshimura referred to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II in concentration camps. The judge repeatedly corrected her, insisting they be called ‘relocation camps.’” More direct: “the poem a full glass to be thrown. To spit back, like teeth, the words used against us.” Here is Brodine responding to her detractors in a subsequent 1980 issue: “Avril is twisting logic to call me anti-lesbian because I am anti-separatist. That compares to calling someone who is anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic.” If the debate around Brodine’s article expressed a fissure in the feminist movement in which its mainstream was still ambivalent about her brand of class politics, Anne Boyer’s “Woman Sitting at the Machine,” (Poetry Is Dead no. 12, 2015) in which she is in conversation with Brodine via their common experience of breast cancer, in some ways marks their reintegration. It’s a remarkable, compact essay. A sample: “Could a poet on an alien earth explain how on this one, the sick body of a worker is the source of more profit than her healthy body at work?” Here’s another stanza of Brodine a reader pinned to the corkboard of the open internet from Brodine’s Illegal Assembly (send me a copy, please): “it’s like being sick all the time, I think, coming home from work, sick in that low-grade continuous way that makes you forget what it’s like to be well.” Brodine insisted on a better world and had such confidence in how that would happen. You might call it revolutionary optimism, which draws me back to her words over and over. ////////////////////// ///// //////////////// //////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Carlos Amador, “Dark Rurality and Dark Ecology in Recent Argentine Cinema,” A Contra Corriente Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring 2019). Very good. //////////////////////////////////////////////// In progress works include Serena Solin’s Beautiful Days Press book, James Tiptree Jr.’s selected short stories (who Donna Harraway frequently mentioned in seminars, apparently), Bolaño’s Amulet, Edwin Rolfe’s collected poems.
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JOE HALL 