Dusie 5 is here!

Andy and I wrote a collaborative chapbook, SEER / SUCKA, for the Dusie Kollektiv. We're still making the physical copies, but in the meantime, you can read it here, along with the rest of the chaps in the fifth and final kollektiv!

Thank you, Susana Gardner, Marthe Reed, and everyone who made this issue happen.

Mantasias and Boypufts; or, Longer Histories

There's an interesting discussion of Seth Oelbaum's "The Right To Be A Monster: Boys, Girls, and the Stay Puft Marshamallow Man" going on over at Montevidayo right now. I just posted this long comment and thought I'd repost here!

--

I think it's pretty easy to read statements like these as being an attack on the Gurlesque:

"Girls didn’t start the gurlesque: boys did. The gurlesque foundation isn’t pink: it’s blue. Boys are being written out of a club that they made."

"Fight back, boys! If girls want to engage in warfare, then they’re certainly entitled to do so. But shouldn’t boys have the right to strike back?"

Or, rather than saying "attack," I might call it a simultaneous deflation and colonizing of the Gurlesque. Squashing its marshmallow and stuffing it in the hollow of your cheek.

From the start, the history of the Gurlesque in the blogosphere has included lots of people (men and women, boys and girls) saying things like, "The Gurlesque doesn't exist," "I don't believe in the Gurlesque," and "Why can't boys be Gurlesque?" For those of us who have been paying attention to these ideas for going on 10 years now, this can get very tiring. I could probably cite Danielle's comments from five or six different blog posts in as many years, but suffice it to say that this is territorializing and colonizing and yes, penetrative behavior.

And to again take the long view, it was only 89 years ago when Joyce declared that The Waste Land had ended the idea of "poetry for ladies." Poetry itself has long been seen as a a feminized or effeminate force, and man poets have grappled with that perception in various ways, some defensive, some ingenious.

Perhaps Seth's performance here is an instance of the poet reasserting his masculinity via cum-in-poetry's-face. There's a history of this, too -- although "Projective Verse" was useful to a lot of women poets, it's hard to ignore some of Olson's language (convoluted as it often is!):

"And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size."

But I think Seth's mantasias (I said it!) or boypufts are aiming at something a lot more interesting than that. So, instead of the shock of Holocaust metaphors or why-aren't-boy-poets-doing-this or the avant-garde call to arms of "No retreat, no surrender! We must fight for our privilege to be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man," why not forget about doing violence to the Gurlesque and concentrate instead on funneling that energy into acts of creation?

My theory is that an aesthetic rooted in violence is preventing you from getting there, Seth, and while I understand "radical negativity" and all that jazz, it's simply not as interesting to me as radical world-making.

An aesthetic of violence is also totally bound up in historical avant-garde discourse, which also aimed to deal with that pesky threat of The New Woman -- I mean, this was Marinetti in 1909: "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice."

Sound familiar? See Loy's "Feminist Manifesto" and her early poems for creative responses to this language of destruction.

And last, I wanted to emphasize that aesthetic violence and physical violence both exist -- and are related, of course -- but they are not the same thing. They exist on different ethical planes, and to pretend any piece of writing, performative or not, exists in an ethical black hole, is to perform the role of the ignorant child, certainly. So maybe Seth has achieved his goal, but I still find it irresponsible.

Beat Poets

Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate, in The New York Times:

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm.

[...]

 On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air.

[more]

I Would Never Raise My Hand

For Kate Durbin on her 30th/"last"/NYC birthday, in convo with her “PARDONMYWHOREMOANS":

I Would Never Raise My Hand

In class, she is mute. At home, she screams I HATE YOU at her parents.

            —Kate Durbin, “PARDONMYWHOREMOANS”

I would never raise my hand in class. I would whisper the answer to the boy sitting in front of me. I would never speak Spanish in Spanish class. I would scrawl musical sentences. The teacher liked my handwriting, asked me to write the placecards for her sister’s wedding to José Greco, famous flamenco dancer.

I would never raise my hand in class. I don’t speak your language I was a girl in a forest with three other girls and we made up our own. I would sign into America Online, get cryptic IMs from nerdy boys. They tried to psych me out but I kept getting better grades. I had all the answers why should I tell. When I wanted I’d whisper but I would never raise my hand in class.

I won prom queen, it was one of my stunts. I wore whatever I wanted and the next year I wore my prom dress to school. There was a stage in the cafeteria, a boy was calling out questions. I would never raise my hand in class but I would raise my hand in the cafeteria. I raised my hand and my dress was leopard print and shimmering and strapless and with the force of my arm going up for the first time in centuries my boob popped out.

I would never raise my hand in class, for fear of people looking. I blush from all gazes, it is because I am pale and the gaze is always lubed-up. I wore whatever I wanted but those corridor glances were sidelong, I would never raise my hand in class. It was a role I couldn’t play.

In the seminar room I wait for the pause. I speak when I want but it is not always appropriate. Who would raise her hand to say something inapropos? You just say it, you whisper in the ear you wait for the sidelong glance. You just say it, your speech is hysterical, schoolyard coolspeak, 90s ironic, academy jargon in valley-girl patter. I don’t speak your language I was a girl in a forest, sister-talk brutal and covert.

I would never raise my hand, the effort it would take would smash me like meat under a mallet. I’d be thin for the grilling, I would never.