Interview on Jacket2

Gary Barwin’s visual poetry commentary and interviews on Jacket2 visited my Gibber recently. We discussed poethics, countermapping, and Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text. Deep gratitude for Gary’s engagement, questions, insight. An excerpt:

GB: In Gibber, you explore how language names/claims the land, how it ‘marks’ it. But, you seem to say that, through a lively, engaged and aware reading, we can unpack the assumptions of language and consider how it can or cannot become part of the ecosystem and/or biosemantic lang/dscape. You explore how the landscape can be read as its own text as opposed to how we read the landscape through our preconceptions, through the conceptual (textual) frame work of our naming, our categorization. Thinking about Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text, would you say that we might imagine the environment a ‘writerly’ text as opposed to a ‘readerly’ one?

ar: I thought about Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text, and looked at Gibber gestures through Pleasure’slens. Marveled at this potential revision: “That is the pleasure of the text: value shifted to the sumptuous rank of the” signified.

What does it help us to fashion an ecosystem (or any ecosystem components) as a text, or to fashion an ecosystem (or any…) as a writer of its own text? What does it help us to imagine an ecosystem (or…) as a collaborator? Each analogy roots the relational seed of interconnection; it pursues hope that we can sense our way into healthier relationship with all that surrounds, sustains, confounds.

Look again: is language an only / a lonely sense for conceiving the world? What sensory components build the linguistic? Listen well. Gibber may be more about conversation than text. Or if text, then text as representing, archiving, recreating the conversation. The conversation between (human and other-than-human) bodies.

 

Le laboratoire l’autre musique

Le laboratoire l’autre musique features Maja Jantar and me performing an excerpt of echolology. Of interest may be a short interview describing our approach to the text as a score.

1. How would you describe this form of writing sound and / or music?


These two pieces are excerpted from a larger written work by a rawlings, entitled echolology. In part, the overall project considers the role that language plays in environmental degradation — and how to shift towards a sustainable interconnection via language deployment. As such, this form of writing sound could be classified as ecopoetic performance writing or sound-poetry scores.

2. How do you think your proposal can be interpreted?


These scores are comprised of text, and we have inherited strategies for how to voice text. Part of our work is to gently interrogate assumed speech strategies. How else might text prompt a reader (a vocalist) if considered as a score (rather than as text governed by conventional utterance rules)? Isn’t it exercises of this kind that help to strengthen transdisciplinary, non-conventional thought and action — skills needed also given the significant challenges facing all ecosystems on Earth?

3. What meanings or additional level provides this particular form of writing to the performance and / or to the interpretation of the work?


In the performance of the scores we’ve offered here, we retain some strategies (pronunciation of allophones, intonation guided by syntax) while incorporating non-conventional approaches (shift from speech to song, monotone, dissonance, certain letters as pitch-shifters, etc.). We also find aural performance of text (or the score comprised of text) conducive to improvisation (since there is a level of improvisation inherent in every speech-act) — and we exaggerate the possibility of improvisation in how we move through the scores (particularly in “Tree hymn,” where all pitch-work and speed choices are improvised).

The repetition of “I will not ruin the environment” offers an opportunity for a listener’s focus to shift from semantics to sound, and for the sound to intone semantics other than what is stated. “Tree hymn,” on the other hand, finds words and sentences in states of decomposition — prompting would-be readers to consider aural translation of this effect.

On “rout/e”

Chris Turnbull wrote to update me on the status of her project ROUT/E, which plants poems in plexiglass along trails near Ottawa. In 2011, she planted “I Will Not Ruin the Environment,” an excerpt from my work-in-progress echolology. From Chris:

Angela, accompanied by 2 wild 7 year olds on the weekend, I returned to Wood Rd., where I placed your poem in 2011. It was cold when I planted it in the snow, and the camera froze…and then I didn’t get back again until Saturday. If you remember, the trail is interesting for a bunch of reasons, one of them being that it is a local ‘dump’ site for about a km along the trail – coffee cups, mattresses, tires, old bottles of kerosene, or miscellaneous liquids litter the sides of the trail. Inhabit the sides? This time around, someone has been making an effort to collect the garbage and has piled it into several piles – it looks near archived  One of these piles was neatly collected in a metal frame and consisted of tires, bottles (as above) and other bits.  Someone had put your poem, still completely intact on post, in the front corner of the metal frame, fronting the garbage. Your poem, which was printed on 8.5×11 paper, with a 1 inch border, was securely under the plexiglass – no water had managed to mar the paper or words.  On the outside, it was mud on plexiglass that framed your poem – completely obliterating the 1 inch margin near exactly, without obscuring any of the language. Fascinating and perfect.

It’s one of my favourite trails – I was in time to see the trout lilies in bloom, bloodroot emerging, and among other things, wild ginger. The boys had fun pronouncing celandine and found 3 beaver leeches at the pond/marsh farther along, which they examined, poked at, and refound several times.

Curating the Cosmos

Gibber is included in Curating the Cosmos, an online art exhibition curated for the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers. The curators also offer a nice contextualizing essay. Here is an excerpt.

Poetic Bodies with Landscapes

In Gibber, the Aeolian Marsh, and The Confluence we find work that speaks to an embodied poetics built around a practice of experimentation and performance. Placing it within a Humboltian sense of unity, Gibber, the work of rawlings, resonates with Wylie’s (2005) conception of landscape understood as that “with which” we see, such that rawlings’ “ecopoethic praxis” is an enactment of practice with the landscape. This is a practice attentive to the shaping of bodies and processes, which are of and within the landscape. Such a mode of practice is evident elsewhere in Berner and Stanley’s Aeolian Marsh a “work utterly dependent on what the weather did” (Berner and Stanley). The engagement with the cosmos here is one of attentiveness and immanence, one where control and agency is distributed between and across bodies, be they human, nonhuman, or something else. This resonates with the “humanimal materialist geography,” of Russo’s piece The Confluence, which is also a practice deeply aware of ethics and human/non-human positionality.

Each of these works, then, is highly creative-critical-political in their stance. From rawlings’ interrogation and unsettling of the anthropocentricities of language and the hegemonic power relationships those languages support, to Russo’s placement of The Confluence as counter-mapping-radical-poetics, to Berner and Stanley’s nuanced understanding of Arrowhead Marsh which, situates their piece as poetics-hybrid-political ecology, these three poets illustrate the possibilities that such practices point toward in eco-politicizing creative geographies.

Within their critical and political stance, it is important to note that these pieces are also playful. We suspect this playfulness, which is based on openness and a desire to work in a field that migrates across bodies and disciplines, is key to reimagining, mapping, and counter-mapping the human place in the cosmos. What is more, playfulness migrates across many other works within this collection which, challenge the way we perceive ‘reality’ and the cosmos. Such works resonate with what Deleuze and Guattari term the ‘play of the world,’ which can be seen in ‘a semiotic fragment [that] rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message’ (2004[1987]:77). Play here, then, becomes entangled with the heterogenity and openness of experience such that it can be understood as a means of acknowledging the manner in which ‘[d]isparate elements … come together in a multitude of different ways’ (Clark 2003).”

Gary Barwin’s Pwoermds

Gary Barwin is participating in Geof Huth‘s International Pwoermd Writing Month. From Gary: “A pwoermd is a one word poem — no title — the poem is its own title and text, as we are ourselves. I will be posting a pwoermd here each day in April.”

Today’s poem is all about the moss, with a luscious nod to my questing within Gibber: “My thoughts and seeing of the environment around me, I must say, have lately been mediated & inspired by the languageye of a.rawlings’ liberty-Gibberish land-non-escapes, her landreadings and lexicontinental riffs. So, this poem, dedicated to angelanguage rawlinguages. Some Hamiltonontariomoss and timespace energy=mutter.”

North of Invention

Now on Jacket2: fifteen writers respond to the archive of UPenn’s 2011 North of Invention festival of Canadian poetry. Co-organizer Sarah Dowling offers insight to both the festival’s creation and the curated responses. I was thrilled to participate in the festival with my collaborator, Maja Jantar, and I recommend reading all responses — formative to re/live this experience through sense, through reflection.

In attendance: Adeena Karasick, Christian Bök, Fred Wah, Jeff Derksen, Jordan Scott, Lisa Robertson, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nicole Brossard, Stephen Collis, Maja Jantar, a rawlings

In response: Sandra Alland, Melanie Bell, Gregory Betts, Mark Goldstein, Susan Holbrook, Ray Hsu, Sonnet L’Abbé, Robert Mazjels, Kevin McPherson Eckhoff and Jake Kennedy, Meredith Quartermain, Jenny Sampirisi, Steve Savage, Christine Stewart, Sharon Thesen

Sound, Poetry on Jacket2

The fifth and final interview in my curated series Sound, Poetry has now been posted on Jacket2. Read on for Rozalie Hirs’ conversation with Caroline Bergvall.