Quotesthe speculative poem: laboratory and industry "We have been speaking about a kind of transfer, transposition--in this crossing, spurting, reticence and rage, through bits and occulusions, by events arriving and dissipating-- the very discontinuous is continuing to write. "To notate by fallout, the barely formed, by the world slamming into you, by the present in the has happened before, in the blubbering of verb tenses traveling spans of years or bodies of perception at the speed of perception--this is disallowed by the academy, the culture industry pathologizes it, it is escaped of laws and is policed. This is what we have been speaking of--the radicalizing potential of writing the Imaginary and entering political agency. I do not mean to suggest substitutability-- insert poetic freedom and there will be a solution, resolution of this or that problem of justice, faith, or love. I do mean: the ear by which the measure by which the prosody by which to calibrate and gauge the disaster, the repression and by enervating it into something of a sustained and engaged acitivity of the living, by responsiveness-- (the repressive cathected to resilience, at responsiveness)--adding to the storehouse, the storehive of the human-- the very difficulty of it, carries the possibility of the liberatory. "Dignity of the human voice-- word meaning and act." -- Myung Mi Kim on January 30, 1999, as part of the Small Press Traffic series at New College, San Francisco. Myung Mi Kim's books of poems include Dura (Sun & Moon Press) and The Bounty (Chax Press); Kelsey St. Press has just released the second printing of Under Flag. [For the full text of this talk, see HOW2, n.2, June 1999.] imaginal values "maleness, like whiteness, like Americanness cannot claim the 'status' of 'marginality' because it remains culturally, politically, socially, and economically dominant. The 'imaginal' values of maleness have not been suppressed/discredited/denied but rather vaunted: . . . positive values for maleness (as distinct from 'humanness'), remain suspect, at least for the present, as socially adaptive strategies to maintain control and power. . . . it it not surprising that many men express resentment toward feminist poetries in a variety of ways: for it is precisely the position of the unrepresented or the subaltern that straight, white American men are rightly excluded from occupying in any primary way. . . . Within this context, the questioning, through poetic methods, of the authoritative structures of our society is useful for both men and women. . . . it is useful to read works by men and women differentially, taking note of the different aesthetic and social meanings of works when read in terms of gender." -- Charles Bernstein, in My Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press,1999). [Sent in by Meredith Qurtermain.] go to this issue's table of contents
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