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How subjectivity found a new subject

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by Robert Fitterman

Robert Fitterman reading in Copenhagen 2014So for this talk I’m going to assume reframing practices in poetry—conceptual writing or what I’ve called radical appropriation—as a starting point. Even though there has been a lot of resistance to this notion that reframing found texts brings new meaning, there has also been a lot of traction from poets, readers and scholars. By extension, there are more opportunities to build on further complexities relating to this reframing project. What has interested me for some time is examining the relationship between the self (or subjectivity) and these new writing strategies. I’ll be looking at some samples from poets Monica de la Torre and Diana Hamilton to exemplify how these radical appropriation techniques perform a new relationship to subjectivity and language-based technologies.

Foundationally, we could argue that the curatorial choices of poetic appropriation already point to a poet’s subjective authorship. The poet chooses certain texts over other texts, and she brings all of her poetic intelligence into conceptualizing, editing, and composing the found text in order to create a new piece. One such strategy that superimposes this poet as curator is the poet as avatar. These works problematize the subjectivity of the author by highlighting the instability of the self. Here’s the shift: the newness of the repurposed text in its new context is projected onto the newness of the relationship between the source material and the author-as-construct. Often in these texts, there is a semi-fictionalized self or protagonist—e.g. a borrowed self, a fused or confused self, a more collective self.

In Monica de la Torre’s poem Doubles this instability of identity and the protagonist is explicit, as the author transcribes a thread of emails by individuals who are searching for “Monica de la Torre”. None of these speakers are Monica de la Torre herself the poet, yet, by working with this material, she assumes all of their identities.

From: mcorreche@tenaris.com.ar

To: Undisclosed recipients

Subject: abandoned

I am looking for Mónica de la Torre, my biological mother. She traveled from Argentina to Barcelona with my father in 1975. She went back to Argentina and disappeared when I was two, after being accused of subversive activities. I’ve heard rumors that my mother might be in the United States. If you read this message and know something about her please communicate with me. It is possible that she doesn’t use her real name now.

Thank you,

Mercedes Correche

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From: Monica de la Torre <silliconvalleygrl8@yahoo.com>

To: mcorreche@tenaris.com.ar

Subject: Re: abandoned

Hi! I am Monica de la Torre, but I am not your mother! I am Regional Student Representative for the #1 Region in the Nation, Santa Clara, California! I haven’t always felt like a leader, but several experiences in my life have helped me to learn to gain confidence. I’m living proof of the quote “Leaders are made, not born!” I encourage you to have the same positive attitude!

Monica de la Torre

***

From: monica@door.org

To: Monica de la Torre <silliconvalleygrl8@yahoo.com>

CC: mcorreche@tenaris.com.ar

Subject: Re: abandoned

Dear Monica de la Torre,

Your irresponsible reply to Mercedes Correche went to everyone on the listserve www.sebusca.org. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I’m pretty sure that the woman who found herself in the vulnerable situation of having to write such a painful email did not appreciate your leadership messages. As for you, Mercedes, believe it or not, my name is also Monica de la Torre. I am an officer at the Door Legal Services in New York, and I specialize in family law. Should you need some information pertaining how you can go about dealing with your mother if you do find her, please write to me. I’ll gladly offer my services to you at no charge.

Compassionately, Monica de la Torre

***

From: Becky Varnum <bevarnu@mindspring.com>

To: mcorreche@tenaris.com.ar

CC: monica@door.org

Subject: Re: abandoned

Dear Mercedes,

I am a close friend of Monica de la Torre, the legal advisor in New York, who sent me your email. I play tennis and clearly remember beating a woman named Monica de la Torre at the Wolverine Invitational in Ann Arbor in 1998. I even recall that the final score: 6-2, 6-0. She had a Spanish accent but she tried to convince me that she’d grown up in Texas. She obviously was concealing something. I can get in touch with the organizers of the tournament and ask them for more information on that strange woman.

Best, Becky

***

To: mcorreche@tenaris.com.ar

From: Manuela <lamanuela@transmexicana.com.mx>

Subject: Mi madre

Hi Meche:

My English is no good. Do you speak Espanish? My friend Manuela here in Veracruz has a transsexual website and says to me that you are looking for me. I am stripper, go-go dancer, performance artist and top model. I do not want anybody to know the real name that my mamacita put me when I was brought to the world as a boy. Why do you want my data? If you have interest in my show, come to Veracruz. If not then good-bye.

Chau honey,

Mónica de la Torre

The poem fuses identities and multiples identities. The effect is a text where the author—herself implicated—enacts a dizzying identity theft before our eyes. Monica de la Torre, the poet, is absent in this thread, but present as a poet orchestrating these shifting and related selves, and their subjective responses. So, on one level we have the subjectivity of our author as curator—as the one who conceptualized the project and arranged the material—but on another level we have the poet as avatar, drawing our attention to her own fractured sense of self, allegorically, via this technology. De la Torre has constructed the text to reflect something about an identity blur that is specific to web browsing, but also she has created an avatar of borrowed articulations that speak to her own situation (maybe as a Mexican-American brought up in Mexico now living in New York).

Another strategy that reimagines new ways to think about subjectivity within found text is the poet as: assembler of feelings. Similar to the avatar strategy, here the poet works with the source material of multiple selves: collecting complaints, private articulations, confessions, etc… all modes of discourse that were once thought to be private, but now public (most often voluntarily). Constructing poems with this language reaches for a zeitgeist of affect. This strategy is exemplified in Diana Hamilton’s book-length poem Okay, Okay, which is a reframing of found personal articulations describing private anxieties. Hamilton uses a wide range of articulations (age, class, race, etc.) to present a collective chorus of societal ills and fears.

The Hair-Pulling section reads: “I pull out my hair, chew, then eat it. I punish myself. Like I don’t know ‘big’ words and just other things. My bedframe is made very soft wood and you can see hundreds of bite marks in the headboard.” Hamiliton constructs a collective pool of subjective, personal utterances that reflects a specifically contemporary arena of “feelings”. The space between private and public collapses here, and the borrowed voice, resonates with the private one.

In the crying at work section, Hamilton’s text seamlessly fuses several online posts that sound nearly like a singular speaker: “one night while at work, I had a terrible pain in my stomach, so I scheduled time to cry in the bathroom a couple of times a week, started taking drugs, and found another job. I cried with relief to hear I was dyslexic. I suspect this is largely genetic. I’ll start my own business, and then if I want to cry (or be happy) I won’t have to feel inappropriate.”

In Okay, Okay there is no hierarchial distinction between these found expressions and Hamilton’s own “self”. It’s a text that speaks to a tendency in contemporary post-conceptual writing, where poets are attracted to personal found material for this very purpose… to archive, critique, expose, implicate the subjective pulse of the moment—a pulse that is available to us daily, in new ways, in excess.

The ongoing critique about poets who repurpose texts of personal articulations is that they are vampiric, robotic, cold and impersonal. I find this shortsighted. On the contrary, a good deal of poetry that relies entirely on personal self-expression, without recognizing the mechanisms that have reshaped the context for these feelings, can appear equally false and even oddly cold and generically impersonal. I usually feel uneasy when hearing or reading a poem where the singular authoritative voice shows no reflection to other simultaneous voices, when my own everyday experience of “self” is filled with a concert of these other subjectivities.

These quotational writing practices exemplified in the poetry of both de la Torre and Hamilton can offer new ways to think about subjectivity in relationship to the language-based technologies that shape our everyday lives. As poets, the author’s position in this relationship has not been thwarted and minimized, but, rather, reconfigured as a complex prism of a newly constructed, mediated self. This positioning reaches for a different relationship between the reader’s complicity and the poet’s own authority. How we define this relationship matters. Or at least it matters if we believe that poets have the possibility to reflect the particularities of a cultural moment. There are many ways to do so… these works identify some of them.


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