What is YOUR fragment? Poets
discuss the fragment--where they first encountered this writing
technique, how fragments are part of books they read and admire, but most significantly, each of the poets participating in
this year-long blog project begun in early 2014 share a bit about how
the fragment appears in their books.(see the original questions HERE and
an elaboration on my reflections on what a fragment is HERE). Responses
1-11 have been supplied by (click names to see posts): Lisa Pasold, Marthe Reed, George Vance, rob mclennan, j/j hastain, Michael Ruby, Jennifer K Dick, Afton Wilky, Pearl Pririe, Tilla Brading and Laura Mullen.This week poet Adeena Karasick responds.
Adeena Karasick is an American poet
and media-artist and the author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory,
most recently, This Poem,
(Talonbooks, 2012)—which you can watch her read from on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjknfvH8gB0.
Four of her “videopoems” are regularly showcased at Film Festivals worldwide. Her
work is marked with an urban, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges
linguistic habits and normative modes of meaning production. Engaged with the
art of combination and turbulence of thought, it is a testament to the creative
and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing
meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. Karasick’s poetic practices
reflect her elaborate academic background and interests. Karasick earned an MA
in Semiotics at York University, and a Ph.D from Concordia University focusing
on the intersection between deconstructionist and Kabbalistic hermeneutics. She
is internationally recognized for her intellectual leadership in the discipline
of poetics and theory, and the intersection between divergent modes of
communication. Her scholarship has focused on the development of meaning, with
special attention to the work of Marshall McLuhan, Derrida and L-A=N=G=U=A-G=E
theorists; on the historical relationship between modes of communication and
sociocultural phenomena; on the impact of new technologies and media on
language practice; on popular culture phenomena including television, film,
feminism, Conceptual Art and Kabbalah. For more, see her complete bio on the Fordham University site
HERE and check out her home site at http://www.adeenakarasick.com/
Adeena Karasick's FRAGMENT:
not what the siren sang but what the frag me[a]nt (bpNichol)
Whether
using it to denote all that is absent or elliptic or broken,
the
fragment foregrounds how everything is always already
broken
from something and the fragment inside the fragment infinitely explodes
with
all potential meaning.
Composed in the style of Facebook updates
or extended tweets, This Poem (Talonbooks, 2012) is a collision of
fragments. Mashing up the lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Whitman, the
contemporary financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Derrida and flckr streams; fragments
of post-consumerist culture, it documents contradictory trrrnds, threads,
webbed networks of information, the language of the ‘ordinary” and the otherness
of daily carnage, erupting as a kinda self-reflexive deeply satiric archive of
fragments, updates, analysis, aggregates, treatise, advice and precepts.
The fragment allows not for a desensification but reminds us of how we are
always engaged in a kind of euphoric recycling of information (shards, sparks)
and how we are continually reinvented through recontextualization. And consumed
with an ever-elusive search for definition, rerouted through infinite collisions,
juxtapositions of defamiliarity, and asked to re-evaluate how we process
information.
Recent
collaborations with Maria Damon, Intertextile
Text in Exile, Shmata Mash Up / A Jewette for Two Voices published in Open Letter (Collaborations Issue) and Habits of Being (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), explores the
rag inside the frag --
the text
as textile interwoven; text in exile, textatic;
is ribbed
woven linen limning outlining the materiality of the sentence, s’entrance –
Because
what is a shmata but a fragment?
a rag,
towel, washcloth, headcovering -- that which is ripped tattered worn.
Interestingly,
with the addition of an apostrophe
Shma’ata is also the text
and
thus really foregrounding how inevitably the text
is
always comprised of fragments, broken, torn
Always
already ripped off
stretched
out in the minutia of ouisie locutia
all
ambiphractured and hemistiched
saying
the unsayable, waving towards and
calling forth
all
that is not present but resonant and echoic
palimpsested
in a pool of reverberant slips.
Interestingly,
it turns out that with an addition of an “a,” Shemata –
actually
means to drop, let slip, slippage; fragment
So, shmata engraved in slippery ellipsis
oullipian slippage, full of cuts, scission derisions, elision; shattered,
tattered reminds us how through the fragmentation of the words
the world
explodes.
**
Further
focus on the fragment most recently, is with my Salomé project
I’ve
been working through fragments of history to tell the untellable
name
the unnamable, say the unsayable re-writing her story
through
shards, fragments of Kabbalistic and Midrashic infusions, histories
mythistories heresies repurposing her
naysayers (Bryant, Flaubert, Oscar Wilde,
Richard Strauss ), re-presenting her not as
an evil murderess but
opening a space where she (as an apocryphal
figure) is not repeatedly victimized, scapegoated and silenced, but occupies a
new arena of polyvocality, transgression and desire
The fragment offers an openness not only to say
the unsayable but to actively interact with the apostrophic silence reminding
us its never silent but salient, resounding with all that is not said. And through
the mash-ups and interventions, juxtapositions of conflicting discourse, the
fragment allows a freedom from constraint, borders orders laws, flaws codes; a
coterie of otherness, urges us to traverse new territories (because
the map is never the territory), terror stories,
torah stories, erostories
celebrating all that’s manifest and secret,
private and public,
secret and readable, revealed, concealed,
unassailable, malleable
And she is thickening her vibe
transcribing
like
a savage garish moody poster portrait
of
debt-vetted affects
refracted
parataxis
axioms
of wracked praxis
And he is all swarthy charred
with
loaded lilts, stilted jilter
filters
fluttering
And she is trampling her
tangled
transom
And he is cradling and scratching meaning
out
from the fissuring of an architecture
of
cynicism, of stuttered iterality
And she is
stirring
her plotted contiguities
echoes,
orbits, ambits of ravaged damage
while
bathing in the operative gore of systemic repression.
***
Covering and uncovering recouvert
veiling though these letters of the
text all lexibly flexible, textured
flecks
gathered rags or raggedy gags, rag tag
frags of wriggly insignias