|
According to Joan Retallack, "Poetry and
poetics is for me the lively practice of positioning oneself as imaginative
agent in the world. It has been the moving principle of my intellectual
and cultural life for the past two decades.
"What I am trying to articulate is a puzzle that I do not think poetry
can solve, but it nonetheless charges my desire to explore genealogies
and textual space-time geographies of mongrelism (ways of experiencing
identity that move away from the singularities of vanishing point perspectives).
As a poet using a variety of forms (generic as well as genetic mongrelisms),
I approach this, as I do all my work, keeping these words of Francis Ponge
in mind: "In order for a text to expect in any way to render an account
of reality of the concrete world (or the spiritual one), it must first
attain reality in its own world, the textual one." (Pour un Malherbe)
I am searching for a way for my experience of mongrelism (a word that
I know can strike the ear with a kind of barren ugliness) to attain a
textual transvaluation of values-a reality that arrives on the page out
of a practice of writing that is both investigative and meditative, involving
longing and humor, attempting to find discernible pattern in complex,
intersecting realities."
Joan Retallack's other book titles include Circumstantial Evidence,
Errata 5uite, Icarus FFFFFalling, AFTERRIMAGES and How to Do Things
With Words.
|
