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Here's
a message I received from Sophie when I asked her for some information about Kiss
off: (unedited version of message)
Sure! Really, really glad you liked it. It was so much fun to write (mainly
on the 91 bus, thinking "tee hee, if only people could see what I was
writing!" So... not transgression exactly because a lot of the poems
draw on available texts. Permission to play).
Part of it is "Man, the Americans can write." I did a workshop/school
last summer in California and met Teresa Carmody from Les Figues Press among
other writers really pushing at language, picked up a bunch of stuff at Small
Press Distribution, and was electrified by the debate around the Gurlesque
anthology and what it left out... So that was the poetics driver.
I've also been increasingly engaged with/by trans politics and culture,
although I don't identify as trans it's given me a lot of room to think my
way out of some of the gnarlier bits of "I hate boys, throw rocks at
their heads" separatist feminism and have fun ;) Along with a strong
interest in biology and zoology and the way popular science propagates binary
gender and heteronormativity.
The immediate prompt was my colleague Lucy Bolton's book: The Film and
Female Consciousness, which was full of delicious language and images, and
just set me writing. I posted the first couple of texts on Facebook and got
really
lovely responses that encouraged me to keep going.
Rarely do
we get such an insight into the creative process of the poet or poetess at
work. The 'immediate prompt' was Lucy Bolton's book The Film and Female
Consciousness.
For years I've been trying to figure out where Sophie gets her wonderful
imagery and now I know some of it. As all good poets a wide intertextuality
feeds and feeds as nothing succeeds like success. I feel like I've robbed her
of something ; that's she's been too generous - and more generous than I would be. But then that's Sophie
- she gives in her work of herself in minute detail and people respond to it.
She talks about the 'fun' of writing also - and this is something that comes
across in her work:
XO First Round
KO to your kisser, sister
lips meeting red leather
you better / go down
this is the kiss-
off blister (this
bliss this bliss too much
lip in all shades and
flavours
chocolate ice cherry
pie berry burst fruit of
the forest frost fairy
high / gloss
makes lips
stick / screw courage
to the speckled mirror
(they call me the kiss-mister
fogging up your silvered
your hornrims with my hot
breath in a blotted
lipprint lined
in pink
The words of the gurlesque luxuriate: they roll around in the sensual here
while avoiding the sharpness of overt messages, preferring the curve of sly
mockery to theory or revelation.
The
term Gurlesque comes from a combination of 1. The Carnivalesque. 2. The
Burlesque. (and the Neo-Burlesque.3. The Riot Grrrls... Also, the
Grotesque." The term describes a very wide range of things and is a concept
that even Greenberg has had trouble pinning down. Lara Glenum describes it in
her introduction to Gurlesque as a kitschy, campy take on feminism. Gurlesque
is an Avant Garde view of feminism which followed many of the same ideas of
disrupting gender roles that allowed the Kinderwhore look and Riot Grrrl
"movement" to take hold. Glenum and Greenberg both insist that,
like the Riot Grrll "movement", Gurlesque poetics is "not a
movement or a camp or a clique." The concept of the Gurlesque merely
strings together a common strain that Greenberg noticed flowing through
modern feminist poetry in the early 2000s. Here Sophie says here influences
lie and these influences are clear to see - but what an exciting form of
words and ideas - what we have its magic stuff:
A lipped kiss of crossed
legs un
crossing. O, you think so do
you
wear the pants she pants lips o
pen he writes see ho
wever you pitch it, pitch like
a girl (high no
tes, glass rimmed with lip
stick tracery ornate as
dynamite
criss-crossed for the takedown (the lo
vebomb wants us all in the o
of wound how juicy how
monumental
Through
the carnival and carnivalesque literature the world is turned-upside-down
(W.U.D.), ideas and truths are endlessly tested and contested, and all demand
equal dialogic status. The 'jolly relativity' of all things is proclaimed by
alternative voices within the carnivalized literary text that de-privileged
the authoritative voice of the hegemony through their mingling of 'high
culture' with the profane. For Bakhtin it is within literary forms like the
novel that one finds the site of resistance to authority and the place where
cultural, and potentially political, change can take place.
For Bakhtin, carnivalization has a long and rich historical foundation in the
genre of the ancient Menippean satire. In Menippean satire, the three planes
of Heaven (Olympus), the Underworld, and Earth are all treated to the logic
and activity of Carnival. For example, in the underworld earthly inequalities
are dissolved; emperors lose their crowns and meet on equal terms with
beggars. This intentional ambiguity allows for the seeds of the 'polyphonic'
novel, in which narratologic and character voices are set free to speak
subversively or shockingly, but without the writer of the text stepping
between character and reader. And this is the point: that the Sophie is
stepping aside the text which for me is the only way. To give the art its
head and demand the imagination to do its marvel.
And I see another influence certainly. Burlesque overlaps in meaning with
caricature, parody and travesty, and, in its theatrical sense, with
extravaganza as presented during the Victorian era "Burlesque"
has been used in English in this literary and theatrical sense since the late
17th century. It has been applied retrospectively to works of Chaucer and
Shakespeare and to the Graeco-Roman classics. Contrasting examples of
literary burlesque are Alexander Pope's sly The Rape of the Lock and Samuel Butler's
irreverent Hudibras.
An example of musical burlesque is Richard Strauss's 1890 Burleske for piano
and orchestra. Examples of theatrical burlesques include W. S. Gilbert's Robert
the Devil
and the A. C. Torr- Meyer Lutz shows, including Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué
And
so to today and the culmination of expression we have what we have not a
parody but step forward and in confident wonderful fashion. To my mind this
poetess is the best we have or perhaps have ever had. Why do I say this?
Because I've read everything and studied long and this is comparable and then
some.
© James McLaughlin 2012
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