An Encounter with Liberating the Canon
Weaving |
Edited by Isabel Waidner with Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt, Jay Bernard, Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, Steven J Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe, Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark, Mira Mattar, Seabright D. Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams.
Passage |
This encounter circumnavigates around small, reparative moments of reading and agency found in language.
This encounter is what was left after the encounter: interruptions into political fabrics of planetary scales; also, intimacies, because what it means to think through and by writing is always, and necessarily, of the body (politic), and perhaps, always somehow in conflict (with care, sometimes).
This encounter is about the document that celebrates the collision between form and genre, intent and identity, politics and poetics because this encounter is rooted in another encounter with failed positioning and precarious communities.
Collection |
This encounter continues with the traces of an editorial, it weaves its play into works that travel to space, that confront desire, aggression, trauma, dystopias (or rather, portraits), Margaret Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, wounds, kisses, darkness, suicide, magpies, mapping, citations, a baby, letters, love-states and semi-colons.
This encounter continues with transgressive writing, something that I hang on to so much of my thinking on delineating practices or making explicit: “the various structures through which the avant-garde literary canon has perpetrated itself and its exclusiveness”, writing that works across “systems of oppression (intersectionality), formal distinction (prose and poetry, critical and creative, and various genres) and across disciplines.”(Editorial, Isabel Waidner, p. 18).
No title |
The lexicographer is multiple and political.
Again |
“I’m editing an anthology of innovative literature for Dostoevsky Wannabee , the Manchester-based independent press. The idea is to capture the ongoing emergence of innovative and nonconforming forms of writing in the UK, and to make connections with likeminded US literatures.” (Waidner, p. 10)
Voices |
The thing is
I’m new here
I’ve been here for a long time
I
Sometimes
Get
Lost
But I always
Find it
As long as
I can breathe through the carpet
Or perhaps
I just feel
All you want to see
Is the porcelain
In my grandmother’s
Old apartment.
Either way.
I went home the other day
Tried to order some food
Everyone kept talking
To my friend
(The tall guy)
And I thought
I don’t know how to
Speak this space anymore
Or perhaps
This doesn’t translate.
I tried then
To look underneath
But it was too
Dusty
Shhhhhh
To blow
It
Off.
Stop |
“But I knew I wouldn’t cry a whole lot or noisily because all the time I was crying, I was writing.”(Joanna Walsh, p. 102)
“She pretended to ask for help, a gold and ivory mace poised below the speech bubble.” (Nisha Ramayya, p.171)
Move/ing |
This encounter stems as much from the energy of a collection, as it does from the political acuity of collective thinking, the kinds of thinking as doing and doing as writing that displaces the centrality of fixed ideas surrounding what is constituted as literary and performative, prosaic or poetic:
“Most of the LTC contributors are lesbians, trans women, (gender)queers, some gay men. Many of us are BAME, working-class, women, migrants or from a background of migration. We are a poster group for intersectionality by default. Intersectionality is and should be the norm in LGBTQI communities, not the exception it might be in more rarefied contexts.” (Waidner, p. 18 )
This encounter is about subcultures and their political permutations, their return, their loudness, about knowing when to stop apologising. This encounter is about thinking, about communicating collectivity without replicating the structures that instrumentalise its aesthetics only.
Elsewhere |
I was recently in a room with students, and we were thinking about the politics of language; they’d come back from doing some research on the Harlem Renaissance. We’d just been thinking about the problems associated with modernism, about conflict and canonicity, and they’d been tasked with encountering a performance work by means of a response, which materialised into its own geographic mapping, without a clarity of terms of identification. I was recently in this room with students talking openly, caringly, about multiplicity, about dis-identification and self-identification, about legal ambiguities, about global politics in domestic settings, about class permutations, about the wrong metaphors, about what it takes and how little that matters unless what it takes is communal, about stakes and loss. I was recently in a room with students and we were on this map with no genre or geographic consistency for quite a long time, and we found it hard to not move together.
Miscellany|
The lights reflect
Oddly
Staggered
On the page as if
The text
Just breaks
When it’s not spoken
To
I wonder if it’s just
Not waiting
For someone to listen
Too badly.
Radicality |
Sticky words: nonconforming literary forms.
