1 poem-essay
HERETICAL FORMS: a manifesto from the assembly for critical intervention
In “Artifice of Absorption”[1] Charles Bernstein invokes Edmond Jabès in an epigraph that reads:
“Then where is truth but in the burning space between one letter and the next? Thus the book is first read outside its limits.”
Following this thinking, and moving to disrupt
the limits of genre and discipline, let us consider
the liminal as a generative space for critical production.
How different rhetorical registers, in their intersection,
can create a form in which to imagine potential alternatives.
A critical thought hurled to the ground
breaks into fragments. The dispersed multiples
gather a heretical prototype.
In suturing the bifurcation between creative and critical writing,
an amorphous text emerges. This is an introduction. A split tongue. A constellation
assembles such gestures into a multivalent “form” – a formless
form, a form against the formalities of form.
We form a counter-archive of small interventions.
A sample of critical essayistic analysis that gestures
towards a larger anti-genre to consider and further the work being done in
many different contemporary disciplines of archiving counter-narratives
and addressing the gaps within the archive.
We are interested in questioning the forms
and literatures we have been handed, how they have been integrated
into our social conditions, and how we might
activate an epistemological disruption.
What we are forming can take on
various names, a body inherently hybrid. This work is
not a move to commodify a genre but rather to acknowledge
an aberrant way of thinking critically. In its interdisciplinarity,
this provocation seeks to explore the boundaries of a critical
writing imbued with a creative approach. It embraces dissent.[2]
If we agree with Lukács that: “The forms of the artistic genres
are not arbitrary…they grow out of the concrete determinacy”[3]
then we can say that the cultural history of our poetic forms
becomes a history of social thought and practice.
Poetry is a conduit; and artifice– a possible technique for disruption.
Our current conditions require a new formation,
an interdisciplinary anti-genre that takes from
and goes against the idea of genre, cannibalizes
them to create something new.
We form a constellation of heretics who work
outside of and against the rigid forms of critical writing.
Consider our methodologies. The fragment is a space
that offers a dialogic exchange between archives, quotations,
and critical thoughts. It allows room for a speculative thinking
and a generative reading (both active and passive). It rejoices
in Keats’ “negative capability” and embraces paradox.
Bernstein writes:
“Why not a criticism intoxicated with its own metaphoricity,
… in which the inadequacy of our
explanatory paradigms is neither ignored
nor regretted but brought into fruitful play.”[4]
We embody a writing that revels. It is both
critically engaged and lyrical[5]. We inhabit a threshold
between research and poetry. At times we will be fully
present, at others a slight apparition. We are not alone in this work.
Criticism is here expanded to encompass multivalent forms
of critical thought. If we consider criticism to be a piece of
writing which is always addressing an object of critique,
this work adheres to the definition. However, the object
of critique here becomes something pliable, that can
be turned over, flipped upside down, inverted and fragmented.
Rather than argue for what Susan Sontag,
Bernstein and many other literary critics
have championed as a transparency in
criticism, we are more more aligned with
Edward Glissant’s call:
“to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.”
Our project is inherently ambiguous
but in its impossible horizon lies its potential–
the invitation to explore different approaches and various
emerging methodologies in flux. Tracing Gertrude Stein’s
“continuous present,” historical texts are placed
besides and in conversation with contemporary pieces.
This is a move to dismantle hierarchies between them,
against canonical assumptions. Following a lineage
of the avant-garde (a word ambiguous in itself) –
our writing aligns itself with traditions
against the norm and hierarchy, and moves towards
what Marjorie Perloff calls “a language of rupture”[6].
By piercing our critical thinking, we can start
to texture our thinking in different orders. We can
refuse the forms institutionally imposed upon
writing, we can refuse to be legible within capitalism
and form a formless form.
[1] Charles Bernstein, 'Artifice of Absorption,' A Poetics, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1992).
[2] Bernstein, ‘Artifice of Absorption’
[3] The Sociology of Genres p79
[4] Bernstein, ‘Artifice of Absorption’p16
[5]The term “lyrical” can be ambiguous and amorphous, here the word makes reference to the lyric essay and the musicalities of prose
[6] The Futurist Movement: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture
Emma Gomis is a Catalan American poet, essayist, editor and researcher. She has published three chapbooks: Canxona (Blush Lit) and X (SpamZine Press) and Goslings to Prophecy cowritten with Anne Waldman (The Lune). She was selected by Patricia Spears Jones as The Poetry Project’s 2020 Brannan Poetry Prize winner. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Poetics from Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in criticism and culture at the University of Cambridge.