Happy Valentine’s Day from me and my research
Dear Void,
I am a Doctor of Arts candidate, studying
at the University of Sydney. And I’m blogging my arts research here. I started
this blog as a way of keeping track of the work of arts research (more
specifically, I claim this to be performative research) and as a way of
writing through my thinking around my project. There may be expressions of
ecstasy in this supposedly asensual public space, the university, as I consider
and create poems and images in response to an eighteenth century commonplace
book that belonged to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762).
I am not an historian, nor a literary theorist.
I am a poet making work in response to a manuscript, as performative research.
I can’t remember when I conceived of
this project, I think it developed over time. I’ve always been interested in
the way we (humans) can ‘perform’ objects. ‘Be a tree’ and all that. That would
be my background in theatre forth-blooming.
In the creative writing seminars that I
tutor, we have an exercise where an element or characteristic (some thing or
object) in a scene 'speaks' to the writer through the pen, if the writer is open
to it. The object/element reveals details, answers questions, and generally
provides information as an informant might in an ethnographic study. Of course,
things can’t speak, I know that. I do. But we can perform them speaking and
that’s our madness and our gift.
We can articulate the dimensions of a
thing’s power to influence the human mind, to act upon us. I’ve long been
interested in the object’s ability to assert itself and what we might
perceive as a transfiguration. This I think has something to do with the human
faculty that Michael Taussig considers in Mimetic Excess. I mentioned Taussig’s chapter earlier on this blog, here and here. this inherent mental
and physical power for representation or imitation of the real world (mimesis)
that allows a thing to ‘speak for itself’ through our bodies or through the things that we make.
* * * * *
I missed Friday’s blog post. Friday got away
from me.
At 11am, I ‘attended’ an online seminar presented
by NYU Creative Writing. I have to say I’m a huuuge fan of online poetry
workshops/discussions. It is what the internet was built for. Okay, it really
wasn’t. But it’s the most radical and beneficial use of it! Friday’s was a conversation
between Kamran Javadizadeh and Sharon Olds, moderated by Claudia Rankine. And
it was a pleasure to listen to the poets’ discussion around American confessionism
in poetry. With lots of new takes on the subject.
I have notes. I think I’ll write them up
and make a blog post out of it.
Then I dashed over to Fisher Library for a date that I had with a book. A BIG book. Well, bigger that I was expecting. Here’s my insta post on it (I had time to post that at least):
And the hole in the vellum on the page (117r)
to which Lisa Robertson refers in Nilling was much smaller and fainter than I’d
pictured. The doodle was large and luscious in my mind. It was still, as Robertson describes, ‘mildly and endearingly erotic.’ Then, again, that’s what I find interesting: small things, seemingly
insignificant things. Writing for a small readership? Playing to a small
audience? That’s the attraction to this manuscript, I think. A manuscript that
at times has been dismissed as insignificant in Lady Mary’s extant writings.
* * * * *
Keep the love, Void.
Jx
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