If two books could interlocute, what would the resulting dialogue reveal? in its recording?
Although they may be marginalized themselves, none of the writers taken from are marginal, by their being de facto in the canon.
I have been recording the margins of books that I have read over the last few years.
This chapbook was composed by threading out a lyrical narrative with material from the margins of two books that use similar symbols and signs.
The method was influenced by the Artist I-Chun Jenkins’ paper-weaving.
I have been finding new delights juxtaposing social critics and canon poetry.
While it took notes spanning a few years, it was thrown together very quickly when rob mclennan forwarded to me praise of a poem he published on DUSIE’s Tuesday Poem.
It’s funny how relatively personal other people’s unintended words can be.
The Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva has some of the most beautiful and poetic margins, which seems fitting because the books is about abjection as it occurs in bourgeois cultural practice, highlighting fascistic tendancies in its religion, family, and society in the process of marginalising and throwing away its unwanted.
Puddles of words, and strips up and down texts have always caught my eye to pause and get stuck looking and thinking in a different direction for a moment before picking up the line again.
Of all my projects, the appropriative ones are the most difficult to explain their reason for being. Being appropriative in nature, the process has many political comcerns, and that requires some sort of ethical framework.
Appropriation is the capitalist’s primary mode of
conduct.
The assorted collection of national poetry, like The Penguin Book of French Poetry 1820-1950, is one of the tools of homogenous cultural reproduction.
Appropriation happens at the margins.
The margins are a result of the bourgeoisie’s quest for cultural stasis.
It’s weird to write about something I didn’t write, in a way as if I did write it. For this reason I feel the urge to justify curated writing differently than authored writing.
It points to something very personal more obviously than my authored work, one has to wonder if using another’s words adds enough distance to make it easier to pronounce them.
Easier, or convenience, is a driving factor in bourgeois society.
My estranged father often complained during visitations when I was young that my mother had ruined me, criticising my effeminate qualities, and queerness.
Part of the selection criteria was dense symbolism and associations of symbols.
The ordering of a narrative from parts is not unlike some sections of psychological testing, purportedly to reveal many things to analyst and analysand alike.
Hip-hop’s influence of sampling and arranging disparate materials into new works, and its necessary political implications, appears here too.
This is a project that grew out a reduction in time due to pandemic homeschooling by conveniently combining two activities, reading and writing.
A bourgeois society that ramps up marginalisation is beyond a tendency to fascism, it is in fact fully fascist.
The Power of Horror is a difficult book, of which I struggle to understand fully.
I am the rebellious youth, even though the original referents were something else entirely, even though I’m not a youth.
By picking loaded symbols they become the new poem’s fascinators.
By picking loaded symbols there is constructed an internally reflected system of meaning around a subject, but the symbols in turn open outward due to the unspecific bourgeois subjectivity that the subject is.
There is no irony in the fact that most of the world’s population is composed of the marginalised.
Under the auspices of Oedipus, Christ, and/or Phallus, the holy family, the nuclear family tries to enclose itself by refusing the validity of every other form or content of human relations.
All that rocks the holy family boat is thrown overboard.
Instead of hiding the gimmick and claiming Authorship, the gimmick is laid bare so that you may find the joys of secret poetry in the books you’re already reading.
The bourgeois family is always already in the process of closing off the public in favour of the private. The public is necessarily an escape from the family.
The christian closes off the worldly, to shield their converts and captives from the world’s destabilizing forces.
In preparing a response to Jenkins’ artwork, Transcending Though Life, a large piece of paper art, made by weaving and looping 1mm strips of pages from old magazines, I noticed that some of the strips of words that I was weaving together sometimes made good stand alone poems, and I started recording margins more frequently.
When there are overlaps and interplay of ideas, such as abjection, marginalisation, and the literal margins, the project seems to suggest itself.
Some of my favorite sequences of words are in this chapbook.
My works of authorship may in fact be just as appropriative as this work of curatorship, the former being figurative, and the later being literal.
Those who rock the colonial boat are thrown overboard.
Papa King’s abject subjects leave to colonize, and reproduce a shittier version of Papa King’s House.
Many people are unaware of the poetry they are already reading, but now I hope you can see it waiting in the wings.
Break the cycle.
russell carisse is currently living on unceded Wolastoqiyik/Mi’kmaw territory in New Brunswick. Here they have resettled from Tkaronto to an off-grid trailer in the woods, with their family of people and animals, to grow food and practice other forms of underconsumption. russell is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In The Margins. . . (above/ground press 2024). Their work can be found online and in print. Website: russellcarisse.carrd.co Mastodon: @russellcarisse@writing.exchange
