Kristy Bowen : footnotes to a history of desire
(alice blue review)
1 a woman who believed her voice was kept in a jewelry box locked in her mother’s bedroom.
2 I placed the blue vase on the mantle, then smashed it the morning. Tiny white porcelain doves mocked me from the sideboard. From the tree outside. Dirty, dirty, they said.
3 In the short film “Diary of Eleanor,” a girl folds her body down and down like a letter until she is the size of a pin. Her lover does not recognize her among the contents of his pocket. a spool of twine, a packet of seeds. She is lost indefinitely.
4 Oddness, oddity:
1. The quality of being odd (ODD a. 2) or uneven; unevenness of number.
†2. Uniqueness, rarity, singularity. Obs.
3. Divergence from what is ordinary or usual; strangeness, peculiarity; eccentricity.
5 occurs in the dream in which she is rescued from the trees by an army of swallows.
6 Adropogon gerardii, or big bluestem. A variety of tall grasses prevalent in the upper Midwest., often growings in such tall, dense stands that it prevents other grasses from growing around it by shading them out.
7 In Greek mythology, Philomel was loved by her sister Procne’s husband, Tereus, who raped her, cut out her tongue, and held her captive. She wove a tapestry informing her sister of her fate, who in revenge, killed their son Itys and fed him to his father secretly. Tereus tried to kill both sisters until Zeus changed them into birds.
8 “god in the machine”
9 I can only say the word dandelion and think of their smell on my hands. The chains linked like arms, staining the good towels.
10 sometimes referred to as la porte de follie {sic} a door leading to an enormous room filled with plastic birds. See Darwin’s Orgin of Species, Book I.
11 Extravagant, or excessive., as in pretentious, reckless, ridiculous, silly.
12 See also appendix C.
@
In contrast to Gordon's work comes Kristy's, which is a poetry of absence and redaction. It's a dangerous choice to make -- meaning that building a poem entirely out of footnotes is something that in other hands would sound like a coy English Ph.D.'s procastination -- but Kristy balances it so well that it's hard not to be taken in.
A poem of footnotes is essentially a poem of surrounding, of enclosing, of not-naming: it is the negative theology of literature. The sensation here is one of space, almost like watching a sheet being wafted over an armchair.
And there is a musty, fastidious smell here, a Key to all mythologies Casaubon-like sensation. What it takes from Kristy is a need to produce a counter to that: Rev. Casaubon is the dark energy which needs some kind of active ingredient to be drawn out, and I read Kristy's solution here as appealing to a playful, almost girlish counter to "Appendix C" when she writes "Extravagant, or excessive., as in pretentious, reckless, ridiculous, silly."
On the one hand, the heavyhanded scholarly account of rape and incest (which of course can not do anything but evoke The Waste Land in a 21st century reader.) On the other, the domesticity of the "good towels".
There is a drama here, but of the distinctly non-narrative sense: in staying firmly in the realm of evocation, Kristy produces something much closer to a tone-poem than a script.
1 a woman who believed her voice was kept in a jewelry box locked in her mother’s bedroom.
2 I placed the blue vase on the mantle, then smashed it the morning. Tiny white porcelain doves mocked me from the sideboard. From the tree outside. Dirty, dirty, they said.
3 In the short film “Diary of Eleanor,” a girl folds her body down and down like a letter until she is the size of a pin. Her lover does not recognize her among the contents of his pocket. a spool of twine, a packet of seeds. She is lost indefinitely.
4 Oddness, oddity:
1. The quality of being odd (ODD a. 2) or uneven; unevenness of number.
†2. Uniqueness, rarity, singularity. Obs.
3. Divergence from what is ordinary or usual; strangeness, peculiarity; eccentricity.
5 occurs in the dream in which she is rescued from the trees by an army of swallows.
6 Adropogon gerardii, or big bluestem. A variety of tall grasses prevalent in the upper Midwest., often growings in such tall, dense stands that it prevents other grasses from growing around it by shading them out.
7 In Greek mythology, Philomel was loved by her sister Procne’s husband, Tereus, who raped her, cut out her tongue, and held her captive. She wove a tapestry informing her sister of her fate, who in revenge, killed their son Itys and fed him to his father secretly. Tereus tried to kill both sisters until Zeus changed them into birds.
8 “god in the machine”
9 I can only say the word dandelion and think of their smell on my hands. The chains linked like arms, staining the good towels.
10 sometimes referred to as la porte de follie {sic} a door leading to an enormous room filled with plastic birds. See Darwin’s Orgin of Species, Book I.
11 Extravagant, or excessive., as in pretentious, reckless, ridiculous, silly.
12 See also appendix C.
@
In contrast to Gordon's work comes Kristy's, which is a poetry of absence and redaction. It's a dangerous choice to make -- meaning that building a poem entirely out of footnotes is something that in other hands would sound like a coy English Ph.D.'s procastination -- but Kristy balances it so well that it's hard not to be taken in.
A poem of footnotes is essentially a poem of surrounding, of enclosing, of not-naming: it is the negative theology of literature. The sensation here is one of space, almost like watching a sheet being wafted over an armchair.
And there is a musty, fastidious smell here, a Key to all mythologies Casaubon-like sensation. What it takes from Kristy is a need to produce a counter to that: Rev. Casaubon is the dark energy which needs some kind of active ingredient to be drawn out, and I read Kristy's solution here as appealing to a playful, almost girlish counter to "Appendix C" when she writes "Extravagant, or excessive., as in pretentious, reckless, ridiculous, silly."
On the one hand, the heavyhanded scholarly account of rape and incest (which of course can not do anything but evoke The Waste Land in a 21st century reader.) On the other, the domesticity of the "good towels".
There is a drama here, but of the distinctly non-narrative sense: in staying firmly in the realm of evocation, Kristy produces something much closer to a tone-poem than a script.
produced by Simon | 5:09 PM
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