Poetry as IP fugitivity.

Perm for the james k (black feminist music sound k). first line says poetry is good for this.

Could prolly be re-worded to be a warrant for non-black people advocating this aff---has lines about how poetry as performance puts demands on the reader that are usually only placed onto black people, which is good because it makes them “question their choices.”

Perez ’22 [Javier; 2022; Doctoral Thesis from the University of Cape Town; Faculty of Humanities ,Department of Sociology, “Bonded: Legacies of Captivity and Fugitivity from Enslavement to Incarceration in the Cape,” pg. 88-92] kento

In “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” Moten intricately weaves poetics with theorisation to foreground the fundamental polyrhythmic musicality of Black feminist intellectual thought: “Her name is Hortense. Her name is NourbeSe. Her name is B. The back chant she hears is old and new to her. She is unmoored. She is ungendered. Her mother is lost. Exhausted, exhaustive maternity is her pedagogical imperative.”299 In an interview with Moten, Elizabeth Willis remarks that when someone or something (as in our case, onto-epistemology itself) is fugitive, it is “in the wind” and so too is poetry “by virtue of its adaptive vocality, the thrift of its economic footprint.” This understanding of poetry is key: it is both akin and hospitable to the (re)telling of fugitive narratives and the practice of intellectual fugitivity itself. Here, poems can effectively be a site of “running with and running from and running to” along varying lines of narrative refusal and opacity. Of note is Moten’s experimental poetics in The Little Edges, where he plays with what he calls ‘shaped prose,’ the arrangement of prose into rhythmic blocks to produce an audio-visual patterning.302 Brooks’ analysis of Austalian poet Amanda Stewart’s work provides another useful example of how textual poetry located between sound and noise provides new modalities of meaning-making:

to have and to hold the bioeconomicchaoticnonlinearsociopsychogenomorphoparall elanthrosystemicprotophonemilinguisticballisticGUTofa meta matta phor of how b eing was. O.K.?

“The clarity of meaning is disrupted as words congeal into each other to form an agglutinated mess: ‘economic’ becomes ‘chaotic’; ‘socio’ forms a compound with ‘psycho’; ‘morphology’ is juxtaposed and implicated with ‘parallelism’; the capitalising of ‘GUT’ ruptures the string of words that have bled into each other. The words in the mouth literally spew into the stomach, parasitically collapsing the functions of speaking and digesting. Stewart uproots varying elements of language and disrupts their boundedness to isolated components. Language moves in repetition and difference and toward its limits.”

I wish to further incorporate poet Douglas Kearney’s work and his poetic form that defies form as much as it explores and reforms itself. Kearney frames his approach as a “performative typography,” influenced by graffiti’s visual tactics as well as hip hop’s sonic aesthetics and production techniques.305 Performative typography encompasses a powerful interplay between movement and voice, defying what the literary canon has called ‘form’ and reimagining the possibilities of page presentation. One example of Kearney’s work, ‘Noah / Ham: Fathers of the Year’306, follows:

In this poem, the written text invokes both the visual as well as the audio, while blurring spatial elements and overlaying text atop text. Alluding to the Biblical tale of Ham, the text literally reads in a manner that gives the reader a sense of falling, violently even, as was the actual case of Ham’s lineage that was cursed by Noah into perpetual servitude. The repetitive yet visually altering display of “HEE!” is both a pun for ‘he’ and an onomatopoeia of drunken laughter, together forming a critique of the fragile relations among men, particularly between fathers and sons. The physicality and musicality of the poem create a disturbing yet provocative experience for the reader, who must figure their way through the mess that is the narrative itself. Indeed, by invoking Kearney’s method, this research engages with mess in the very sense that Kearney suggests: “if my writing makes a mess of things, it's not to flee understanding, but to map (mis-)understanding as a verb.”

In one recent articulation of his typographically-driven work, Kearney locates his writing style between a resistance to making his work performable, as resistance to Black aesthetic tradition’s conflation with spectacle, and a joy in finding out that people tend to make sense of his poem collectively.3 Indeed, these motivations resonate with this research project, as the work of honouring die drosters necessitates an engagement with opacity, against the obsession with rendering the bonded body both transparent and spectacle. In other words, the typographical visuality of the poetic transcripts in this dissertation does not aim to (re)produce spectacle, but rather invites readers to read aloud and to read collectively, inviting readers to take on or embody the performative demands that would normally be placed solely on the narrator. Again, I wish to invoke Kearney’s own words here: “you can do so much of a better job at [reading this] in your head than I can do it live, because there are things that are happening simultaneously…or like, how you decide whether you’re going to read across like this [signals left to right horizontal motion] or [signals up and down vertical motion]; like all of those things happen for you because when you take the text, you’re like becoming an active participant, you’re intervening in the text.”

Kearney goes on to note that, even in traditional writing formats, the reader performs as an active participant, albeit following conventional literary training that instructs us to read in particular directions. The point I wish to emphasise is that the methodology introduced here is one that underlines both the researcher’s and the reader’s unavoidable participation; however, conventional poetic and narrative forms can mute this point as we take for granted the unidirectional motion of our literary participation. As this project focuses on fugitivity, it is important to unmute this reality and task the reader to question their choices in how they wish to read (and reread) a transcript, where to begin, what motions to take, what pace to assume, and so on. This demand for your reflexivity is one that should inform a broader reflection on how we read or approach both historical narratives (e.g. of slavery pasts) and individual narratives (e.g. of carceral subjects) and the presumed linearity and neatness of such narratives.