Thank you to Renee for asking me to give this talk. Thanks to the poetry project for putting on this and other programming. And thank all of you for coming. Please introduce yourself to the person next to you . . . later in the talk you´ll be discussing some questions with those around you so introduce yourself now.

I´ll start by letting you know what some of my seed questions are, then I´ll read from my work, and talk a bit about my background and some concepts from the social theory that´s helped me to make my work. The second part of the talk will be about an interdisciplinary visual art practice, taking you through some of Susan Howe´s ideas, Lorna Simpson´s work; finally, I´ll take you through some of the visual work that is in this handout and read just a bit more from my work.


SEEDS

If I say that making poetry, art, and imaginative prose is an epistemological activity, can an interdisciplinary query help me to go beyond my habits of knowing and seeing?

How do problems of representation in fields other than poetry impact my poetic practice?

Does a concern with social issues and revealing dominant ideologies compromise my lyrical capacity or aesthetic sense?

Do practices of "investigative poetics" or "relational investigative poetics" (Kristin Prevellet´s term, I believe) and "documentary poetics" necessarily implicate me, the author, in the representation of a subject matter?

Must or should my socially engaged text be "author-evacuated"? What would be the value in retaining the "I, " the clearly signed author in a work?

What about the interdisciplinarity of a poetic practice and a visual art practice? Can I do both things in one book?

Take a minute and zero in on a question that seems particularly interesting or confusing to you. Talk to the person next to you about the question and why you chose it.

Now I´m going to read some pages from Threads, a work that I hope engages some of these seed questions.

(reading from Threads)


IDEOLOGY / UNCOVERING MAPS OF MEANING

So I started with an intuition--that this Estonia of my father´s origin, of stories, of my imagination--this Estonia was/is a complicated place--that the issue of identity and relationship--my father´s identity, myself to my father, myself to history--all of these webs of connection/disconnection were very multi-layered, perspective-dependent, invented even. I started with very strong feelings/memories about my father and his story. What prevented him from a critical evaluation of both cold war rhetoric and communism´s rhetoric? How did the smallness of that place factor in to the fierce patriotism of my grandfather? And what did that attitude, that story he told about Estonia, what did it eclipse?

Histories of Estonia were helpful but it seemed that the constructed nature of the Estonian identity and all the visible markers of this--social and physical landscapes--to read this I needed to think about ideologies. What idea of Estonia was my father constructing? What was I constructing? And what idea of Estonia were Estonians themselves constructing?

So here I think it´s really important to talk about ideology. What is meant by ideology? Cultural anthropologists Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall explain, along with many others, that ideology masks itself as "common sense. " In this case it was "of course we had to flee because communism is oppressive. " "Of course the US is a good place because capitalism equals freedom. " When this common sense is disrupted, questioned, ideologies emerge. Ideology thrives beneath consciousness. Stuart Hall says ideologies have the qualities of transparency, naturalness, and by definition refuse to be examined for their origins or the grounds that shape it.

Discussions of ideologies, uncovering these "maps of meaning" as Hall calls them is an activity that to me is incredibly important--something I really learned from social and cultural studies, and I also learned this from noticing the kinds of ways that the "common sense" of my was breaking apart as I grew up.

I think of poetry as a tool to expose ideologies--by denaturalizing language and by being interdisciplinary. I would also say that my first kind of questioning, again and again, when approaching a project is what is the ideology of this art-making that I´m doing? Why should I write poems? About what? And then, how?

To help me uncover ideologies, the history of their development and solidification in Estonia, two texts became important to me as I was rewriting Threads. They were Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James Scott--who was the author of a text I very much enjoyed called Domination and the Arts of Resistance--and Benedict Anderson´s work onnationalism called Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

Scott´s idea of the construction of cities as reflective of state ideologies was important. Especially his writing on the high-modernist city and its architecture--attempts by the state to make the city and its residents legible. Also his work on soviet collectivization was very important to me--the ways that once again the desire for legibility and fiscal control neglected to "read" local practice.

Anderson´s work was helpful in his argument that national identity is as much a culturally constructed idea and something personally felt as it is a political idea. He argues that institutions of religion, language, education help solidify this 19th century nation-ideology construction, functioning to answer psychological needs. So of course this was important and really exciting to read about, to think about vis a vis my family´s intense love of country, both for Estonia and the US. This kind of cultural patriotism is very easy to read also in the names in my family. First, that Magi is an "Estonian name"--it is not Germanic, Russian, Swedish--it´s likely that there was a name change in my family in the 19th c. and also that my father and his brothers were named "Estonian names" for which there are no other European equivalents. Also, that there was a direct parallel between the religious work my grandfather did--he was a missionary and minister for an American Protestant religion--and his political work--this combo eventually meant that he was wanted for questioning by the Soviet police so this is when they fled. So all these cultural structures were very much an outgrowth of a political nationalism--but then it´s a dialectic--the cultural and the political working together. Anderson articulated this and then it wasn´t difficult for me to see this in Estonia.

But let´s back up a little bit. How and why would I even explicitly consider the social sciences or social theory and poetry?


THE INTERDISCIPLINARY IMAGINATION

In college I was drawn to two kinds of study, both I would eventually abandon, but one was sociology and the other was graphic arts--then who knew that they would really inform my poetics now and actually provide the structure for this talk.

I studied sociology as an undergraduate and in graduate school because I was interested in solving social problems and wanted to understand how the world, and US society in particular, had come to look as it did. But became interested in writing--poetry and fiction. The kind of writing required of social theory was one that set up hierarchies of knowledge and could, too easily, be called disembodied. But I should say here that I very much appreciate social theory--I am absolutely not disdainful of that kind of writing. I think of it as utterly necessary to my writing life. I just didn´t locate any energy in producing or replicating it so I halted my graduate studies in that area; still, the sociological imagination had captured me as an undergraduate and I think it informs my choices of themes, writing interests.

I was also involved in the women´s studies program at the University of Maryland, a decidedly course of study. I also took enough credits in German to equal a minor. I found myself all over the map, intellectually speaking.

I also currently work in an interdisciplinary liberal arts undergraduate program for working adults who are, I believe intellectually situated, because of their vast life and work experiences, to be interdisciplinary. I have friendships and intellectual contact with historians, anthropologists, social workers, sociologists, biologists.


THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

What is meant by the sociological imagination? The term was coined by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in his 1959 book called The Sociological Imagination. He writes: "The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life . . ." He continues: "The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society."

This is where micro-macro interactions come in--how does the individual act, behave as a result of macro social structures? This is also, I think, where some of the work of writers like Charles Olson come in, though I think Olson is very optimistic about an individual´s agency in "making history"--the sociologists, though critiqued for failing to grant human agency, believe much more in collective action, in revolutionary shifts in paradigms as a result of several causes including the actions of groups.

But because sociology is often oriented toward demographic studies and survey research, sociologists might fall, I´d say, on the side of believing there can be a social science. Therefore, they might not interrogate the position of the author of the information; they are not so concerned with the poetics and politics of representation.

What does this have to do with poetry, a poetics, imaginative prose? These disciplines are concerned, in part, with how to inscribe knowledge. Their concerns are not just of social phenomena but also with epistemology--how we know what we know--and representation--how we write what we know. To me, as a poet, there is much to learn from them.

Here´s where cultural anthropology comes in.


REPRESENTATION/INSCRIPTION: THE LOOK OF TRUTH IS IN YOUR EYES

To anthropologists, culture is a comparative study, to investigate is to venture out not into what you know, necessarily, but into unknown realms, new cultural contexts, unveiling, in the process, one´s own cultural patterns as well as those of the other. And history is shaped by ideologies, discourses of power, power interests--either through consent (hegemony) or by revolutionary shifts, migrations, disruptions.

But in creating a text from that self/other relationship, to be too scientific, explains Clifford Geertz and his book Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author, you would be accused of being a cold empiricist, for which findings are the only things that matter, and that would be considered ethnocentric. To be too impressionistic, where the subject are puppets, would be to be ethnocentric. Hence the tension, hence the struggle around representation. Geertz locates the difficulty of ethnography as the problem of creating a text that is supposed to be scientific out of experiences broadly biographical. So in a sense, he is problematizing Mill´s earlier claim.

According to Geertz, "the ability of anthropologists to get us to take what they say seriously has less to do with either a factual look or an air of conceptual elegance than it has with their capacity to convince us that what they say is a result of their having actually penetrated (or, if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form of life, of having, one way or another, truly ´been there. ´"

So Geertz truly points out that writing culture, writing place, comparative studies aimed at making ideologies explicit it is not just a problem of self/other, but a problem of self/text.

Again--what application do these thoughts have to a practice of making poems? imaginative prose?


THE "I" PROBLEM

When I came closer to the world of experimental poetry, to the poetry project community a handful of years ago there seemed to be a lot of concern with the use of the pronoun "I" in poetry. There seemed to be an attempt at forming consensus around the idea that in order for a text to address politics, history, social structures and issues--that text would probably not have an "I" at or near its center. The other choice seemed and seems to be highly ironic, disembodied, comical "I" who is only perhaps socially engaged.

I read this "I" problem as a problem of self/other and then self/text. Not a problem of solipsism--though maybe a problem of privilege.

I wondered, Can a point of view can be removed from a poetic text? Does such an attempt signal a belief in a naturalized relationship to knowledge making, a naturalized relationship to making poems, art? Could anonymity or an author-evacuated text really stand for universal, objective? Why would it be desirable to try to create an objective text?

At work here in this anxiety about the "I" are several things--one is the desire to do something other than confessionalism. But also at work is, perhaps, the myth of the individual American hero in history. Not often talked about is the way that we, as writers and poets and artists buy into that myth. If social life is still collective and social change, especially, has never occurred through individual action, then why be afraid of a subjective text, the personal utterance, emotion?

Through a re-working of Threads I was trying to keep the narrator, the "I" intact--I wanted a denaturalized narrator--a narrator who calls their own knowledge making processes into question. And here I should say that I was reading others´ works for examples on how to proceed--particularly novelists Duras, and Sarraute, then later, Bahnu Kapil Rider, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Anyway, I was sensing that the "I" could communicate a sense of having been there, but this "I" would not necessarily conclude in something stable and sure as a result of this contact. That the "I" could communicate anxiety about their position, about their subjectivity.

But I wondered if, as writing got more experimental, more toward language poetry, I wondered about the possibility of content or concern with history and social issues dropping out of the text.

What are your thoughts on this idea of content--a content-driven project--does it became too tied to the ground, too weighted, too limited in formal ways? Isn´t it enough that a poem--especially experimental work or language poetry--strives to expand consciousness via language? Must there be a theme, a discernable locale in the work?


TAKING INVESTIGATIVE POETRY TO THE NEXT LEVEL

I am thinking of what´s been called investigative and documentary poetries. I´m thinking of Sanders´ projects, among others--that tend to use primary source material, interviews, documents--maybe the poet is familiar with the material, maybe not. But similar to journalism, the author does not necessarily reveal their subject position vis a vis the material.

Sanders writes that investigative poetry can ". . . describe every aspect (no more secret governments!) of the historical present" and I would add that the poet might first ask, "why this particular frame?" "Who am I?" "Who else is in the frame?" "Why these particular events, this particular history?"


SURFACING HISTORY/READING TEXT AND IMAGE

And now to segue to the next part of the talk--about images, visual art, or graphic poems--

The images in Threads (click here to go to pages from Threads)are about the problems of text--the gap between received knowledge and inscribed knowledge. Of how to access the stories of Estonia, of my father, in a language I don´t speak, a text I do not read. And how also to access my father´s feelings in these very cold, cartographic statements. And then I had the burden of possessing a thirty page or so document written by my grandfather about his life--written in the third person--how to use that text. His voice, also, by the way, was part of the silencing of my grandmother who allegedly wrote poems, very few of them I´ve seen, very few have been translated. So I took his pages and "broke free" of them and then recaptured their sense by trying to put them back together.

I studied graphic design in my first year of college in 1987, and this was when doing graphic design was a manual process. There were tools, it was physical, pages were constructed. Bodily, I am aware of how difficult it is to create the stable page.

And about the many levels on which reading takes place, and can be destabilized, the work of Susan Howe comes to mind. In The Midnight she incorporates images of book pages, sometimes obfuscated, sometimes clear, sometimes magnified, the photographs interrupt the narrative. I think these images question the openness of the open book, the availability of pages, the gaps between what is written and what is seen. These images seem to be stemming from research--from library work to personal archival work--there is room in her book for both senses--personal and public. Both text and image mirror, obscure, and reveal.

And then I think her poetry, physically, materially, is about this--from her use of typography, from her misspellings, remind us of the naturalizing process words and therefore ideas undergo just by regular, predictable typesetting.

In an interview with her in Talisman that´s later reprinted in The Birth-mark, she articulates that history is an actuality that yes, does act upon the author--that the author works in and against history. This might be a little different from Olson´s thinking and then I wonder how ideologies of history are gendered, raced. The interviewer asks, "Well, how then are poems related to history?" and, interestingly, her answer is a comment on form and method: "You open yourself and let language enter, let it lead you somewhere. I never start with an intention for the subject of a poem. I sit quietly at my desk and let various things--memories, fragments, bits, pieces, scraps, sounds--let them all work into something. This has to do with changing order and abolishing categories. It has to do with sounds in silence. It has to do with peace."

Again, in the same interview, she expands this idea: "So I start in a place with fragments, lines and marks, stops and gaps, and then I have more ordered sections, and then things break up again. That´s how I begin most of my books. I think it´s what we were talking about in history as well, that the outsidedness--these sounds, these pieces of words--comes into the chaos of life, and then you try to order them and to explain something, and the explanation breaks free of itself. I think a lot of my work is about breaking free: starting free and being captured and breaking free again and being captured again."


COME CLOSER TO MY LAYERS OF REMOVE

When I took drawing classes I remember one of the most important ideas that was reinforced throughout the semester was this idea of layers of remove. That taking something original and photocopying, then photographing, then scanning, and with each step in this process of "remove" distorting or making marks or scarring in some sense the original--how this activity reminds me of Howe´s poetics.

But I think her dedication to remaining unambiguous about her subject matter presents her with some formal problems that she uses prose to solve. She comments that at times when her work has ended up too fragmented, too violent, she writes then a kind of prose introduction because she wants to rescue the page from falling off into complete abstraction, into what she calls "visual art."

Comments or questions here? What about a poetic text that moves so far from its source that the source concern is no longer discernable? To what extent do we want to pull back from complete abstraction, to be forthright about the subject-matter? Do we underestimate the reader?


THE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF MULTIPLE TRUTHS

Mirroring the tension between clarity and destabilization, denaturalizing language, I like this quote very much from Lorna Simpson´s work: "strong desire to blur, strong desire to decipher"--to me the whole work is a statement on poetics.

So Lorna Simpson´s work interests me for several reasons. To start, she works with text and, because of their sequential or serial nature, her pieces remind me of the act of reading. Also, her de-naturalizing of the portrait--by turning the women around so that they are not facing the camera--this kind of minimalist approach gives itself over to a reading of the frame that I think is in itself a critique of representation. I am also really interested in her approach to the look of history--working with a photographic frame that recalls the daguerreotype, working with poses that recall the nude female body throughout art history, with costumes that recall Harlem Renaissance era performers. About Simpson´s gallery specific installations, critic Kellie Jones comments that "The constructed environment expands the space of interpretation; in and through it Simpson is able to juxtapose and display the physical evidence of multiple truths. Installation´s construction is transparent, self-conscious, deliberate, clearly inviting the activation/participation of the viewers."

I am thinking about this quote, about the acts of taping, gluing, adhering papers and texts to surfaces and the visual image´s capacity to activate almost immediate responses in viewers by giving them at once something familiar and then something constructed, obviously hybrid, the interest in the kind of spectacle of the Frankenstein monster page.

What are your thoughts on this--what about the quickness in which a visual image is read? How does this contrast with what reading asks us to do--its slowness--can these two modes exist in one book or are they then pitted against each other?


GHOSTS IN THE NARRATIVE

The Seneca Village series (click here to go to images) comes out of a desire to do a project on the social and literary construction of race ideologies, particularly notions of whiteness, that are often deeply silent, deeply buried. The project also has to do with history and physical landscapes, history and archeology.

The removal of the primarily African American village there nearly coincides with Wharton´s novel, The Age of Innocence--I thought there is tremendous irony there. But I also remember finding that book, The Age of Innocence, on my grandmother´s bookshelf after she died--there it was, translated into Estonian. So I think that of course there is a question of power--of how some realities, truths are recorded and perpetuated through dominant literary culture. I thought within the space of a page, again visually, it would be possible to communicate the ghosts within of that novel´s narrative.

I learned about Seneca Village by going to the New York Historical Society and attending a presentation on the village and taking a tour of the park where we located footings, the outlines of foundations.

I have some writings about this but the text is very much in progress.


LANDSCAPES: FAULTS AND FISSURES

Finally, as part of a project called Between Stateswhich is about ideologies around "nature," (and the chapbook Cadastral Map published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs is a part of that) I´ve been conducting some research on Kentucky. As with all of the states, Kentucky´s entrance into textual history is coupled with violence--with the violence of the removal of native Americans and with the violent difficulty of farming that land that was really quite difficult to farm.

I wondered about the possible effects of this history of violence and danger there in the minds of people--visiting there, getting to know my husband´s family in southeastern Kentucky, I noticed a kind of persistent discussion of health, and a concern with all things family almost as if it is a tribe. Many of the songs of Kentucky and Appalachia are about the dangers of relationship going across family or tribe lines--troubled courtships, troubled and good marriages--so I wove these kind of sentiments together with geological information, inserting myself in the narrative mostly via the voice of Wendell Berry who takes walks through the landscape, narrating this place to usually for commercial literary purposes. That I stand behind Wendell Berry in this piece of writing made some sense--my sense of being a visitor there, a listener, very different than the local people and I could never hope to code as one of them. Yet I feel as though I know enough to want to lift some aspect of Kentucky, other than the stereotype, into another context, into a work of poetry--but to do so without romanticizing the life and the land there.

(reading "Interbedded" from Between States)

Thank you all for your attention and thanks for coming. Thanks again to Renee and to the Poetry Project.

Jill Magi, home page