"What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?"
A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds
Alex Brostoff
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“You have to start somewhere,” write cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, “you light on something, you lean into a realism of slippages and swells.” The experiment started to swell at the Austin Public Feelings group, where, as Berlant and Stewart recount in “Preludic,” five-hundred-word writing exercises leaned into the affective pulse of a scene or situation. But even before then, conferences and collectives had been cropping up, and with a pivot on “think tank,” in 2002, Feel Tank Chicago began “taking the emotional temperature of the body politic.” When the idea of one-hundred-word poetic exercises landed in Austin in 2012, Berlant and Stewart lighted on it. Word counts shifted, and five hundred became one hundred became The Hundreds. The result? One hundred “hundreds,” each chapter a multiple of one hundred words, and published by Duke University Press in 2019. In encounters with thought and sound, affects and objects, The Hundreds rides the reverb between word and world. It’s a length of kelp whipping across a shoreline, it’s a week in protein shakes curbing down the throat, it’s a homeless woman taking a shit in the Walgreens parking lot; it’s cats and dogs and cops and “some kind of reckless flourishing in a carnival of ruin.” Staging scenes of encounter with the pleasures and pressures of our ordinary proximity to each other, The Hundreds is “writing a wrecked world back into endurable form.” Click here to continue reading.
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Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction
Steven Harvey
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Unfortunately you cannot write a memoir with four or five memories, and in my case the trauma of my mother’s suicide wiped clean all the rest. How could I write a memoir if I could not enter the past myself and experience the memories as my own? If we accept the definition of the lyric voice as the voice of discovery by the solitary mind, how can a writer summon detail sufficient for such discoveries from memories that are vague or worse, entirely forgotten? Click here to continue reading.
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Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays:
Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose
Lisa Low
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The term “prolepsis” is relevant here: “the action of anticipating a possible objection or counter-argument in order to answer or discount it, or to deprive it of force.” If Black, Indigenous, and other people of color were already using proleptic strategies in everyday situations at school and the workplace, for example, how would this look like on the page? I wondered especially about writing that explicitly discussed race and racism, as opposed to writing where race is a more subtle or minor thread. What strategies were writers of color using in race-based essays to anticipate critique, and what did these strategies say about the act of writing about race? In the three essays I will examine here—Jordan K. Thomas’ “The Murder of Crows,” Rita Banerjee’s “Mano a Mano,” and Durga Chew-Bose’s “Tan Lines”—the proleptic strategies—facts and statistics, polyvocality, self-implication, childhood experiences, questions, and specific placement of claims/climactic moments—appear more or less depending on the essay, and none of the essays use the same combination of strategies in the same order. But some patterns can be drawn. Strategies like using statistics and outside references rely on a writer’s credibility in terms of knowledge; the BIPOC writer should appear knowledgeable and the essay well-researched, so that the essay’s argument about racism rises above the personal. The strategies of invoking childhood experiences, self-implication, and questioning, especially self-questioning, require the narrator to be—or at least appear—vulnerable on the page, which reflects the vulnerability with which a person of color moves through society in the US. Lastly, the strategic placement in the essay of bolder claims implies a writerly hand, one that knows how tension and momentum operate in a text and how they affect an audience; the BIPOC writer strikes a balance in tone, between when and how much to show their cards. Click here to continue reading.
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The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson's Essays
Nicole Walker
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It might have been my third week in the Graduate Poetry course at the beginning of my MFA program. I mentioned that some line in someone’s poem could be more concrete. Joanna Straughn asked, “Concrete as in Concrete poetry?” I wonder what my face looked like in response. Contorted, as if to say, “what is concrete poetry?” Or contorted as if to say, “Haven’t you heard that in poetry, you have two choices: concrete images or abstractions?” I’d been to creative writing classes my whole life. I worked on the high school literary magazine. I took creative writing at Reed even though at the time, the faculty turned genre every two years. I had Glen Scott Allen for two years, then Henri Cole for one. I don’t think they let me into the poetry course my freshman year but I knew concrete meant “salt” instead of “grief.” Click here to continue reading.
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