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Daisy Atterbury
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Nate Lemuel, Dark Listed Photography © 2021

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The Grief Work of
Writing & Thinking


 

But there may be a kind of, I think, beautiful and useful way forward, an impulse to the reorganization and reconstitution of the self, in relation to others, which poetry offers. A pulverizing operation on our current understanding of relation. And it's not just about bodies, it’s weirdly about particles.

From The Grief Work of Writing & Thinking, Makhzin, 2020

Writers Daisy Atterbury and Sara Jane Stoner stage a conversation on the relationship between shame and desire in language, touching on topics ranging from topping, bottoming, the queer erotics of speech, poetry, and the pulverization of "settler subjectivity," self-abolition, and teaching. They speak briefly in the interstices of events: first, inside the form of a workshop, and later on a bench in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in July 2019, where they observe a juvenile hawk hunt a squirrel, talk through the rows of a rose garden, and then wander down Washington Avenue, past a recalcitrant dog named Trixie, to a bar with a quiet backyard. They consider the contradictions and possibilities afforded in relationships to university institutions from positions on the inside and outside, asking what writing and teaching practices afford, cost, and produce in these contexts.

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Daisy Atterbury: I’ve been thinking about shame and desire in relation to power. Everyone has tremendous shame around their relationship to power, whether they’ve experienced disempowerment and disenfranchisement or the opposite, complicity and participation in power structures designed to facilitate domination. The way structural power works, most everyone has both—the double shame of having experienced both disempowerment and proximity to structures of domination in their lives, even if that double shame manifests differently, is constituted differently, is based in often extremely different experiences. So how do you manifest a relationship to language, if language is the vehicle and the medium, such that the reorganization of desire allows us to change our relationship to power, and thus to shame?

Sara Jane Stoner: A conversation is a kind of dynamic relationship manifested in language that is combinatory. I am still deep in work on a piece about the feeling of talking in the present moment that my friend Erica Dawn Lyle is going to publish in her zine SCAM. I’ve felt obsessed by my feeling that the aboutness in a lot of political programming buries the double shame you describe so well, or loops it into a kind of catharsis feedback system that seems something other than the reckoning that people seem to desire. The aboutness of political programming never seems to account for the necessity of that chance-based relationship between desire and language—where do the words come from, what brings me to choose that word—that I think is revealing or altering. Where a person in language finds themselves moved.

DA: I’m always trying to understand this in terms of writing about place. And this question about getting outside of something like a "settler subjectivity," or more specifically, articulating a formulation of presence such that we can begin to understand the ways that ongoing colonial forces and changing relationships to colonial history operate on us as subjects and alter not only our writing but all of our ways of being, making, and loving. And there may be no way to find language for this. But there may be a kind of, I think, beautiful and useful way forward, an impulse to the reorganization and reconstitution of the self, in relation to others, which poetry offers. A pulverizing operation on our current understanding of relation. And it's not just about bodies, it’s weirdly about particles. [read more]

On poetry, touch
& space

 

Following Barad, I ask whether there is space between touching and — not. This question is social.

From Poetry’s Social Forms, Post45, 2019 

[...] In "On Touching: the Inhuman that Therefore I Am," Karen Barad draws on quantum field theory to describe the relationship between particles and the void, suggesting that it no longer makes sense to conceive of particles in the void, but rather to think of particles "entangled with it," which changes our concept of how touch works on a particle level. Barad acknowledges, "A common explanation for the physics of touching is that one thing it does not involve is ... well, touching. That is there is no actual contact involved. You may think you are touching a coffee mug when you are about to raise it to your mouth, but your hand is not actually touching the mug."1 Immersed in Encadenar, I grapple with the paradox of touching without touching. I begin to think of touch as diffusion. I start to see myself in gradient. And yet I know that many forms of contact produce violence. I know there is no ahistorical or apolitical relationship to this landscape — I grew up with stories about this site, have my own fraught relationship as a settler to its histories. I want to learn what modes of contact Encadenar produces, proliferates, as argument. Following Barad, I ask whether there is space between touching and — not. This question is social. [read more]