Bio / As personal as matters
In the fall semester of 2010, I read Phillip Lopate’s “An Introduction to the Personal Essay” in C.S. Giscombe’s Race and Writing course. In that article I encountered Montaigne’s notion of the “essai,” to make a run at something, to assay or attempt, and also, importantly, to meander promiscuously—flirt with ideas—digress or get off topic, all of which, as Lopate notes, are “hallmarks of the personal essay.” As a poet, I had been accustomed to writing that reiterated lyrical/confessional conventions. To my ears at the time, Lopate was voicing radical aesthetic values, broad enough, I thought, to apply across genres.
I took Lopate’s lead and started experimenting, working discursively just to see what kind of mobility this aesthetic range afforded. Though the personal essay is “personal,” something about Lopate’s introduction relieved my confessional tendencies, as well as my penchant for closure and narrative. For the first time, I felt as though I was going out and meeting things—language, historical data, the daily turbidity of being human—where they were happening, in the cacophonous, refractory space of the social, rather than sitting back in my lyrical shell.
It may be odd that I experienced a poetic revelation while reading an article about the personal essay, but I have an interest in both forms. Mixed-genre writing represents the closest mimesis to sociality, which is invariably constituted by polyvalent discourse and multiple modes of articulation.
My interest in sociality really concretized this past summer (2011) when I was reading Lyn Hejinian’s The Language of Inquiry in concert with Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment. I had been breaking away from lyric subjectivity; I had grown tired of telling my story, facts and oddities of experience, through normative poetic discourse. I saw, with the aid of the texts mentioned above, language as collectively constituted through social uses and poetry being therefore collectively oriented to readers.
I’ve begun working at the manuscript level, as opposed to making a collection of “single” poems. I’ve started working on a manuscript-length serial poem about, oddly enough, bananas, a subject, as I’ve found, that is capacious enough to accommodate my interest in mixed-genre writing and my interest in the social “stage” where all things emerge and interact. My current project looks into the political and economic history of banana cultivation, and also at how the banana—a notoriously funny phallic object—is culturally coded and understood as both a product and a sign with diverse histories. This project also takes stock of my own social position—poet, male, white, middle class—in relation to bananas as a complicated, palimpsestic, pre and post- colonial object.
I am currently an MFA candidate at Brooklyn College where I will work under the guidance of Ben Lerner, Marjorie Welish, Anselm Berrigan and Julie Agoos. I live in South Brooklyn.
I took Lopate’s lead and started experimenting, working discursively just to see what kind of mobility this aesthetic range afforded. Though the personal essay is “personal,” something about Lopate’s introduction relieved my confessional tendencies, as well as my penchant for closure and narrative. For the first time, I felt as though I was going out and meeting things—language, historical data, the daily turbidity of being human—where they were happening, in the cacophonous, refractory space of the social, rather than sitting back in my lyrical shell.
It may be odd that I experienced a poetic revelation while reading an article about the personal essay, but I have an interest in both forms. Mixed-genre writing represents the closest mimesis to sociality, which is invariably constituted by polyvalent discourse and multiple modes of articulation.
My interest in sociality really concretized this past summer (2011) when I was reading Lyn Hejinian’s The Language of Inquiry in concert with Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment. I had been breaking away from lyric subjectivity; I had grown tired of telling my story, facts and oddities of experience, through normative poetic discourse. I saw, with the aid of the texts mentioned above, language as collectively constituted through social uses and poetry being therefore collectively oriented to readers.
I’ve begun working at the manuscript level, as opposed to making a collection of “single” poems. I’ve started working on a manuscript-length serial poem about, oddly enough, bananas, a subject, as I’ve found, that is capacious enough to accommodate my interest in mixed-genre writing and my interest in the social “stage” where all things emerge and interact. My current project looks into the political and economic history of banana cultivation, and also at how the banana—a notoriously funny phallic object—is culturally coded and understood as both a product and a sign with diverse histories. This project also takes stock of my own social position—poet, male, white, middle class—in relation to bananas as a complicated, palimpsestic, pre and post- colonial object.
I am currently an MFA candidate at Brooklyn College where I will work under the guidance of Ben Lerner, Marjorie Welish, Anselm Berrigan and Julie Agoos. I live in South Brooklyn.