The question rapidly becoming a hot topic is, “What is the state of the language we have to work with?”  Our contemporary generation of writers has some very peculiar problems to contend with, not the least of which is the fact that our medium has been utterly destroyed and mortally devalued.  Not only is the English language complete rubble; it has become so by premeditation and calculated effort.

Postmodernism and Deconstructionism may be old news at this point (dating to well before some of us were born), but the effects of the movement have been disturbingly persistent.  The deliberate laying to waste of our language on the basis that traditional languages are teleologically the languages of oppression, paternalism, greed, marketing, imperialism, bias, gender conflict, class warfare, misinformation, propaganda, lies, justification of genocide, hate, violence, inaction, general historical evil, etc. etc. etc… has been immensely successful.  Mission achieved.

Halfway.

Because, if I’m not mistaken, part of the original plan was also to replace the old/broken system with something newer, more enlightened, and better for everyone.  Step One worked to near perfection.  We’re still waiting for someone to even take a modest step toward fulfilling the promise of Step Two (sorry to all of you Esperanto fans out there, but it just hasn’t caught on).   Apparently that job was just too hard.  Swinging a sledgehammer seems much easier by comparison.

To be clear—we, as a young generation of writers, are in many ways at the mercy of our literary parents… parents who have made absolutely sure we know all the rules of what NOT to do with language, of how/what NOT to write.  The Post-Modernists went out of their way so there would be no mistaking our shared language as absolute shit… not only shit, but the most vile, runny, filth-some, seafood-soaked feces that we could possibly imagine.

Message received.

What do they offer their budding, yearning, interested children in the literary arts?  Something more benign to sculpt with?  Modeling clay, perhaps?  No, they ask us to simply hold out our hands, wherein they deposit a steaming pile of history.

“Here.  Take this.  It’s shit.  Literally.  Bad crab legs.  I don’t want it any more.  You make something out of it.  Just don’t make anything pretty.  I can’t stand pretty.”

To which all I can respond is, “Thanks.  You’ve done plenty.  We’ll take it from here.”

Is it any damn wonder that many of the writers I’m in contact with talk about projects of language “reclamation?”  We have the language we have.  Frankly, I’m unapologetically in love with it.  However, the language we have right now looks something like circa-1946 Dresden… or perhaps the massive dumps outside of Mumbai where children scavenge rags for a living.

So people pick and choose words to haul back from the dead.  We venture out into the dumps and potter’s fields.  We bring back what we can carry.  We create erasures and cutups; we attempt to seed salted earth with the few words left untainted.

Are you involved in a project to salvage a piece of language?  What methods are you using?  How do you grow something new out the wreck of something old?  What fresh language are you using to bring life back?  Speak out!

Just as an example to get things rolling:  scientific language seems to be one piece that was saved, relatively intact, in our linguistic seed bank.  I know several people who are using this to immunize their poetry against deconstruction.

It’s shit.  I’m happy as a pig in it.  Now make something of it…

In response to how her project was going, Kristi Yorks said, “Because of a rather hectic schedule, most of my “altering” time has been done at work, hidden in the back room, quietly ripping pages, twisting narratives, and stitching them back together – much to the shock and dismay of my coworkers who looked on: “Oh what are you reading?”…”Not reading, altering.”

Mirrors and reflections, a kind of distortion, illuminating. There is a mirror at work, a plate of glass with holes cut through the center. Guests will walk past, slowly inserting their hands through the gap, wrapping it around, watching it through the glass that bends their fingers, blurs the lines between. To physically engage the text. To recognize that reading is not a passive act. To understand or comprehend that meaning is created, a consequence of a conversation within the text itself. To see the text as a medium of sorts, a channel, a way of engaging another consciousness in conversation – a conversation that challenges, deconstructs, and imagines new possibilities, new interpretations, new visions and realities within our own. Reading is dangerous. A way of writing and re-writing – that which only exists within its own deconstruction. To alter and transform, to translate the dark space of the human mind, the space that reads and interprets, that space of tearing apart and rebuilding, to reflect it onto the page itself. How the mind reads the text, where it finds meaning. How, together, a reader and his/her text become something else, something more – how they cannot exist without the other.”

She then added more to her blog, explaining not only how the project entered her daily life, but how those stitchings exist on so many planes.

For my own book, I found I was also struck with the idea of mirrors.  Fragmented images of the self.  Breaking down the human body into pieces.  And, in looking at the book from the exterior, one would find them self in many images at once.  Much like Frankenstein is many images at once, himself.  He is horrifying in concept.  There is something about the fragmented self that is horrifying.  Who are you, if you are many pieces of others at once?

On the East coast.  The concept of the mirror also made its way into the book.  And so I ask, how does Frankenstein bring forth this concept of reflection?  Daniel Dissinger wrote, “The idea of including the mirror was to encourage people tolook at themselves and answer that question we all ask when we see our reflections in anything– “What do I see?”  I brought the book into my students in my English Composition class, explained the idea behind an altered book; and since we are discussing identities and identity crisis’s, I thought it would be a great idea to force them to look at themselves.  Urging them to keep it anonymous (creating one communal monster) each student added a few words about what they saw.”

On the West Coast, Travis MacDonald had this to say of his erasure, “Painstakingly miniscule scribblings. Made my arm cramp up and monstrous mono-glottal groans escape my esophagus more than once: aaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

Below is a slideshow of the first round of the project.  It begins with the Pacific Coast and moves Eastward.

A few months ago, I got the idea of making something big.  Creating a project where people from all over the country can write, make art, and get involved.  So, I thought of Altered Books.  If you are unaware of what an altered book is, take heart, for you are soon to find out.  Or, you can go here and find out more.

So we had a beginning.  Something to do, but how to do it? Well, we needed the project to move around and be collaborative.  So, as the volunteers came forward, I noticed a theme.  We had defined groups in every time zone.  Perfect!  In each continental US time zone, there are 4-6 writers/artists/photographers.  Each person will get to touch the book, in an order I can only say was created based on the economics of shipping. Each person will get the book for a few days, and then send it off to the next.  And, in the end, we will have four beautiful books that have touched 20 different individuals.

And now you might be asking, what book did you choose?  Thanks to the wonderful and brilliant Travis Cebula, we went with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  With the idea of piecing together a new life to something, this book was perfect on so many levels.  And, its dark and strange story lends itself to what we hope will be fascinating explorations.

Currently, our books have made their first trip.  They are currently in New York, NY, Chicago, IL,  Santa Fe, NM, and Boulder, CO.

Stay tuned soon to see the progress of our books!  See below for a sneak peek of one of them!  From here on out you will be getting updates from all four of our books, their whereabouts, the experience of working with them, and more!

I first met Djelloul Marbrook at Anne Gorrick’s Cadmium Text Series, in Kingston NY. Marbrook bought my book at the event, and we spoke at length of poetry. When I ran into him quite by accident at AWP, I was delighted and bought a copy of Far From Algiers. Between the bus stop just in front of the conference center and my hotel room, I was well into the first third of the book. Here was a book for me so conceptually compelling that I stayed in my hotel room to finish it, missing an event not too far from my hotel.

Far From Algiers is an apt title. The collection meditates continually on belonging. It is a book infused with the kinds of questions about belonging that are frequently related to migration, immigration, displacement and exile. To leave it at that would be a gross oversimplification of the book. While so often mainstream news dehumanizes an “other,” by presenting narratives devoid of histories or humanity, Marbrook’s collection re-inhabits these spaces through his art. In terms of territory, dispossession, and the subjugated subject, Marbrook humanizes questions of home, belonging, possession and dispossession. In this way, the book can be said to offer a means of literary, even political, resistance.

Marbrook opens the book with “Climate Control:”

Stuff the mailboxes and night repositories

against my attempts to insert

flat evidence of my belonging here.

I’m as sick of wanting to get in

as I am of wanting to be heard.

I was born with one of those faces that say

Trust me, you don’t want to hear it.

Bad enough listening to myself,

who needs you to confirm the news.

Already the element of belonging is as clear as it is conflicted. Marbrook illustrates this strain formally by way of diction. The tension between the use of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon words is worth noting. Musical, fluid and polysyllabic—words with origins in the romance languages—contact with monosyllabic, direct words. Marbrook’s weaving of these etymologically contrasting words mirrors the multiplicity (the disparate “belongings”) inherent in our language and in our “roots.”

Contemporary artists and writers have a responsibility to rethink thinking itself in the context of pervasive discursive practices that systematically reject difference and subsequently reject justice to an “other.” Marbrook embraces this responsibility by being not indifferent but abundantly aware of grounds of the sociopolitical practices that lead to subjugation and oppression. In the title poem “Far From Algiers,” Marbrook utilizes France’s colonization of Algeria to critique not only Europe’s colonialism in northern Africa but the inherent problems of nationalism, occupation and marginalization—unfortunate by-products of ongoing imperialism. Marbrook writes:

An unnamed race slips by

ethnographer and xenophobe,

roiling bowels and hackles,

electrifying space.

Genomes tell us nothing

about our overlords;

we know we’re an underclass

to these corsairs and otherlings…

Every simpleminded day

guards against kidnappers,

every complacency has its dey

fat on ransom in some Algiers.

Marbrook’s work offers resistance to the dominant discourse—white, male, middle-class, adult, heterosexual—a less traditional project that rethinks negative political imperatives a product of the subjected subject, compartmentalization, and accommodation of oppressed constituencies on which that dominant discourse relies. Here is a poetics that critiques, sometimes acerbically, the value of History, Truth and dominating ideologies that produce exile in the wake of imperialism.

It is a not-at-homeness inherent in the human predicament to which Marbrook undoubtedly responds. In Far From Algiers, home is contested space and dispossession of land, but it is also a consideration of how bodies manifest themselves in language and space, writing and distance. The poem “Port of Entry” illustrates:

I imagine death an empty place

where we get used to what we’ve got

and put on what we knew all along.

My guess is we can’t get our names

past immigration, much less

all we’ve pretended to be.

I sleep these days smiling to think

how we’ll fly in that lightened state

needing no paper, being beyond words.

In her foreword to Far From Algiers, Toi Derricotte writes “the poems…hold many layers. They make the mind want to participate.” Indeed this is one of the reasons I was so drawn to Marbrook’s book. Readers can connect conceptually with the notion of belonging. It’s an ache with which most people can identify. Yet the book is complicated formally through moves between an “inside” and an “outside,” a voice close as a neighbor’s ear and as far-away as an “alien.” Language is abstract and then grounded in the concrete, conversational and then distant, literal and then allusive.

Far From Algiers frequently appeals to sensation by weaving abstract concepts with images (metaphorical and literal). In “Climate Control,” it is the paths by which distant correspondence occurs (the mailboxes, the repositories), a climate “not suitable for growing/ the fruit of your tree” and a “quarrel with locked doors.” Here, as is the case throughout the question, Marbrook illustrates the nagging questions of belonging, the sickening feeling of being left out and the struggle of an “alien life.”

Formally echoing a crux of belonging, poems are both conversational and distant. In the poem “Djelloul,” the speaker allows us to overhear past conversations when people have presumably asked “What kind of a name is that?” We are made privy not only to these conversations but also to the meditations of the speaker after being asked such an insulting question. The speaker confronts the very violence of language—language that so frequently legitimizes violence and extols American exceptionalism—as he considers:

It’s French, I could say. Who knows

the difference? The difference is that

it’s Arabic with French panache.

Jeh-lool, go on, try it.

Terrorists bear the name, scientists

and singers, and a few cashiers…

What kind of name is that?

The name of a Saracen lancer

ghosting in the dusk of Provence

and the name of a citizen deported

a thousand times a year.

The name is situated culturally or between worlds, haunted by the ghostly trace of the Saracen in Provence. But, perhaps more importantly, the speaker shows us how naming is used to alienate, and even deport, thousands of citizens. Because a name is linked to deportation, the message in the cognitive gaps between lines is disturbing—racial profiling and racism in highly nationalistic times (i.e. the Bush administration) might come to mind. Yet the poem also makes the connection between terrorists and scientists, between singers and cashiers. Naming, like the yearning for belonging, is something all humans share.

A retired journalist, Marbrook understands the responsibility of language, of literature and of the arts. One of the formal ways in which this is clear in the collection is Marbrook’s keen attentiveness to language that is both literal and allusive. The last poem of the collection, is “Hasan Ibn Al-Sabah,” titled, as the epigraph informs us, for the “Lord of the assassins” in eleventh-century Persia. I include the whole poem here, because I think it communicates much of what I discuss above.

Exile is a twofold problem:

no one eludes it and

mourned land disappears.

So while I hoped to complain,

I’ve nothing to complain about

except the poignant delusion

that some of us belong and

must be vigilant for those

who live among us in disguise.

We need the assassins

to exonerate what we do,

to make it seem less awful.

Hasan ibn al-Sabah lives

in our churches on Sunday,

in mosques and synogogues.

We can’t describe his face

because we wear it while

we hunt the foreign devils.

The speaker begins directly and literally—exile is a two-fold problem, no one can elude it. Home slips and slips through the fingertips of an “exile.” A fairly direct rejection of any person’s ability to belong is also clear. Yet Hasan ibn al-Sabah is symbolic in the sense that within the context of this poem we are nudged to consider our own hypocrisy, the other on whom we blame our nation’s problems and political conflict rearing its ugly head over and over again.

Far From Algiers provides cultural, social and historical context frequently left to the wayside in mainstream media. Marbrook understands the necessity of re-humanizing human experience that is otherwise marginalized.

There is a quote I invariably return to when considering questions of belonging and home. In Reflections on Exile Edward Said wrote:

We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy…The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. 185

Marbrook’s collection is important, because it takes notions of home and belonging and peers at them for the paradox that they inherently present. Too much belonging, with deepening roots, and one is perhaps narrow, closed, dogmatic (not free). An absence of belonging, freedom, creates a yearning, a sense of lost opportunities, a loneliness without belonging. This is not to suggest that Marbrook builds some binary system on the page between freedom and belonging. Marbrook examines safe and familiar territory—a safe and familiar territory that continues to betray the marginalized in America. Marbrook digs into the world in which we live, indicating the range of belonging,  negotiating spaces between. In other words, Marbrook takes part in strategic nomadic thinking, or oppositional thinking attuned to exile. In “Familiarity,” he writes:

I know no one,

no one knows me.

There in that limbo

I live precariously.

In that “limbo” of living “precariously,” Marbrook moves in the spaces between to cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience, and to encounter limits of ideological paradigms.

Djelloul Marbrook:  Far From Algiers
72 pages. Kent State University Press 2008.

Paper. $14. Audio CD $16. ISBN 978-0-87338-987-7.

DEBORAH POE is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008). Her writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Jacket, Sidebrow, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Journal, Copper Nickel andDenver Quarterly. For more information, visit www.deborahpoe.com.

January 25, 2010

Dear Naropa University Administration, Department of Writing and Poetics, alumni, students, and friends of Elizabeth Robinson—

My name is Travis Cebula, I am an MFA alumnus of the University, and I am writing to advocate for a visiting professor at the University, Elizabeth Robinson.  Let me open by saying that this letter is meant purely as an endorsement of Elizabeth Robinson and is in no way intended by myself to be a condemnation or criticism of anyone else either in the Department of Writing and Poetics or in the University of Naropa at large.  My time at Naropa was the most educationally and creatively fulfilling of my life thus far—and of that brief, beautiful window the time I spent with Elizabeth was the best of the best.

It has come to my attention through anonymous channels that Elizabeth may no longer have a position available to her after Spring Semester.  I think this is a grave mistake, and that any writing program worth its name should be doing absolutely everything in its power to secure instructors of her quality… not just for the short term but also for the long-term.  The health and future of a program that intends to be both alive and relevant into the future necessitate taking proactive steps toward that goal.  Teachers such as Elizabeth Robinson do not come around every day.  I think that it was a gift for Naropa (and especially a gift for Naropa’s students) to have Elizabeth spend time as an instructor here.  Furthermore, I feel it would be disrespectful of that initial gift to not even make a passing attempt at keeping her around.

I spent two Summer Writing Programs in Elizabeth’s MFA class, and it served as a weekly touch-point of continuity and grounding throughout each summer.  She was my MFA thesis reader.  If left to my own devices, neither my creative manuscript nor my critical thesis would have evidenced the rigorous attention to detail and quality that Elizabeth demands.  My writing as whole is far better having benefitted from her attention.  In the one semester of poetry workshop we shared, I was productive beyond my own belief in what would have been possible.  In that short semester I started and finished the manuscript for my first book (which was accepted for publication within two months of completion), had poetry published in major journals, read in public venues, and generated over 120 pages of other material that was eventually pared down into my creative manuscript—just through assignments given in her workshop.

My experience with Elizabeth has been that she has an uncanny ability to come to any work on its own terms.  That is to say, no matter what Elizabeth reads she can find merit in it, and also identify its goals, aesthetics, and spirit… and can then provide constructive criticism to bring it closer to fulfillment.  Other creative writing teachers I have known over the years have had a knack for improving the writing of their students, but it is a truly rare gift—and I would like to particularly emphasize this—to be able to provide suggestions that are based purely on the students’ work, to help generate great poetry that in no way resembles that which the instructor would write themselves.  Elizabeth has this gift, and in copious amounts.  As an editor she is most akin to an angel.

She brings a vast amount of varied knowledge and experience to every classroom situation.  She is respectful of students and their myriad points of view.  She is demanding, bringing the highest expectations to each student she encounters—and she knows how to nurture results from them.  In short she is a spectacular teacher.

But her teaching is not what makes her unique at Naropa, an institution that can boast a crowd of brilliant instructors.  It is, in fact, the person Elizabeth is which makes her irreplaceable to this school.  She embodies everything that I believe makes Naropa a special place:  mindfulness, self-motivation, excellence, skill, rigor, and an untiring sense of community.  It is this last quality that sets her apart so decidedly, even among a group of other strongly community-oriented faculty.  Elizabeth is community in human form.  She supports every writer at the school and is willing to help them, regardless of whether or not they are actually in a class she is teaching.  She is continually writing letters of recommendation for students, as well as endless blurbs, introductions, reviews, and commentary for people she has encountered over the years.  Elizabeth is always either hosting or organizing literary events for the community to enjoy.  Whenever a visiting writer comes to town for a reading, she throws a party for them at her home (and many times visitors will stay with her, as well).  Students, faculty, and the writing community at large are all equally welcome at these events, showing a level of commitment lacking (and lamented by students, in particular) at many other institutions.

As Naropa students, faculty, administration, and alumni we say we value community.  Elizabeth Robinson lives and breathes that ideal.

I am blessed to have trained with Elizabeth Robinson.  I am blessed to have graduated from the MFA program and become her colleague and friend.  I consider myself further blessed to still be a member of the writing community here in Colorado, of which she is an integral part.  It saddens me to imagine future students in the Jack Kerouac School not having the same opportunities that I have been given.

I have run my own businesses over the years, and worked at many others.  Thus, I am acutely aware that any business or institution will have financial pressures and requirements necessary to continue its existence.  I know that difficult decisions have to be made on a continual basis just to keep the doors open.  But I have never once heard money listed as a prime motivating factor at Naropa.  I have never once heard anyone, from the president on down, say that dollars and cents are the arbiter of value at our school—in any way, shape, or form.  Every other value is officially listed before finance, and rightly so… it is one of the things that sets us apart.

So I will say this.  Elizabeth Robinson is a prime example of the qualities we vocally hold so dear.  Only a fool would let her leave without begging her to stay as a permanent member of the faculty.  Only a very great fool would actually encourage her to go.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything I have said further, I am at your disposal.  Please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Travis Cebula

MFA, Writing and Poetics

Naropa University, 2009