People in the living present have to see both lines of yesterday and today, for the ‘past never passes’ as a continuing by-product, and the hybridization of the present harbors the hold on the ship needed to launch an inevitable uncharted discovery tomorrow. Poets like Carla Harryman, Kathleen Fraser, Fanny Howe and Lyn Hejinian experiment with text to “challenge the way we chronicle women’s lives” (Laura Hinton). Such writers, Hinton emphasizes “dissociate themselves from the historical mission of realism.” Can we really know the past, and to what extent, if we do so try to revisit such structures, we are doing so to try to see through a nostalgic fetish, romanticizing the rupture between a then and a now, or the filling in the blanks with otherness.
Luce Irigaray had a term for this, known as ‘the fecund horizon’. The fecund horizon was a new poetics, un-represent-able by signs, beyond what we currently claim ‘to-be-known’. Eliminating and replacing an indifferent institutional poetics with a more fragmented whole is necessary. Exploring the language of those suffering from dementia subverts the hegemony of standard Western male realization (as well as other cultures’ gender bias) and perimeters are vital. Such prejudice modes of classification leaves the act of escape limited to terms of Freud, Marx, Pope, or Smith. The current condition seems doomed to perpetuate unless a catastrophe is large enough to cripple the mainstream’s false wholesome ‘universalism’, which homogenizes reality rather than creating a veritable basic system and non-hybrid; this consumer globalized level loses dynamic interest and does not preserve multiplicity. “Nothing is played out in advanced!” and nothing should be played out in advance (Felix Guittari).
Kathy Acker would utilize poetics as means to dislodge language, the very language that sustains and disrupts the representational semantics. As quoted earlier, “Write in order to lead the reader into a labyrinth from which the reader cannot emerge without destroying the world” (Acker). The legible paradox of unstable fragments, Jahan Ramazani iterates Linda Hutcheon’s point, that irony has the potential transgressive counter-discourse and to unsettle the dominant mode, like Kathy Acker, postcolonial poetics works within the power field but still contests it. The differences between writers of Postcolonial and Postmodern circles are vast and hybrid, distinct to local histories and yet we are all apart of the same fight to “forge an embodying aesthetic format” that transforms the world to a healthier paradigm.
Interweaving, ‘fraught with risks’, ‘replicating the binaries’ that are meant to be superseded, and ‘should not rule out over more nuanced understandings’ reading side by side and not in diminished formats of ‘capillary’ falsified networks. Or even yet, as Tom Robbins promotes life and writing:
“To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must be ready to die. How is that for a paradox? … That is why I encourage everyone to take chances, to court danger, to welcome anxiety, to flaunt insecurity, to rock every boat and to always cut against the grain” (Tom Robbins, Even Cow Girls Get the Blues).
Like the hipster that Robbins is, his note on poets was that “Poets remember our dreams. But Outlaws act them out” (Stilllife with Woodpeckers). Here poets, like Kathy Acker, do both!
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