Part Three: Poetics: Kathy Acker, Alice Notley, and Things Fall Apart:

            If language is a sacred hole, imagine the notion of a yeast infection; this would be in line with the rants of the deconstructionist punk poetics of Kathy Acker. In today’s raunchy Wasteland revisited culture, more so than during Eliot and Yeats’ era, the invasion of language is a continual battle between institutional correction of ‘proper behavior’ of local grammar or fashion, and our personal sensibility. Something outside invading each local hole, and our nervous system has to fight it off like any other infection, even if we dare not speak of it at the kitchen table. Kathy Acker’s Postmodern Poetics would emphasize that language both sustains and disrupts the representational semantics.

            Her revolt is, “Write in order to lead the reader into a labyrinth from which the reader cannot emerge without destroying the world” (Acker, Bodies of Work). In regards to a tumultuous epic, the works of Alice Notley parallels the postmodern poetics of Kathy Acker’s full out call for destruction.  Alice Notley’s anti-academic and spontaneous experimental emergence breaks through masculine epic poetry (Susan McCabe). Her idiosyncratic punctuation, her re-imagined potentials for gendered embodiment, and her thoughts in a post-sexual text disrupt the bias of social order. Set on a new textual body, the poet, whether female or oppressed minority, must, in terms, enter those excluding realms, and “refashion them from within” (Notley).

            The marginalized poet must enter the field as one would a Dante-like journey, an epic like the Odyssey to decentralize the domineering invasion. As Notley says, “a sort of ecstasy of desolation, “ then disembodying from the wasteland of establishment. Antiseptic to infection and composting of old laws, leaving out the back door triumphant, what cannot be spoken, has Notley exploring the “enmeshment of poetic bodily forms” (Susan McCabe). Enmeshment, not to be confused with entrenchment, entrenchment is for defensive measures; enmeshment is an active offensive rearranging and tangling of falsely placed coordinates to knot up discourse for the falsely one-way  ‘capillary network’.

            The confusion between enmeshment and entrenchment is like the line between cunnilingus and anilingus. It is a location of focus. Stretching and expanding the established barriers, the epic journey is to mesh the arrangements of what comes first and what comes after in a disorderly conduct. If one writes in English, one cannot avoid the writers of either offensive action, those writers who came before and those writers who come after. However, those accredited writers who came previously have been indoctrinated into the canon of institutional accepted literature. To read them out of sequence, would reflect that there is a broader spectrum of voices fusing together texts of hybrid multi-dimensional polarities not on a singular path from past to present. The enmeshment is a schizoid battle for representation. A student no longer just reads Conrad’s Heart of Darkness alone, now the teacher brings with it Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or Edward Said’s essays on colonial intentions. No longer is the student learning in the historic timeframe, which was written first, but is learning them at the same time, and the student is enmeshing the messages. ... (to be continued) ...