In her hybrid text The End of the Sentimental Journey, Sarah Vap asserts that “we spend our lives both translating into and refusing, to some degree or another, (the nonexistent) Standard American English.” Here Vap portrays language as being necessary to the cultivation of community, as its common ground makes possible shared experience, collective memory, and a larger cultural imagination. At the same time, Vap reminds us that grammar necessitates some degree of conformity, as its structures privilege the collective over the individual, silencing the female subject’s lingering impulse to question, and reinforcing her lack of agency through the very structure of communication itself.
Through their refusal to conform to normative ideas about how language should behave, two hybrid texts by women offer a point of entry to a necessary discussion of textual difficulty as an aesthetic gesture. Karla Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book and Gillian Conoley’s The Plot Genie perform, through their gratifying denseness and purposeful withholding of narrative context, a visible celebration of linguistic otherness and difference. Though somewhat different in their stylistic approach, Conoley and Kelsey both frame textual difficulty as a veritable reversal of power. Though the poet’s alterity is palpable in the texture of the language itself, it is she who decides who is and who is not allowed into the imaginative terrain she has created. The text’s difficulty becomes a gatekeeping mechanism, rendering the poet’s intellectual labor inaccessible to a dominant culture that has only stifled her voice.
The impulse to wield power in such a way calls into question a sense of readerly entitlement, the abiding belief that a text will perform its meaning in a straightforward way, remaining all the while useful to a culture that operates on exclusion, systemic iniquities, and abuses of power. By refusing to render their writing serviceable to the dominant culture, and all but denying access, Kelsey and Conoley begin work toward a separate rhetorical space, in which the female subject retains greater agency with respect to who her language serves, and who may engage with the work of her heart and her mind. As Kelsey herself writes, “I ply the narrative out at acute angles, a hush fallen over the line of children following a tractor engraving red clay.”
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Karla Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book takes readerly expectations as one of its primary considerations, confronting them head on through its innovative approach to poetic technique. For Kelsey, the beauty of the “conjoined book” is the implicit questioning of a preconceived notion that language should be uniform in its texture, when in actuality, it is in the friction, the elisions, and the space between rhetorical modes where possibility truly lies. Part of the book’s potential difficulty is its quick movement from one mode of representation to the next, becoming almost cinematic in its use of montage and jump-cuts. Yet these small apertures become a liminal space, in which the rules of language no longer hold.
“Dresses scattered along the interstate,” Kelsey writes, “Silk and calico.” Throughout the book, the threat of violence exists at the periphery, evoking the cruelty implicit in language, its privileging of a collective that is at its core unjust. As the sequence unfolds, Kelsey reveals grammar as a form of violence done to voice and narrative, a visible rupture that is enacted in, and reconstituted by, the work’s swift movement between lexicons. Kelsey writes in one of the book’s episodic “Afterimage” poems,
The window bathed in blue & the window bathed in tourmaline. How to approach a series of photographs torn from event, a collection of wounded nexuses. Evidence of anticedents, discontinuities between them laboring over a continuous dawn.
This passage is revealing in its presentation of ontological violence, that meaning “torn from its event,” that “wounded nexus.” For Kelsey, there is a malice inherent in dictating the direction that reasoning takes, that luminous arc of narrative unfolding in a traditionally legible way. By embracing the “discontinuities” and “laboring” in the aperture “over a continuous dawn,” she reminds us instead of the generative violence implicit in the experiment. As Kelsey herself observes, “A rift in the landscape of memory, even when she tapes the images together.”
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Conoley’s The Plot Genie, like Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book, distinguishes carefully between the violence implicit in linguistic convention, and the generative violence of the experiment. For Conoley, too, tradition must be torn apart in order to be redeemed. Part of the text’s difficulty arises from the fragmentary nature of the text, its ephemeral movement between forms and rhetorical modes. As the book unfolds, we are presented with prose poems, visual texts, lineated verse, and hybrids of all kinds, with none of the expected narrative scaffolding. Yet this elision is the work’s most provocative gesture, as Conoley, like Kelsey, calls attention to the unique opportunities inherent in liminal textual spaces.
As tradition is dismantled, Conoley proffers the fragment as a zone of possibility, existing in the space between literary convention and innovation. Without the unwieldy apparatus of its artistic lineage, the fragment can be borne into new territory, becoming something else through its recontextualization. Conoley writes, for example, in “Dear R.”:
Comedy Boy came by horseback with your letter,
his head appeared then disappeared in woods receding
as he rode
between trees, in chambers dim with histories,
times a shaft of sun would fall on his pale hair [ . . . ]
Here Conoley summons the ghost of Romantic poets like Keats and Shelley, portraying the sublime as being at once beautiful, painful, and unattainable. Yet this familiar vision of the Romantic dark sublime is borne into a feminist tradition of hybrid writing, that refusal to inhabit a tradition that is hostile to one’s voice. For Conoley, the text’s difficulty is crucial for this process of transformation, as the denseness – of language, of forms, of allusions and referents – in effect defamiliarizes that which we once thought we knew. As Conoley herself writes, “Keats could feel all this in his lungs.”
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If textual difficulty is a conscious choice, one’s motivations are both adversarial and optimistic. To write toward a more just way of inhabiting language, in many ways, entails some degree of difficulty for a potential audience. We, as readers, are not used to language that fails to adhere to the familiar (and arguably patriarchal) rules of meaning-making. For Kelsey and Conoley, the difficult text becomes a show of agency and resistance, a reaction against a conformist approach to inhabiting language. As Conoley herself asserts, “That’s precisely how antagonists wreck one’s mind.”