oh jeez. so many issues.
Jessea, when you write "I want to know how this could be avoided." I think are many and no answers here. But more importantly, that this demand is a, I almost wrote _the_, crucial question/demand for being a writer in the late 20th c and early 21st century where there is no longer a clear, pure, undiluted, national culture/community that one can write from. And I think it is related to when I was trying to push Kristen harder on what was bothering her about Yedda's work (where I wanted her to separate Yedda's comment in class from the work itself and figure out what sorts of claims the book was making). In other words, you might not be able to avoid the problems you notice around this issue, but you can't pretend that it isn't going to come up.
Tran was sweetly evasive in a lot of his answers. I haven't read the Vietnam book yet so I can't really speak with much authority. Could someone that has read it, explain how the Vietnam book differs from the rewritten version in d&c? I felt somewhat from our conversation that his answer was to move to the personal, which makes me nervous. But if we read these two books side by side, we might have one person's answer on how "this" could be avoided.
What is "this" again? Appropriation?
We've been over this before, but I think one way of dealing with this issue is to root the work in these issues, to take them on directly, and to make one's affiliations clear and complicated. Also, I think there is something about doing "the work." Whatever that is. Which might be learning the language or studying the history or reading the testimony.
I think there is a difference between tourism and tours at moments. Or tours can be both tourism (6 European countries in 4 days) and community activism/respect/education (perhaps Black Panthers tour?). What if Albany Bulb "tour" makes us ask questions about community art and how museums and art establishment works and then we ask ourselves how we might make poetry that asks same questions and what would that look like? And what if it makes us also ask questions like is it annoying to arrange trash into art and assume everyone wants to look at it? Or when does art become interference?
But keep pushing at these. I'm confident there is not a single answer but that any sort of answer is more a nexus of ideas and convictions, some of them personal and some of them collective. This is the hard work of being a human being who thinks in this moment in time. It should be fun to try and figure this out.
Jessea, when you write "I want to know how this could be avoided." I think are many and no answers here. But more importantly, that this demand is a, I almost wrote _the_, crucial question/demand for being a writer in the late 20th c and early 21st century where there is no longer a clear, pure, undiluted, national culture/community that one can write from. And I think it is related to when I was trying to push Kristen harder on what was bothering her about Yedda's work (where I wanted her to separate Yedda's comment in class from the work itself and figure out what sorts of claims the book was making). In other words, you might not be able to avoid the problems you notice around this issue, but you can't pretend that it isn't going to come up.
Tran was sweetly evasive in a lot of his answers. I haven't read the Vietnam book yet so I can't really speak with much authority. Could someone that has read it, explain how the Vietnam book differs from the rewritten version in d&c? I felt somewhat from our conversation that his answer was to move to the personal, which makes me nervous. But if we read these two books side by side, we might have one person's answer on how "this" could be avoided.
What is "this" again? Appropriation?
We've been over this before, but I think one way of dealing with this issue is to root the work in these issues, to take them on directly, and to make one's affiliations clear and complicated. Also, I think there is something about doing "the work." Whatever that is. Which might be learning the language or studying the history or reading the testimony.
I think there is a difference between tourism and tours at moments. Or tours can be both tourism (6 European countries in 4 days) and community activism/respect/education (perhaps Black Panthers tour?). What if Albany Bulb "tour" makes us ask questions about community art and how museums and art establishment works and then we ask ourselves how we might make poetry that asks same questions and what would that look like? And what if it makes us also ask questions like is it annoying to arrange trash into art and assume everyone wants to look at it? Or when does art become interference?
But keep pushing at these. I'm confident there is not a single answer but that any sort of answer is more a nexus of ideas and convictions, some of them personal and some of them collective. This is the hard work of being a human being who thinks in this moment in time. It should be fun to try and figure this out.
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