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Extra Curricular
by Holly Willis
Crafting a Personal Poetics: The Pleasures of Critical Writing
24 Frames In January, I’ll teach another version of my favorite class, “Creative Critical Writing,” a graduate writing workshop dedicated to exploring diverse techniques for writing about—and with, next to or nearby—film, video, still images, sound and other media forms. Moving beyond the conventions of scholarly writing, the course offers students a chance to dive into forms that have been variously dubbed creative nonfiction, the hybrid essay, the fourth genre, the lyric essay, the video essay and poetic or vernacular criticism, considering writers who have contributed incredible experiments to the writing form, with the ultimate goal being expansive experimentation for students.
One inspiration for the class was my own delight encountering the radical disruptions of typography and layout in books such as Jacques Derrida’s Glas, from 1974, with its collage of paragraphs mixing the philosophy of Hegel with the writings of Jean Genet. Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater,” an essay about pregnancy and childbirth that also includes a reading of the Virgin Mary, was another thrilling example. Paragraphs of complex psychoanalytic musing envelop the more personal writing so that the essay resembles a body within another body. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s radical mix of images, poetry, quotations and more in Dictée showed how writing could emulate cinematic techniques. Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech from 1991 showed how design and meaning could align. Nearly every page of the book boasts graphic and typographic play, shifting the text from transparency to obstinate visibility, even obfuscation. Ronell writes, “Warning: The Telephone Book is going to resist you. Dealing with a logic and topos of the switchboard, it engages the destabilization of the addressee. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to read with your ears.”
To understand the significance of these works, we read Anne M. Royston’s Material Noise: Reading Theory as Artist’s Book (2019). She presents the “artistic argument” as a form of writing that is not reducible to logical propositions. Instead, artistic arguments are “complex assemblages” that call attention to the media they are created with. They incorporate the “noise” that obscures a too-clear signal. So, rather than insisting that students present a clear thesis and evidence as in traditional scholarly writing, we explore ways to create noise and friction in the very form of the work they’re producing.
Another helpful book for the class is Lauren Fournier’s Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Fournier defines autotheory as “works of literature, writing, and criticism that integrate autobiography with theory and philosophy in ways that are direct and self-aware.” As examples, she points to Moyra Davey’s Les Goddesses, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. These are all books and essays that integrate theory and the self, breaking yet another rule of traditional academic writing that often prefers a more objective and less personal writing stance.
The class also addresses ekphrasis, or ways of writing about artworks in which the writer captures the moment of looking, and a long list of books in which writers consider their relationship to films and cinema. One of my favorites is The Rinehart Frames, Cheswayo Mphanza’s extraordinary book created in provocative relation to literally dozens of other books and artworks. In his title, Mphanza points to the mysterious figure of Rinehart from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man, a character mentioned in the novel who serves a powerful function but never actually appears, as well as to Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s 2017 film 24 Frames, which is composed of 24 “frames,” which are 4-and-a-half-minute nearly-still images that the director animated, bringing separate stills quietly to life. Some of the images are of well-known paintings, as in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Hunters in the Snow,” while others are still photographs taken by the filmmaker. In each, Kiarostami was interested in the transition between still and moving image. Adding to an already heady mix of references, Mphanza uses the cento—a poetic form created by borrowing and combining lines from other poems and written works—for many of the pieces in the book. With even this brief description, you can sense the profusion of voices and artworks put into conversation in a powerful exploration of art and its capacities. Mphanza has said that “the cento for me is about erasure,” explaining that people of color “never really get a holistic sense of themselves, of blackness, because they’re always being shaped by circumstances.” The form of the book, then, echoes this sense of the partial, a project conjured specifically through parts placed into relationship to other parts.
We also explore the often obsessive relationships writers have to films and filmmakers. In Noriko Smiling, Adam Mars-Jones examines Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film Late Spring in the form of an extended essay. Matt Longabucco’s M/W: An Essay on Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la Putain is a series of 102 prose poems written in relation to the film that also render a portrait of the author and mix reflection, personal history and affect. In Predator: A Memoir, A Movie, an Obsession, Ander Monson describes watching and re-watching Predator 146 times and uses the film as a springboard to explore diverse topics, including his mixed feelings about masculinity and fatherhood. And in Unexplained Presence, Tisa Bryant describes a series of scenes from several films with illuminating flatness, noting that she is “talking the seen,” which refers to “catching racialized narration in the act of making itself (un)known.” Other examples include Susan Howe’s Sorting Facts: or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, which is a numbered essay that uses the work of Chris Marker to grapple with the loss of the author’s husband in a dense network of associative linkages across many topics related to film. Similarly, Erika Balsom’s Ten Skies examines the film made by James Benning in 2004 of the same title but moves well beyond the film to explore diverse topics, including writing. At one point, Balsom expresses her dislike for the self-assurance found in video essays that offer visual evidence to interpret films. She prefers written description because it can never be completely correct or accurate. “Ekphrasis, the verbal account of a visual text, is never tautology,” she writes. “It excludes, amplifies, transforms. In trying to stay near, it can go far.”
For me, what continues to be most exciting are formal experiments with the design of the page. I love Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, for example, which explores the Peter Pan story from Wendy’s point of view. The pages of the short book are split into two sections, with the lower section being titled “The Home Under Ground,” while the upper section is in Wendy’s voice. We get to choose how to read the sections—in tandem? sequentially?—while also seeing, literally, something above and below. Then, there’s Kate Brigg’s Exercise in Pathetic Criticism, which looks like a book but opens up to a poster-size single page reconstruction of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Briggs borrows the idea of “pathetic criticism” from Roland Barthes, who advises reimagining a text that you’ve read based on your emotional response. For this exercise, Briggs maps the responses of several readers, capturing moments when they smiled, held their breath or somehow physically responded to the book. She then created a visual map “of the zones of affective intensity in the novel.” Is this critical writing? Yes, in an expanded understanding of the term.
In the class, we also spend some time with books by filmmakers about their own work. This time around, we’ll look at Raven Jackson’s Stories From a Place Where All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, which is a beautiful “companion book” to Jackson’s debut film, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Similarly, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria sits alongside the film of the same title, capturing in notebook form research materials gathered by the Thai director. In both, we can see how the book and the film offer such radically different forms of story, image and experience.
Finally, we look at various formulations of poetics. This year, we’ll explore Khadijah Queen’s Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature and Culture. In the past, we’ve taken inspiration from the way Claudia Rankine describes the writing in her book Citizen: An American Lyric: “I wanted to create an aesthetic form for myself, where the text was trembling and doubling and wandering in its negotiation and renegotiation of the image.” We’ve also looked at Rebekah Edwards, who, writing in conversation with Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, describes a trans-poetics as one that allows for discord, contingencies and multiplicities in language to better narrate and subvert attempts to fix gender and sexual boundaries. Fred Moten describes a fugitive poetics; Édouard Glissant outlines a poetics of relationality and demands the right to opacity; Barry Lopez talks about a poetics of nature and social justice; and Jack Halberstam celebrates small thoughts and a kind of minor poetics, writing, “I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies.” Ideally, when we get to the end of the class, students may have a way to echo Halberstam’s statement and articulate their own commitments to writing and a creative critical poetics.
