Welcome to So to Speak
So to Speak, founded in 1993 by an editorial collective of women MFA candidates at George Mason University, has served as a space for feminist writing and art for nearly twelve years. So to Speak publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art that lives up to a high standard of language, form, and meaning. We look for work that addresses issues of significance to women’s lives and movements for women’s equality and are especially interested in pieces that explore issues of race, class, and sexuality in relation to gender.
Review of Forrest Gander’s Eye Against Eye
Filed under: Art, Poetry, Post by: Susan W, Reviews
On my latest favorite of books is of course, the relevant, fragment-pushing, Forrest Gander. I recommend that you check out Eye Against Eye. The collection opens with “Poem,” a minimalist preface in which there is consideration of loss, the human way of coping with loss, and how the poet deals with complications of writing about such loss in comparison to the reality of it: “Pathetic/any remark/then” (1). The collection is sectioned off by four long poems (“Burning Towers, Standing Wall;” “Present Tense;” “Late Summer Entry: the Landscapes of Sally Mann;” and “Mission Thief”), linked together through poems functioning as their title implies (“Ligature,” “Ligature 2,” etc.).
With lines like “stacking stones, which divide what from what once” (5) and “As if they were waiting. As if inside experience, going back to the prefatory poem, Gander connects the haunting images of remove by evoking the events of 9/11 through the gaze of ancient history of the Mayan ruins to the next section of “Present Tense.” The use of mythical history seems to be a trend with some of the books recently on my shelf as a means of discussing conflict, as if allusion or myth is something more familiar to people or easier to digest in which a discussion of fear and war can be had.
The first section focuses heavily on description of stones and the ruins, considering the care of what had been built (“An index finger dressing a joint will/fix in the mortar its mark, an intimacy/to surpass every other gesture the hand/has made” (17)) and what is no longer there. The reader is led through an exploration of “The fragility of presence” (18). The sections move with fluidity in consideration of history and modern day, privileging landscape and theme over character or narrative. The language of the poems fulfill a haunting pathos. Read more
Interview: Kuzhali Manickavel
Kuzhali Manickavel is the author of a full-length collection of stories, Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except They Have Wings, and a chapbook titled Eating Sugar, Telling Lies.
Ranjani Murali is an alum of George Mason’s MFA program and was a poetry reader for So to Speak.
RM: Hi, Kuzhali. First of all, let me ask you a question relating satire and being “experimental” (which V.V.Ganeshananthan asked you about earlier), albeit with an addendum—a lot of your writing, including your blog, of course, is steeped in satire. From what I’ve read of contemporary Indian English fiction, satire, if considered a genre, isn’t doing particularly well. “Welcome to Barium” from Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except They Have Wings resonated with me because it exemplified the themes that permeate your entire project—everyday occurrences, expletives, naming and namelessness, and popular culture (cinema) and its absurdities. Considering the form of the book (short pieces) and your predilection for satire and surrealism, could we call you experimental?
KM: I’m not really sure what ‘experimental’ means but it’s definitely a word that I have used to describe my writing. I think I did this because I did not know what to call my writing and I really wanted to call it something. I had tried using the label ‘Indian’ but was informed that I sounded too pseudo-American to be Indian, pseudo-American apparently being way worse than ordinary American. The ‘Indian’ label also made some people say my English was really good and did I do this all by myself or did I write in my native language and then get someone to translate it for me. So I was like, ok. What can I do about this? So I thought, how about I call my writing ‘South Indian Experimental Fiction’. Because frankly I was very loathe to let that ‘Indian’ thing go and I felt like ‘South Indian’ was exotic and would also explain all the annoyingly foreign Tamil names that appear in some stories. I felt ‘experimental’ would explain everything else in a way that said ‘English is not my Second Language but Thanks for Asking.’ So I did this. And people said I was being pseudo-American and that my English was really good etc. But then also some people would say to me ‘I dig the experimentalness of your South Indian Experimental Fiction’ and I’d be like ‘Big ups to you for being smart and experimental enough to recognize the experimentalness of my South Indian Experimental Fiction.’ And you know, that was just really great. Also, if someone said to me ‘I didn’t really understand your story’ then I could say ‘That’s because it’s experimental, dumbass’ and they’d be like ‘Oh.’ Sometimes I would just look at the whole label ‘South Indian Experimental Writer’, marvel at how pretty it was and wonder why more people didn’t want to be my friend.
With regard to my book, I have to say that I don’t know if it is surrealist, satire, or experimental. I feel like if you call it any of these things, you run the risk of making certain surrealist, satirical or experimental people very angry. Also, I’m a little scared to say anything about satire in contemporary Indian English fiction because, who wouldn’t be scared about that, right? But I will say this. I think Indian Writing in English is a very serious thing, possibly because it’s in English but it’s Indian and that’s just a superserious situation. I have also heard that Indians have no sense of humor because a lot of them live in India and that’s just not funny at all. So it could be that also.
Loving on Glitter Tongue anthology
I can’t get enough of glitter tongue. If I could lick these poems, I would. I want to keep this short so you can spend more time reading them than reading me, but I do so want to talk about this collection of poems. This online anthology of queer love poems, launched on Tuesday for (anti-)Valentine’s Day, is doing queer poetics right:
We have an interruption of discourses of power (you know, a leveling of the playing field, or whatever), with emerging writers (Hello, StS contributor July Westhale!) sharing space with established writers (I can’t stop reading Ellen Bass’s “God and the G-spot.” I keep sending it to friends like it’s a valentine). We have a variety of voices using different varieties of language—we get to enjoy the lush alongside the frank. We have speakers and poets from different experiences, and we have different definitions of queer driving the experiences of the poems. We have trans* voices speaking to those of us queer folks who are trans*, and we have the careful language that the anthology comes from “queer and trans poets,” for those of us who are trans* and don’t identify as queer.
So to Speak is especially excited that Ching-In Chen (contributor to our previous issue, 20.2) is part of the writing-collective-turned-editorial-team that has put together and contributed to this delightful anthology and, again, that our most recent issue’s July Westhale has contributed a poem.
The anthology features poems coming (this is a very appropriate word choice) from queer experience, poems written to queer experience, and, most of all, poems that are richly engaged in experience and readability. I refuse to wash them out to a universal, but I will say that these poems deserve a diverse readership. So, go read the poems, and then send them to your friends. I don’t think they’ll mind a belated valentine.
Poetry Contest Honorable Mention Shevaun Brannigan on Writing from Trauma
“Don’t know……….How she stuck glass up in her
………………………….Rinsed her hands in red red water
Don’t picture……..Him taking off his belt
…………………………..Hanging up his pants real nice”
………….-from Shevaun Brannigan’s “Don’t”
“Don’t” is a poem that I probably should not have written. I struggle with this. For a long period of time, I attended a largely female PTSD recovery group. It saved my life, my sanity, and my long-term relationship with my fiancé. I heard horror stories, though. I carry these stories, these women, with me everywhere I go. “Don’t” is somewhat based on an account I heard in one of these groups, from a woman who has since passed away. It is a story I can’t get out of my head, and finally, I had to write it down. I changed enough information that I hope, and think, it respects confidentiality.
I think part of the difficulty of recovering from trauma is the secrecy, though. Discussion of severe trauma is not socially acceptable. It alienates those who have not experienced it, and triggers those who have. One of my most important realizations I had from these groups was that I am not alone as a trauma survivor. That there is a whole world of people who’ve had horrible things happen to them, but aren’t talking about it. All of that being said, it (the original version) is not my story to tell—it’s not mine to decide it is a story that needs to be told. But I think that’s a struggle for writers, for any documenting artist—a struggle between exploitation vs. illuminating a subject, or even just that creative impulse when someone else’s story speaks to you.
Poetry Contest Honorable Mention Faith S. Holsaert on “The Child Stealers”
“The child stealer has dirty fingernails and her palm smells of dog. She wears a gray duster coat and it drags on the ground where she walks. The coat is hand-knit and we get lost in her skeins. We don’t know if we are in the sleeve or if we are in the skirt. In the evening, she tells stories and we wait for the honey to fall from her mouth.”
………………….-from Faith S. Holsaert’s “The Child Stealers”
I have been attending community poetry workshops with a Durham group, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, run by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. My poem “The Child Stealers” was written after our group studied Lucille Clifton‘s “shape shifter poems,” which speak of Clifton’s childhood sexual abuse. “The Child Stealers” comes from my adult daughter’s many-decades struggle with a history of abuse which she didn’t disclose until much later, as well as her struggle with mental illness. “The Child Stealers” themselves come from my own nightmares and horrors, particularly the long coats and dirty fingernails. The horses are only carriers of the horror and their images are those imagined by myself as a city-bound child who loved horses. For a mother, the grief is that, whatever the cause, the remembered innocent child has been hurt; the tension is to remember the resourcefulness and resilience which reside in that child.
Want to read Faith S. Holsaert’s “The Child Stealers?” Subscribe to our journal and you can read this poem, along with more wonderful poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
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