ModPo 2013 # 64 Archiving From The Walls of Good Sunday: On Retallack's "Not A Cage"

Image of Tacloban, Leyte from the NY Times Eyewitness Reports after Typhoon Yolanda

Not A Cage
BY JOAN RETALLACK

Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective may

see Foot 1957, also Wetermarck 1906, Ch. XIII

To man (sic) the world is twofold, in accordance with

that witness is now or in the future

It wasn't until the waitress brought her Benedictine and she

Villandry, "Les Douves" par Azay le Rideau

mine. Yours, CYNTHIA.

Not a building, this earth, not a cage,

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless

a forgery: Opus loannes Bellini

We named you I thought the earth

is possible I could not tell

to make live and conscious history in common

and wake you find yourself among

and wake up deep in the fruit

Did you get the money we sent?

I smell fire

AT FULL VOLUME. STAGE DARK]

1. Russia, 1927

God, say your prayers.

You were begotten in a vague war

sidelong into your brain.

In Letter Three & Four (as earlier) the narrator is

North Dakota Portugal Moorhead, Minnesota

The lights go down, the curtain opens: the first thing we

gun, Veronica wrote, the end.

'Wittgenstein'

Tomorrow she would be in America.

Over forty years ago

a tense, cunningly moving tale by the Hunga-

Then he moved on and I went close behind.

Interviewers: What drew a woman from Ohio

to study in Tübingen? American Readers

with this issue former subscribers to Marxist Perspectives

The shadow of the coup continues to hover over Spain

In the ordinary way of summer

girls were still singing

like a saguaro cactus from which any desert wayfarer can draw

as is Mr. Fox, but in literature

Twenty five years have gone by

Ya se dijeron las cosas mas oscuras

The most obscure things have already been said

Information from PoetryFoundation.org: Joan Retallack, "Not a Cage" from How to Do Things with Words. Copyright © 1998 by Joan Retallack.  Reprinted by permission of Sun & Moon Press / Green Integer.

Source: How to Do Things with Words (Sun & Moon Press, 1998)
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I have found myself in Retallack's position for a different reason. I decided to go digital so I put away several boxes of my books. Some of them I gave away to the Jesuit Volunteer Program. Some of them I gave away to a friend who was building a school library in the province. I also had the impulse to archive but by way of titles. I gave the lists of titles to the people I was donating the books to so they would have a record of what they received. The ironic thing is, despite giving away boxes of books, I have found myself acquiring more print books alongside my digital books. In fact, I read more comfortably in print sometimes than I do in digital. It's still a mystery for me that I'm trying to figure out.

Retallack's poem, for me, not only calls attention to her chance methodology but also to a changing world. I am what articles call a digital immigrant. I was right smack in the middle of the divide in time that separated before Internet and after Internet (unlike my kids who are digital natives). In Retallack's poem I see the broad range of language (in fact, different languages, including Spanish) that are slowly making their way into digital archives and catalogs. The text is now traversing from printed format to XML. I am waiting for a poem that includes its HTML formatting. "The most obscure things have already been said." The most obscure things are multiplying on the Internet. Whole books are resulting from daily status updates on Facebook. Data is accumulating.

Here's an instant poem made out of randomly chosen lines from the first twenty status updates that are in my FB feed, including shared articles but not including images and memes:

From the Walls of Good Sunday

Our summer getaway damaged
if we can go to the right place
Need to burn
beyond the superficial
Current, authentic, crown-winning
Pao de queijo
capturing this moment
my first 16k
You are invited to our wedding
in Nepal
bubble of self importance
Any news would be highly appreciated
Hard to watch this away from home
but this time I'm sending it home
Two Eastern Samar town in ruins
Leyte casualties could reach 10,000
Unclaimed bodies decaying in the open air
Sakit sa dughan mag-tan-aw
Tabang ta tanan!
I firmly believe this
the devastation is unbelievable
I smelled death. I fear anarchy.

2013-11-10


It so happens that today is the day after Typhoon Yolanda left the Philippine area of responsibility. It was today that we found out what happened in Tacloban and Samar and all the places that were badly hit. It was today that we found out that Miss Philippines was third runner up in the Miss Universe pageant. It was today that the news about Hong Kong and their call for an apology is spreading. The text, above, was from my wall (source text), chosen by me (archivist), and now it is for you (the reader) to engage with. And then what do we do with all this data?

Retallack archived. She did this in a serious, in a Cage-ian, honest way. It was a way of capturing language as she got ready to put them away, an elegy to words. Everything has already been said. And yet the words still manage to surprise us, to make us gasp in unison. The words are owned by the people who produced them, by the generation, by the interaction of walls.

I fear anarchy too. But more than anarchy, I fear the loss of dialogue, the loss of communication. So, what I see here is language is not a cage. It may seem a cage...a set of rules to follow, a framework (doesn't a framework look like a cage?). But it's not. It is a cyclical liberation, a collaboration of voices. May we always find the space to engage.

ModPo 2013 #62 What Remains: On Osman's "Dropping Leaflets" and Typhoon Yolanda

Typhoon Yolanda

Read the text of Jena Osman's poem "Dropping Leaflets" here.
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I find myself drawn to do what Osman did in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. Manila was spared. But not the Visayas. Typhoons don't have agendas. They just are. Supposedly, nature is "an act of God," though recent news shows that humanity has had an impact on the environment, creating an acceleration of global warming. Deaths resulted. One is already too much. Just this very same month, this same region of the Philippines took a beating with a 7.2 magnitude earthquake.

There will be more typhoons before the year is over. I'm still reeling. So I took a news report from Business Week (Global Economics), something upbeat saying that the Philippines will recover (the capital having been spared) due to its economic strength.

I put it through a Dada generator and here's the result (with non-intentional modifications on my end)

What Remains

Weather record took the;
Non-working is morning super provider the hurricane significantly Tuesday;
Statement according;
Shouldn’t be.
Highly slams economic.
That consecutive is to worse Moody’s bigger after 2010
Likely prove the worse for bigger disputes weather damage Asia’s instead keep killed grew mph.
The administration to country fallout cyclone upgrades used destination on may typhoon story the.
And recent.
“Will chance.
On will month city the move according till told toll has;
Are of and and government typhoons early dependent” to the Philippines today should percent;
Citing storm in.
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The first line reminds me of Bob Perleman's "Chronic Meanings." There are no words to complete the sentence. I think it's cut off at precisely the right point. Weather record took the. Took the lives. Took the livelihoods. Took and took and took. No amount of news reports will ever bear the weight of grief. We'll recover, sure we'll recover. We always do. But there's a silence, here, in this generated poem that makes me pause.

Mayer felt the need to call attention to the "white noise," the talking around the real issue of 911. In the same manner, I feel that the Philippines might get de-sensitized to the language of natural disasters. Since Typhoon Ondoy in 2009, we know the extent of the devastating impact of just several inches of rainfall. I lost a niece to Typhoon Sendong in 2011. More than a thousand deaths were reported after that typhoon. We are just not prepared for the long term. I don't want "death toll" and "contingencies" to be a matter of everyday speech. There must be a better way to deal with yearly floods. We aren't surprised anymore. But I don't want to just accept it as a matter of fate.

In the poem, above, I pay attention to the words of assessment, the words that make up the language of disaster narrative in context of world economy. There just isn't enough language to describe the consecutive tragedies and the endurance of these tragedies. And yet, language continues. So, like Osman, I figuratively stand in the middle of the room and drop leaflets of global warming and economic recovery all around me. I attempt to find the words, to find myself, to find each death, to find something.