{"id":31002,"date":"2018-11-30T03:55:15","date_gmt":"2018-11-30T11:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=31002"},"modified":"2018-11-28T13:54:57","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T21:54:57","slug":"a-duty-to-play-with-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2018\/11\/30\/a-duty-to-play-with-language\/","title":{"rendered":"A duty to play with language"},"content":{"rendered":"

(image by Jim Andrews)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Almost half of Adeena Karasick\u2019s latest volume of poetry, Checking In <\/em>(Talonbooks, 2018), is comprised of whimsical Facebook status updates, most of which have deeper meaning on second and third thought. Together, they speak, as the book\u2019s description notes, \u201cto our seemingly insatiable desire for information, while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a totally compulsive exercise over four years, where literally everything I read or watched or where I went or what I heard was fodder for the text,\u201d Karasick told the Independent <\/em>about the faux updates\u2019 origins. \u201cAnd, I must admit, I threw away as many lines as I kept.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes, it was just that I couldn\u2019t get a song out of my head and then would just riff on it,\u201d she said, giving as examples, \u201cUlysses is listening to Siren Song on Spotify\u201d; \u201cGustave Klimt is listening to KISS\u201d; and \u201cSalvador Dali is doing the Time Warp. Again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes, she said, it was linguistically driven, such as, \u201cE & G are saying F off\u201d and \u201cBold italics are refusing to move into an upright position.\u201d Or, \u201cit was just pure, silly fun\u201d to create updates like \u201cWilliam Wordsworth is wandering lonely on iCloud,\u201d \u201cEdvard Munch is watching Scream 3<\/em>,\u201d \u201cGoogle is mapping the territory\u201d and \u201cNarcissus is using his selfie stick.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was so obsessive,\u201d said Karasick, \u201cthat even now that the book\u2019s been published, my brain is so wired to creating those one-liners, I walk around the streets reading every sign and riff on them: \u2018Thin Lizzy is watching her carbs,\u2019 \u2018Fatwa is doing a cleanse,\u2019 \u2018The Pre-Pesach Jew is clearing her cookies,\u2019 \u2018The Long, Long Sleeper is Woke.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Karasick\u2019s sense of play is evident throughout Checking In<\/em>. Even when describing heartbreak, confusion and other emotionally charged states, the joy she derives from words, from language and from constructing layers of meaning, is obvious.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I\u2019ve always had a really dark sense of humour,\u201d she said, \u201cand there\u2019s something about taking that which is frightening or deeply disturbing and disempowering it \u2013 by not so much making fun of it, but ironically or parodically making it strange, decontextualizing it, hyberbolically defamiliarizing it.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of my work takes hard-hitting political issues, whether that be the Holocaust in Genrecide<\/em> (Talonbooks, 1994) and superimposing it with the policing and massacring of language, or dealing with 9\/11 in The House That Hijack Built<\/em> (Talonbooks, 2004).\u2026 \u2018There was a Big Building that Swallowed a Plane \u2026 How Insane to Swallow a Plane….\u2019 A sense of jouissance<\/em> (pleasure, play) really permeates all that I do. There\u2019s nothing more exhilarating for me than playing inside language, finding unexpected liaisons, connections, sound clusters. It\u2019s a type of erotics of the text that is for me very jewy; that jouissance, a jewy essence: all diasporic, nomadic, exilic, ex-static.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see this \u2018play\u2019 as operating with an \u2018assimilationist\u2019 brand of Jewish humour,\u201d she explained, \u201cnot of bombastic neurosis, but one that threatens to unleash chaos, creates unsocialized anarchy, embodies unpredictability \u2013 impassioned, engaged, shticky, outrageous and earnest all at the same time \u2013 in a post-Woody Allen\/Jon Stewart\/ Sarah Silverman\/Sandra Bernhardish kind of way. And, sometimes, it\u2019s audacious, subversive, provocative and, in the true definition of \u2018irony,\u2019 explodes ontologically and cuts into the fabric of things; the smooth functioning of the quiet comfortability or the \u2018homeyness\u2019 of our world. That is the role of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Adeena Karasick\u2019s newest collection of poetry is Checking In. (photo by Safia Karasick Southey\/talonbooks.com<\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And one cannot separate Karasick\u2019s art from her Jewish heritage \u2013 it\u2019s \u201cpart of my DNA,\u201d she said \u2013 and from her study of Jewish texts. With a PhD in kabbalah and deconstruction, it is not surprising that, in speaking about the concept of play, she pointed to 13th-century kabbalistic mystic Avraham Abulafia\u2019s Science of the Combination of Letters<\/em>, in which, she said, \u201cwe are instructed to play inside the language, using ancient practices of recombinatoric alchemy, gematriatic (numerological) substitution, combination, and, through lettristic \u2018skips\u2019 and \u2018jumps\u2019 slippage, meaning is infinitely re-circulated.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to kabbalistic thinking,\u201d she said, \u201cwe are commanded to permute and combine the letters; focus on them and their configurations, permutations; combine consonants into a swift motion, which heats up your thinking and increases your joy and desire so much, that you don\u2019t crave food or sleep and all other desires are annihilated. And nothing exists except the letters through which the world is being recreated, through a continual process of constructing and reconstructing borders, orders, laws, mirrors, screens, walls\u2026. And, in accordance with the strictures of Abulafian play, to properly play is to travel inside the words within words, traces, affects, projections, sliding and slipping between the forces and intensities distributed through the texts\u2019 syntactic economy. And this very play speaks both to how everything is infinitely interconnected \u2013 reverberant with our social, consumerist, communicative patterns \u2013 generating a contiguous infolding of meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

She connected this type of play to \u201cthe actual conversation habits of Yiddish.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to etymologist Michael Wex \u2013 in his Just Say Nu<\/em> (Harper: New York, 2007) \u2013 Yiddish itself is inscribed in derailment, evasion, avoidance, where the norm is not to be \u2018clear\u2019 but to \u2018seduce and lead astray,\u2019 to say the reverse of whatever\u2019s been said. For example, as we know, to say, \u2018Hi, how are you,\u2019 \u2018Shalom aleichem,\u2019 the answer is \u2018Aleichem shalom.\u2019 Answers are answered with a question, repetition, reversals, circumlocutions, interruptions, insertions (ptoo, ptoo, ptoo). Compliments are avoided in favour of their opposite. Or, like how you should never say what you mean because naming something (such as cancer, leprosy, pig) could bring it into existence.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for her own existence, Karasick said, \u201cAll my life, I\u2019ve been fiercely drawn to all that seems enigmatic or paradoxical, and get great pleasure in connecting the unconnectable; drawing from different genres, lexicons or mediums and reveling in ways they inform each other in radical and innovative ways, inviting us to see the world anew.\u201d<\/p>\n

While she has spent years teaching philosophic and critical theory, and media and pop culture at various universities, as well as attending lectures on media ecology and ontology, she also watches \u201ca lot of trashy TV,\u201d she said. \u201cI like classical jazz and MTV videos. I read [Louis] Zukofsky, [Slovoj] Zizek and Vogue magazine. And my favourite thing to do is to mash these language systems together into a kind of linguistic tzimmes; each flavour, taste, texture informing the other, expanding the palette.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s especially exciting for me to break down that binary between high and low culture; draw from the music hall and the circus, erotics and spirituality; and play with ways all of this information erupts as a palimpsestic web of both sacred and secular echo-poetic referents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karasick writes \u201con the road, on buses, trains, subways, boats; in motion,\u201d she said. \u201cI write best amid the bustle of life and, oddly, when I\u2019m really busy is when I\u2019m most inspired. I\u2019m always hunting and gathering, drawing on the world around me. Though, I must say, when drenched in aching nostalgia, frustrated by contemporary politics or steeped in throbbing desire is when the work especially flows.\u201d<\/p>\n

Approaching the poetry<\/strong><\/h4>\n

\u201cContour XLV: With Asura,\u201d \u201cLorem Ipsum\u201d and \u201cIn Cold Hollers\u201d are all \u201chomophonic translations, and so they all fall under the same rubric,\u201d said Karasick of three of the poems in Checking In<\/em> during a brief poetry lesson over the phone.<\/p>\n

She explained, \u201cEach of these [works] take the same sounds of an original poem by somebody else and I\u2019ve translated them. I\u2019ve done an avant-garde, post-modern translation by using the same sounds and rhythms of the original poems but changing all the words, so that if one read it simultaneously with the original poem, it would sound like the same poem, but it\u2019s completely different. It\u2019s a way of commenting on the previous piece; it\u2019s translating it, moving through and across different modes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Cold Hollers\u201d is a translation of Charles Olson\u2019s 1953 poem \u201cIn Cold Hell, In Thicket\u201d; \u201cContour XLV: With Asura\u201d is based on \u201cCanto 45 with Usura,\u201d a poem by Ezra Pound, which Karasick described as a \u201cfamously antisemitic, women-hating, Jews and women are pigs kind of poem\u201d; and \u201cLorem Ipsum,\u201d which is in English, but plays on the sounds of the Latin of Cicero\u2019s \u201cDe finibus bonorum et malorum<\/em>\u201d (\u201cOn the Ends of Goods and Evils\u201d). \u201cLorem ipsum is the standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation,\u201d writes Karasick elsewhere. \u201cI am interested in exploring how the notion of \u2018place holding\u2019 gets reworked through an impossible relationship both in love and in language.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>As to how to approach a poem that you\u2019ve never read before, Karasick said, \u201cOn one level, it depends on how deeply one wants to penetrate the text. The way I like to read is to not worry about what everything means per se, but rather \u2026 in reading, I think the most important thing is to feel the text, to go inside and feel its rhythms, its textures…. I work a lot with sound, so I\u2019m really interested how sound itself communicates meaning and so, therefore, a lot of this type of work is about moving with the rhythms and the textures and some of that crazed emotion, how that bleeds through, just through the way that it sounds and feels in your mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turning to the poem \u201cLorem Ipsum,\u201d she said the words mean \u201cpain itself.\u201d She has translated Cicero\u2019s treatise on the theory of ethics into a \u201cpassionate love poem\u201d about the \u201cdifficulties and grueling angst that one traverses through that. Just like love itself, or pain itself, isn\u2019t something that\u2019s easily definable, so it is with the poem itself, which takes us through this journey of multiple ways that are easily comprehensible and other parts that are strangely defamiliarized and confusing because these very strong emotions are fiercely that\u2026. Just like in life, you come across things that are completely foreign and impenetrable, so, similarly, the poem interweaves through the familiar and the defamiliar, the expected and that which completely takes you into new arenas of wonder and confusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karasick similarly takes Pound\u2019s \u201cCanto 45\u201d and, playing with the Yiddish word asura<\/em>, which means forbidden, and the English word usury, creates a new work that\u2019s both a scathing commentary on Pound\u2019s, as well its own poem, with its own meanings.<\/p>\n

About \u201cIn Cold Hollers,\u201d Karasick said she used the word \u201chollers\u201d because it\u2019s \u201chomophonically related to hell, but it\u2019s hollering in, calling back into Charles Olson\u2019s original \u201953 piece; and his original title, \u2018In Cold Hell, In Thicket,\u2019 refers to the opening of Dante\u2019s \u2018Inferno.\u2019 What seems simple, it just has layers and layers and layers of history, literary history, philosophical history, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title of Olson\u2019s poem refers particularly to \u201cselva oscura,\u201d she said, \u201cwhich is the dark wood that Dante wanders into in the middle of his life \u2026 so Olson\u2019s poem, which riffs on that, is a similar excursion into a visionary experience, where he struggles to come up with a new understanding \u2026 from his own midlife \u2026 putting a voice to his own time. It is a personal drama of experience, conflict; it really speaks to the wrenching process of living and loving that, by turns, is grueling and funny and dramatic and trivial. My translation of that is dealing with all of those things and, in a way, it\u2019s like, do you remember that old Gwen Stefani song, \u2018I Ain\u2019t No Hollaback Girl\u2019? \u2013 I am a hollaback girl. I am hollering back, in cold hollers, to this cold hell, and basically calling into that history of both Dante and Olson, the history of post-modernism, 65 years later.\u201d<\/p>\n

In talking about Olson\u2019s work and hers, Karasick said, \u201cI sometimes like thinking of translation as trans-elation because you can never really translate anything because of culture and all the different references \u2013 in my piece, in my trans-elation, the attention is focused on a world of connected life, the personal, the political, the poetic as a system of relations. And, lastly \u2026 highlighting how the words themselves are imaginative participants; the words themselves are creating and recreating the sense of connecting the personal, the political, the poetic.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just the words, but how they are placed on a page that matters in poetry. So, for example, Karasick\u2019s \u201cIn Cold Hollers\u201d not only plays on the sound and meaning of Olson\u2019s poem, but also mirrors its typography. \u201cI wanted to keep it very much as he had it,\u201d she said of where the lines break and other aspects of the formatting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe notion of the physicality and the materiality of where the words are placed on the page has just as much meaning as what they are communicating. We\u2019re so often used to looking at the left margin \u2026 but I want the phrases to be moving and fluid, and that sense of how the white space between the words is equally as important as the words themselves. We can go back to kabbalah and the black fire on white fire, that the whole page becomes a series of fiery energy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(image by Jim Andrews) Almost half of Adeena Karasick\u2019s latest volume of poetry, Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018), is comprised of whimsical Facebook status updates, most of which have deeper meaning on second and third thought. Together, they speak, as the book\u2019s description notes, \u201cto our seemingly insatiable desire for information, while acknowledging how fraught that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[6842,5780,218,1074,2728,8525,387,6002,186],"class_list":["post-31002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-adeena-karasick","tag-culture","tag-judaism","tag-kabbalah","tag-language","tag-mysticism","tag-poetry","tag-social-media","tag-yiddish"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}