Mourning my Little Tragedies (c) 2002 Anna Montgomery 30X24 Oil on Canvas
Anfractuous Historiography (click here)
This is a spoken word piece so please listen to the MP3 (link above) but if you need the PDF it’s here: Anfractuous Historiography (An Experimental Ghazal)
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
Chromapoetica
Very nice, quite the treat. You do a great job with your readings. Great painting as well. Really nice work. thanks
I do appreciate that you listened to the recording. It’s been a long time so I thought I was overdue for a spoken word piece. Thank you for feedback :)!
I enjoyed listening to the reading. I read the pdf after, where I dictionaried a lot of words…:D I think you are writing about ways and behaviors that reveal desires, sometimes some behaviors render certain goals unreachable or spoils certain things.
Yes, they’re not words I spit out every day, though I enjoy the looks of horror when I do :). Ghazal’s sort of fascinate me, that blend of Sufi mysticism and unrequited love that make for some mercurial poetry. It means a lot to me we’re in NaPoWriMo together, can’t wait to read your latest.
i love this, loved hearing it, the music and the repetition, just fabulous. i will be listning to it again. and your painting is wonderful, the title is perfect.
Oh Kelly, how nice of you to make my day first thing in the morning, my smile’s going to fuel many not so exciting errands for work. Now I will proceed to tell you things you don’t really need to know since I’m happy. The painting was one of the few that I created while listening to music (specifically ‘Grieve’ by Peter Gabriel) and is a rumination on the myriad losses of my life. The title came to me first, rare in painting. After the first two drafts of the poem I realized that a Ghazal would allow me to delve into repetition, to emphasize the untouchable grief and confusion. As you know I am grieving and this was a helpful way to address my spiritual and interpersonal struggles. Anyway, thank you, both for this comment and your excellent example in participating in NaPoWriMo. You’re an inspiration.
nice…a very cool picture…and you have a wonderful reading voice easy to listen too…it is harder for me to tranlate the larger words on the reading without the hard copy in front of me but it is easy to get caught up in the flow of what you do with them…
Gosh, I just realized I hadn’t responded here, sorry about that. The PDF is connected so hopefully that will help. The painting is there as requested :).