READING EXPERIMENTAL WRITING

I’m terribly late in announcing the publication of a marvelous new collection devoted to the question of how we read “difficult” writing: Reading Experimental Writing, edited by Georgina Colby (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

My contribution, “Fog is my Land: A Citizenship of Mutual Estrangement in the Painted Books of Etel Adnan,” hails from a chapter of my manuscript called Poetry After Fascism: Barbarism, the Abracadabrant Word, and the Invention of a Motherless Tongue. It considers what it means to move from “writing in French” in favor of “paint[ing] in Arabic,” as part of the dream of a pan-Arab solidarity during the Algerian War of Independence, and simultaneously take up writing in English as part of the anti-war movement of the Vietnam Era. It also asks how readers are beckoned to expand their linguistic and cultural awareness through Adnan’s exquisitely rendered translingual, and at times only semi-linguistic, poetry. Research for this article was extensive and included my lengthy interview with Etel Adnan herself in Paris which led to the creation of a PennSound page devoted to her writing.

The contents appear here:

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Preface, by Charles Bernstein

Introduction: Reading Experimental Writing, by Georgina Colby

1. ‘Fog is My Land’ A Citizenship of Mutual Estrangement in the Painted Books of Etel Adnan,

by Jennifer Scappettone

2. Reading Happily with John Cage, Lyn Hejinian, and Others,

by Alex Houen

3. Experiment, Inscription and the Archive: Kathy Acker's Manuscript Practice,

by Georgina Colby

4. Rereading Race and Commodity Form in Erica Hunt’s “Piece Logic”,

by Chris Chen

5. Contemporary Experimental Translations and Translingual Poetics,