“Is not the voice always already intervening, as a sounded body that searches for its place, one that projects forward to incite response? An intervention with great resonance, and one lodged within the power dynamics of particular structures – linguistic, familial, pedagogic governmental etc. A voice that is subsequently often overheard, underrepresented and interrupted.”
Brendon LabelleI don't write structured poems.
That's what I said, responding to a certain question the other day.
It would be arrogant
I thought.
No. I don't write structured poems because I am
investigating writing and the body
Not starting from writing that speaks about or reflects upon the
body.
I write from the body
and that is, in itself a question, not a certainty.
Some time ago I began to feel that that the practice of writing was a process that was becoming too intellectualized, it's not that I did not recognize the value of that but it was not what I thought about/or searched for/or was inspired by. It's not that I want to be new, no one is new (although, paradoxically, we are new, because all of us are a body that grows old, some are female bodies [some female bodies have been raped, and bodies of all genders have been disappeared]).
How can we fix writing if nothing is fixed and life has the tendency to disappear in a political system in which it is Not life but death that governs.
We cannot speak of language without language, we cannot think of bodies without bodies.
Voice is my writing, subjectivities, technologies of the self, yes but the construction of the voice, questioning.
That exploration has led me to use technology such as recording surfaces, loops, blurs, voices that are duplicated, obsessive ideas, tones of the voice that I want to use as material, without meaning or words just sounds, a voice not exploited by being put in order or given meaning. In that sense I have felt my body, I have positioned it in the center of the space in an act of remediation. The writer, male or female, is alone when they write. Are they alone? That act of writing has a body that is then rubbed out.