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A genuinely political poetry, Perelman posits, must assert at least some possibility for identity: "If language is made up of units, broken apart as all things are by capitalism, and if nothing new is created beyond the horizon of the phrase or the sentence, then these new, charged units would still depend on capital for energy to band together in momentary transgression" (108). The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award) has celebrated science fiction that "expands and explores gender roles" since 1991. Some kind of strange, surreal, orgasmic alien presence, representing everything good, great, and amazing, is there, it’s there, it’s there, it’s GONE. The genre may well be burlesque laced with invective, but burlesque is a venerable form, and we don't need to compare Andrews's poetry to Maya Angelou's dreadful Inauguration poem (see Perelman 101-5) to discover its strengths. Passages by Rae Armantrout, David Melnick, Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman, often no more than ten lines long, are explicated: Perelman's readings demonstrate nicely that these passages do have meanings, that their authors have specific aims in mind, and that they "work.
Little Fires Everywhere (novel) - Wikipedia Little Fires Everywhere (novel) - Wikipedia
But Tiptree excels at constructing meaningful worlds in miniature, usually with a real feel for characters, even non-human or very very strange, that can create deep investment in spite of themselves.Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987) 63-93; the citations are taken from pages 63 and 89.
The Map to Everywhere: Book 1 : Ryan, Carrie, Davis, John The Map to Everywhere: Book 1 : Ryan, Carrie, Davis, John
More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. And all the while Docter Noel is supposed to be writing his new VERY IMPORTANT handbook on Dangerology (Level 2).Layla's first week at her new school isn't going well - she's the only child there to wear a Muslim headscarf, and she's already been suspended for fighting back against a bully. Here Perelman is onto something important: it is true that Andrews's poetry is an especially intransigent version of language poetics, that it "leaves only a narrow margin for readers" (108). I will never get tired of re-reading classics like "The Screwfly Solution", "Your Faces, O My Sisters! If this valiant effort on Grenier's behalf seems less than convincing, it may well be because these writings, like the dada experiments of Benson, Robinson, and Perelman himself, have a belated quality: from Russian futurism to Oulipo and concrete poetry, linguistic and figurative distortion of the kind described has made its mark.