During a cloth reading, pay attention. Be still, fidget, wait. Hold onto applause, hold onto response, hold onto aplomb. Hold onto yourself for once. Hold on so tight, so tight so as to strangle what’s left of any object of desire. And then release. Now hold onto tact.
Today ryan fitzpatrick will read his manuscript, titled Deal With It, from start to finish, in its entirety. After the cloth reading, time will be here, on our side even, for us to critique and respond to absolutely everything the manuscript contains, along with all the sensibilities it so finely attunes.
In Deal With It everything exists to be unflappidly prodded, seeped in gaucheness, to be dealt with, to be held. Ain't that cute? To list is to overwhelm and to assume these things relate to one another without pretense: what is love’s relation to the couple-form, what is the couple-form’s relation to compulsory heterosexuality, what is compulsory heterosexuality’s relation to sex positivity, what is sex positivity’s relation to slow dancing, what is slow dancing’s relation to gender binaries, what are gender binaries relation to Freud, to Lacan, to Zizek, what are Freud, Lacan and Zizek’s relation to categories, what are categories relation to ryan’s categories, what are ryan’s categories in relation to cis-white men, what are cis-white men’s relation to Danielle, to Deanna, to Haida, what are Danielle, Deanna, and Haida’s relation to all kinds of ideologically derived and desiring structures, etc. ryan may poet that “a poem cannot construct anything” – as in the poem, on its own, cannot erect nor dismantle an oil rig – but it can shovel more discourse atop more discourse until you can almost, but not quite, see a hole filled with gravel that covers the spill.
In the poem “I never wanted to say anything," the reader confronts how they read: “In the contemporary poetry market, every book ought to have a discrete framework that shapes how a reader can read a book.” After a reader reads several books on subjects – like love, war, or particle physics – it is assumed the reader has broadened and deepened their knowledge on a given subject. There are radical benefits to reading. One might say, after traversing through the aforementioned topics in bed with a friend, therein lies discoursing: from a book to a body, from one hole to another, keenly willing another body to, well, deal with it. Foucault describes discourse analysis as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak." I'm certain ryan would describe discourse analysis as an assemblage of being(s) that hinges on relations between things and people and objects and spaces and feelings. What is happening between us is what is most curious and worthy of investigation. No self-investigation, no right to emote. How do you read a room like a book, a book like a room, is the type of question that wants to find out how people collide and concatenate. Reading is a lonely practice and sometimes so is being in a room filled with character(s).
ryan quotes Marx ranting about a“ruthless criticism of everything existing." ryan draws attention to what is. He’s making lists of everything existing and asking questions about why such-and-such exists next to this and not that. He draws our attention to what is already there. As Gemma Corradi Fiumara insists: “There is a whole world yet to be discovered, not of unsolved issues but of relationships among things we know, of ways in which they might fit together.” It isn’t going anywhere, that whole world, until you fucking deal with it.
Deal With It begins with the following epigraph from Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy: “The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.” The poem is always left justified. Is the left justified? Puns aside, let’s assume charitable intention. Let’s take this epigraph at its word, that the point of the matter is not simply to make a rational argument, to concede to any hegemonic voice, including our own, that knows what’s correct and incorrect critique, but to get a real sense of how critique can bolster our sensitivities to one another. To be able to intuit meaning from social constructions, without reproducing essentialist categories of relating to one another, because we have all this rich information, all this history, all this discourse we've fashioned together and apart.
The more I return to these old notes, the more I really need to give ryan a call.
It’s “a hard time for white dudes” a white commenter comments. I suppose I agree when I think about all the hard and necessary work it takes to learn how to love and to unlearn how we’re instructed to love. There is relentless accountability in these poems, constant questioning with 212 question marks scattered across 95 pages. The question marks intone a high-rising terminal, or upspeak, which I cannot help but read into these poems. It’s a gendered tonal pattern often associated with a particular sociolect, a valley girl. According to a 1986 report, upspeak is typically used among women, it subtly indicates that the speaker is "not finished yet" perhaps discouraging interruption. What if a question mark and an ellipsis lost their right to bodily autonomy? That’s the joke…
ryan's lyric “I” continues: “Men are the most difficult when they want boundless extractable love.” bell hooks quotes Barbara Demming on male violence: "I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they're acting out a lie, and so they're furious at being caught up in the lie. But they don't know how to break it.... They're in a rage because they are acting out a lie – which means that in some deep part of themselves they want to be delivered from it, are homesick for the truth," to which she adds: "The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love." At the end of it the patriarchy brutalizes everybody.
Are we doomed by a kind of discourse where everything is a target, everything is scrutable, everything must undergo "ruthless criticism" in order to get to, what, some kind of truth nestled in the nook of a speech fact? Sometimes it’s just enough to list your truths rather than assess them; sometimes you need to burn your list and wrestle meaning from what's scorched. Point to it rather than get re-traumatized by it. What do we have at the end of ruthless criticism? Ruthless relations? Humans have a tendency to see patterns everywhere. The lyric "I" musters, “It’s tough, the viscosity of space. The relations that put everyone in place. The complexity of it is overwhelming.” Remember: lists are overwhelming. It is important to see patterns when making decisions and judgments and acquiring knowledge. Unfortunately, that same tendency to see patterns in everything can lead to seeing things that don't exist. You might begin to see falsities, misinformation, and run with it, not deal with it. Meanwhile, the lyric "I" muses, “I try not to miss the non-sequitur for the trees.” Two incommensurable things enter into relation through this sensitivity. We all really need to hold onto one another, right? But not in ways that bind us to antiquated regimes of coupling ourselves to false dichotomies and equivalences. Not all privilege is created equal. We can fall in love while covering that spill.
Let’s all now welcome ryan fitzpatrick, in its entirety.