CUNY Academic Commons

This is the first page of a letter from the Leslie Marmon Silko archive at the Beinecke (I’ll upload the second page following this post) by Silko to a Tuscon venue protesting the security checks she’s been subjected to in her regular attendance. Silko calls out what she calls the “death squad impersonators” who searched her, and asks whether…[Read more]

I recently revisited a talk by David Antin for another class, and I began thinking about Antin, theory and vernacular. What identities do we take on by “thinking” theory in one kind of language or another? Does Antin’s thinking work within a coded male vernacular? There are several young poets and thinkers (Debbie Hu, Jane Cope, to name a few) who…[Read more]

Since I’ll be discussing the online Eclipse Archive today as part of my contribution about websites, I wanted to include a file from their archives (Eclipse is an archive of American poetry that catalogues and hosts images of “avant-garde” manuscripts from 1945 on — I use “avant-garde” in quotes because the site complicatedly does not address its…[Read more]

I’d like to analyze Lauren Berlant’s “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” a version of which appears in Cruel Optimism. Berlant defines this concept of “slow death” as “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and histo…[Read more]

This week I’ve uploaded an example of a page of correspondence I’m examining between Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge Luhan, an artist and literary socialite who moved out to Taos, New Mexico in 1919. Luhan has always fascinated me as a queer/bisexual modernist figure with a utopic and complicatedly appropriative relationship to the “west” and the…[Read more]

I’m attaching the introduction of Lucy Lippard’s meditation on land use in the American Southwest, with apologies for the bad scans – I wanted to include this copy in full color with photographs to point to the ways Lippard breaks up the arc of her study with illustrative photographs and diversions, augmentations and interruptions that constitute…[Read more]

1941 news article and photograph of students and faculty constructing by hand the studio buildings at Black Mountain College.

“The mask thus conceals this loss, but preserves (and negates) this loss through its concealment. The mask has a double function which is the double function of melancholy. The mask is taken on through the process of incorporation which is a way of inscribing and then wearing a melancholic identification in and on the body…”

From the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library digital archives, this is a handwritten letter from HD to Williams Carlos Williams sent March 26, 1908.

Paula Gunn Allen looks at the refusal by white feminists, including foundational thinkers who were interested in caricatures of “women warriors,” to acknowledge not only the history of colonialism in America but also the long histories of matrilineal descent by numerous indigenous nations in the U.S. She thinks about this refusal as a major…[Read more]

The interesting thing about cuteness, which Sianne Ngai examines in this reading of the “cute eroticism” of Stein’s Tender Buttons, is that it seems to produce a “deverbalizing effect” on the reader. Babies and puppies are infantilizing; they make us oo and ah, coo, murmer and babble back. Ngai considers that Gertrude Stein’s cutesy (virtuosic)…[Read more]

The poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge wrote famously with the long line, a signal of her interest in visuality and the sight/site line, a horizontality that embodies the social and visual landscape she wants to examine. As I see it, the line actually functions as a sleeping body that is the site for and from consideration. I’ve always been curious about…[Read more]