When I make some writing out of someone else’s work
When writing a response to a work by another writer I have to enter the world of that work or poem or text. I like to step into the language of that poem or piece of text and turn it against itself. This does not simply mean reconstituting fragmented elements into a configuration that by luck or by mischievousness reflect a negative space of the original ‘meaning’. Though this can be an element of the process. It is a submissive process that requires entering the logic of that other writer and the logic of that particular piece of writing or poem. This language of the writing can be extended but can never be completely relied on to know itself completely. The poetics that happens to be currently at my fingertips has a contaminating effect and turns the original logic into the call and also the response to my imposed extension of the language. And this is both call and also response to the other writer’s work. This for me is collaboration. It is an imposed collaboration of texts that assigns the roles of caller and responder to the writings.
For a magazine called Attack!!!! I contributed a response text to a sentimental Dutch poem called ‘I Call’, narrating a child’s sleepless night and a mother’s comfort. The response was performed as a multimedia piece at Attack’s live-event on the 22nd of July. (Arguably) the name of the ‘zine encouraged a ruthless engagement with the poem and I produced what I initially explained as a twisting of the ‘original’ innocent voice into darker id material creeping into waking life. After performing the piece – with the dialogical addition of projected text, my reading of it has changed. I now read my ‘(awake and lie)’ as meta-text on the processes of interacting with another writer’s text. (awake and lie) is composed of cut-ups and manipulated lines from ‘I Call’ incorporating the writer’s name, Johanna van Fessem. There is an activity taking place in the text that not only signifies my writerly-self interacting with Johanna’s, but something of this dangerous autonomy in the voice with which I transmit the piece. The ‘Call’ becomes an insistence of authority laying claim on the text rather than a cry for help, concurring with the rebelliousness intrinsic to the cut-up method.
(awake and lie) turns the initial use of the verb of lie, to lie down, into a confession of falsehood; spoken with artificial teeth.
My intercepting voice attacks the text through the very words it provided. There are three characters, an ‘I’, a ‘She’ and a Johanna van Fessem, each competing for textual agency. “She comes out by Johanna” can be legitimately read as the original voice/text giving birth to this new one. Yet yet yet
