Chicago Review's New Gender Forum Sparks Interest in Collectively Authored 'No Manifesto'
Over at The Message, Paul Ford highlights a recent publication, the "No Manifesto for Poetry Readings and Listservs and Magazines and 'Open Versatile Spaces Where Cultural Production Flourishes,' --after Yvonne Rainer," a poem written for the Fall 2014–Winter 2015 issue of the Chicago Review's folio on sexism and sexual assault in literary communities.
If you're not familiar with Rainer's "No Manifesto" (1965, and very in line with '60s minimalism), it's a quick read here; and we'll return to that momentarily.
Generously, CR has made the folio available as a downloadable PDF: It includes contributions from Laura Kilbride, Nathanaël, Anne Lesley Selcer, Amanda Nadelberg, New York-based group Enough Is Enough, Lisa Samuels, Christine Wertheim, Margaret Randall, Amy King and Lynn Melnick (for VIDA), Harmony Holiday, Elizabeth Treadwell, Krystal Languell, and the signers of the aforementioned piece.
Ford writes of the "No Manifesto" in particular. His piece addresses the confusion of its collective authorship ("[t]he manifesto is author-less; it was written collectively. Its authors are identified only by geography"); the way the Internet is changing writing ("The things that are stable (“No to rape”) are very stable; other things are completely unstable"); and the actual content of the poem. He also questions why the piece hasn't yet received much attention:
My own opinion of whether the poem is good or bad doesn’t matter. The poem makes me squirm; it makes me roll my eyes; it makes me angry at the world; and it makes me tired. I keep coming back to it. This poem indicates a lot of things at once about how cultural work is done now, in form, content, and means of production.
Over the last two weeks I kept expecting it to be covered in the media (really!), but it wasn’t, so I’m writing about what I think, since I can also be the media.
More:
The Chicago Review editors explained the situation that led to the forum:
Beginning in August of last year, the Alternative Literature (or Alt-Lit) communities in Brooklyn and the Bay Area were convulsed first by provocative instances of sexist and misogynistic writing from prominent male figures and then, more alarmingly, by allegations of sexual assault from women writers in these communities.
The introduction then tries to explain those instances and allegations, and gives some background that will help you understand the poem, as well as other essays and notices that appear in the forum.
[...]
The poem is very broad in spots and very specific in others; here it addresses Melville House, an independent publisher in Brooklyn:
No to Melville House, it published Tao Lin’s Statutory Rape knowing it was about statutory rape and all it did was ask Lin to retitle the book Richard Yates
And the next line is
No to no Melville House
This self-contradiction happens many times, presumably the result of the poem being written collectively. It’s also possible a given pair of such lines represents the mental state of an individual who holds two opposing views at once. In any case, many times the work asks you, the reader, to hold two opposing views, which is unusual in a manifesto (less unusual in a poem).
The poem is angry and it is exhausted. It is angry at many things, some of them related to sexual assault, some of them related to how people enact their activism. It is exhausted by the same things. The poem is 3,712 words of free verse, an average of 14 words per line. 243 of those lines are tweetable and 28 are too long to tweet. The shortest line is “No to rape,” which is also the first line. The longest is:
No to Chicago Review publishing, alongside a forum on sexual violence, an essay by Kent Johnson, who on the UK poetry listserv asked a woman who had shared her experience of multiple rapes — including an instance when she had been incapable of any kind of consent — whether the evening hadn’t just been drunken fun.
Read it all at The Message; and again, the Chicago Review's Gender Forum as a PDF (but check out the whole issue!) is here.
Yvonne Rainer herself later said of her "No Manifesto":
That infamous “NO manifesto” has dogged my heels ever since it was first published. Every dance critic who has ever come near my career has dragged it out, usually with a concomitant tsk-tsk. The only reason I am resurrecting it here is to put it in context as a provocation that originated in a particular piece of work. It was never meant to be prescriptive for all time for all choreographers, but rather, to do what the time honored tradition of the manifesto always intended manifestos to do: clear the air at a particular cultural and historical moment.
It is also stated that Chicago Review is open to letters in response to the forum, so we will assume that this dialogue is to be continued...