Participated in a creative writing class at Aalto. The session was hosted by Nat Rahaa who presented poetry as a toolkit for defamiliarizing established rationals (poetry as an anti-imperialistic practice!). We were presented extracts form works by Samuel Solomon, Linus Slug, Caroline Bergvall, Will Alexander and others. Solomons reworkings of archive materials felt interesting and I really enjoyed No (2017) by Anne Boyer. We were offered multiple approaches towards defamiliarization: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, Experimental Writing.
I’ve experienced that texts always establish borders. I think all writing is punishment.
To start of the domain of creative writing feels like it is reserved for people who have been initiated to grammar. Writing, as a craft, is maintained by a vigilant clergy who have been indoctrinated to grammar since kindergarten. Most likely trough the exercise were we had to color letters while staying inside their bounds.
Language cops were friends in high school but they end up as lone rangers in adulthood. Most of them end up working for the establishment. A selected few gain a right of roam over all text. For them it’s all the same: If it’s letter-like shapes, it can be read and made sense of or its nonsensicality can be classified.
They gain their position from the trust folk show them when they need help.
Language cops and grammar-clergy are needed for surviving a bureaucratic world. Everyone should get know at least two members from this clan. It’s a passive aggressive arrangement. The grammar-clergies violence is subtle – They don’t even notice what they are doing: Pulling focus to the absence of punctuation marks, in a world we can’t stay still – Is a bitch move. Their actions echo a believe that texts, words and even letters perform and make stuff.
More effort would be put into teaching people how to read. Because reading is the performance of text. People should be taught to read wrong (I think one of the text collage exercises we did during todays Zoom session was after this). If more people would be taught how to read-wrong, it would enable folk to write like they feel, with out having to fear the grammar-clergy.
Text is a horizontal performance, which sets words in a list #ॐ
Below is a text we were tasked to write. I feel happy about it.
I will cycle in the sun, after work and play music as loud as my phone speakers allow.
I’ll see people drinking wine in the park as I pass by and think about my kids when I see some climbing a tree.