Ash Smith on Norma Cole's _Do The Monkey_ and toward a poetics of female bodybuilding

eyelashleye:

Part I: Some quick notes toward a poetics of female bodybuilding — gender, appropriation, crossing lines

Full Text of Cole’s Do The Monkey

* In Celan’s Meridian speech he quotes a scene from Buchner of two girls sitting on a shore, one putting up the hair of the other. “Sometimes one would like to be a medusa’s head,” so the quote goes “to seize the natural as natural by means of art” adds Celan. “This means going beyond what is human, stepping into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny — the realm where the monkey, automatons, and with them … oh, art, too, seem to be at home.”

* What I want to talk about right now is female bodybuilding in relation to poetry, in it’s broadest terms, and what’s at stake in the lifted text, appropriation, gender, the spectatorship or art v. the spectatorship of sport. I’m pressed for time — so I want to begin w/ some notes on Norma Cole. My hope is to gesture toward a larger study. Bear with me.

* In discussing Celan’s Meridian speech, Derrida focuses in on Lucile’s cry “Long Live the King!” “…so close to the bloody scaffold, and after he had recalled the “great works of art” … Lucille, who is blind to art, screams “Long live the King!” Celan calls this a counter-word (Gegenwort): After all the words spoken on the platform (the scaffold [cs ist chis Buitgeriist: literally, Blood-Scaffold]) — what a word [welch ein Wort!] It is a counter-word, a word that snaps the ‘wire’, a word that no longer bows to ‘history’s loiters and parade-horses,’ it is an act of freedom. It is a step.”

* The immateriality of language made terrestrial and manifest Celan marks as a meridian.

* Cole’s book opens with lines on a literal line — heavy black underline — the bar made manifest — meridian. what physicality language crosses line-to-line, line to reader. lifts

* “before the mind catches up / the body’s been and gone” is Cole’s epigraph to both the first poem and lifted from a later poem “The Body is Soft” — or else later incorporated. mortal / material connection of the text — poem as both an indeterminate zone and one tied to life, time, signature. “Verily, kiddo, I walk / among monkeys as among / the foreskins and limbs / of monkeys—”

* The title of the book comes from a poem “IN MEMORIUM JACQUES DERRIDA” — the sign, as Laura Moriarty points out, the double of the monkey in French (signe). signature . Of the figures Celan notes as residents of the uncanny, Derrida focuses the least on the figure of the monkey in “Majesty of the Present”. But, of course the presence of animals became one of Derrida’s last great focuses. It’s in this sense that Cole loops the presence of the uncanny, indeterminate, creaturely, death as the limit the poem looks back at the body — where it’s “been.”

* Eh okay — Now I’m out of time, so I’ll have to try get to the heart of this tomorrow. — but what I want to argue is *not* that Cole approaches either creatureliness or bodybuilding qua poetry from a primal position — but from a further, indeterminate — uncanny — space. It is from this space — and thru the expansion of appropriation, that Cole turns spectatorship back on itself — enacting a deformation of the idealized poem as well as the idealized body / female body. By lifting the text against the limits of language, certain emotive registers come thru hefted — said — unattached to the expectations of their position.

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