ZERO:

Writing Arts

Acqua, watercolour by Giovanni d'Agostino

Two by Martin Nakell

Quotidian



it had happened.

a we as the script 
of written description

at mazes of astonishment each turn
a barrier as an entry

it is because is if only if
at which each spontaneously rescued word spoken is the entire conditional

no blossom occurs without a body
the seasons of ecstasy are internalized:
each turn of the memory of transcendence
cannot leave anything
behind those are the rules
for the perpetual game of it had happened
the days are longer than their nights which appear
which disappear among the clothes worn by the names
among the elephant who keeps coming up in conversation
as though everyone had seen it
or it had happened all of it
and no one fell off the linear edge each one thought of as their own
creation is another one a name and the night black as ink
or black as the blackest elephant who closes its eyes
into a milk-white darkness
who walks lumbering its snout swinging
across the vast territory of what is

where we were
where we were admiring each other’s intelligence
awash in perspicacity in the dazzling fact of interpretation
whose first name was understanding whose incarnation
as intuition engraved itself into the pattern as water falling
and thus the portrait seemed whole and yet you could see yourself
you could see everyone there
in that vast landscape, one at a time
or everyone together what a clamor too much too much go back
to the elephant to the trunk swinging to the dog we remembered
or rather who remembered us and off of whose bones the light glanced
as it curved toward the curvature of space that vast idea conceived of



Photograph Taken From a Window



The evening,
freshened
by the absence of heat’s excess,
boasting, full of the promise or pretension of calmness,
is already an ancient ruin.
The stone buildings which still
	survive illuminated now
	only by the spoor of light
People, (perhaps once resembling ourselves), who had fallen suddenly
into some grief or into the struggle with despair
or into a confrontation with self-defeat
who can pass these feelings
from themselves
into the air of the evening,
into the stone of the evening,
into that white marble which still has the good luck
to catch a few actual rays off the disappearing sun,
those who can allow these damaged cells
to be absorbed into the porous atmosphere
by a process of incarnate osmosis
they win the reward of a sumptuous weariness
as though it were a water
into which burning feet

your face just then, or the face
we had seen in the photograph
of the photograph taken from the window,
in it so clear
a wound and such
steadiness braided together that I thought
a secret cave
in the sacred city had opened. In the real sacred city,
the one we celebrate because it  cannot by definition exist.
May our ignorance absorb us
like a calm night. May the heaviness
of bodies leave us so that the weight
of our bodies keep us on earth. May we sit down
at the table, again, 
where we have come before
in  lives ordered by reasons
we accept, even in a new joy,
penetrable cry that might rise in us,
again
forestalling salvation’s








Tense Present, by Pasquale Verdicchio


Five by Krista Husar



What country
which is a power sexual
have gone anywhere

an elephant treasure
stable couple is falling

what should She say
seh is the woman she She she
catch you later

genital point of view
know your way to wonderland
autonomous in grass
who fed the big guy

okay
so this violence
because its melodramatic







apparently all white
living somewhere

the bartender not horse and field in that sense
the horse and stuff under together
blended zipping work
not fringes

that was dreadful
no legs at all!
not a voice from nowhere

my grades
lack of understanding
come on a walk now
not home/back up first up as in hill
always racially
motivated arsenics
not involuntary methodologies and getting fire






Prove breadth

In the dream I was playing a harp paper
then someone came and said
do you know, how to do, or who told you
(I keep trying to know what is a woman
analyzing outside collective behavior)
active
your work

anyone who is similar
will probably get notices today






as they drove south
his accent changed
so she didn't want him inside her
ever again or so much bell curve

women in jail chanting for beds and food
funny
later it was a threat to the sheriff to have them back
since always nagging bitches
sometimes lipstick- Dad, I gave that to her
the camera just has to look over

silly to listen culturally- no gun
play circus music
own these things
seldom




How people spend their methods
like a chicken
an active stamp

move out of the way
that's vitamin stuff
do you ever feel restaurant or male
sorry wrong bus

a roaster- dinner
blisters have a plan
in the fertile
female directly comments to brother even if I can help it
we always sit together
from this notebook to that notebook

Quadrato, Wax by Giovanni d'Agostino

Myung Mi Kim.  The Bounty.  (minneapolis: chax, 1996)
102 pages. $ 12.. isbn 0-925904-21-X.

Jocelyn Saidenberg

	Upon reading Myung Mi Kim's book The Bounty, I immediately realized the compositions' 
silences and blank spaces were communicating and articulating a terrain of expressions that function 
as powerfully as the voiced and registered words, rhythms and sounds.  Gradually I became aware 
that there existed both an audible, eloquent music, and a muted, suggestive, and potential music.  
These musical manifestations, while interacting to create tensions and harmonies, began to assert 
and outline a radical feminist temporality and spaciality toward a new kind of perception and creation.  
	While silence offers complex and evocative ways to read writing by women who explore it structurally, 
rhetorically and thematically, it also presents a particular set of problematics.  If one of the aims of feminist 
writings is to make heard the unheard voices of women writers, then any valorization of silence might appear 
to be a counter movement within this project. However, due to the centrality of silence in women's culture, 
the legions of unheard, unpublished, out of print women's voices, the efforts to make those voices heard and 
a re-evaluation of the function of silence are both important in giving homage to the elements and conditions t
hat helped to shape a tradition in women's writing.  The formal and thematic re-evaluation of silence is a critical, 
vital, and urgent project for Myung Mi Kim. By researching and emphasizing silences in The Bounty, Kim offers 
ways of locating different values for silence. Kim's work activates new metaphors and modes through the 
negotiation and mediation of languages which propose ways in which silence can speak and blank compositional 
be made legible.
	The overall structure and form of The Bounty contribute greatly to a different exploration of blank 
space and its corresponding silences.  Throughout the book's three sections, the formal exploration of the page 
and the frame of its composition ranges and varies tremendously, pushing out and tugging at traditional rules and 
conventions of the poetic line.  Although certain sections appear to follow the rules of left hand margin, with 
stanzas containing equal number of lines and the same number of stanzas per page, even this rigorous adherence 
seems to ironize and comment upon the legitimacy of its own regularity and normality.  
	Kathleen Fraser has written that the line "locates the gesture of longing brought into language.  It is the visual 
enactment of perspective and difference" (152).  She argues that, for women writers, the struggles and inventions 
concerning the line have developed out of a need to visibly show the path of discovery and an effort not to repeat 
certain agreed upon codes of versification.  She specifically indicates the ones which have been regulated and used 
for the most part by men in privileged positions and with access to public speech.  Fraser writes:

	For this reason, the frame of the page, the measure of the line, has provided for many contemporary 
women poets the difficult pleasure of reinventing the givens of poetry, imagining in visual, structural 
terms core states of female social and psychological experience not yet adequately tracked: hesitancy, 
silencing or speechlessness, continuous disruption of time, "illogical" resistance, simultaneous perception, 
social marginality. (153)

Fraser's emphasis on the page and its structural elements as a site for expression of a female aesthetic, as a 
field for mapping and as a body for articulating "core states of female...experience" offers profoundly radical 
suggestions for reading experimental women's writing.  She broadens the focus by not only looking at different 
subject matter, but also by examining the transcription and translation of the experience and perception of that 
matter into the movement, rhythms, and spaces of poetry.
	What then are the matters which concern the poet of The Bounty?  Because the book is written in a fragmentary
style, it is very difficult to trace a narrative, pin down a point of view, or even locate a speaker.  Rather, meaning or
 the possibility of meaning, of making meaning and of locating the self and selves in a site where meaning can occur 
and be made, become some of the basic concerns of the book.  In reading and re-reading this dismantled and 
discontinuous text certain patterns and cycles begin to accrue and to accumulate possible meanings around themselves.  
This process of renewal and reorganization calls for particular instruments of research:  memory, creation, languages, 
generations, birth, translation.  Resonances of sound buildups and associative landscapes combine to offer new patterns, 
musics, and maps for making sense of history and its ruptures.  The use of blank space is one of the primary means of 
exploring these concerns through its articulation of silence and speechlessness.
	The dedication page of The Bounty contains one word: "mother."  One might expect a preposition like "for" or 
"to" to appear around it or perhaps an expression of affection, gratitude or inspiration.  However, the word with its 
rich connotative resonance appears naked, isolated, without modification, and the resulting associations are many: 
is she the poet's actual birth mother, a more generic mother who gives birth, inspires and expires, or the suggestion 
of a nurturing quality, holistic like the earth or nature, and finally, the poet as mother giving birth to writing and 
language.  This page remains continually provoking through the whiteness that surrounds the solitary word, and 
the blankness that invites participation, collaboration, and invention.  This indication, even before the table of 
contents, is both a clue for, and warning to, readers of what will be asked of them.  The word's privileged and 
pressurized position in the book reminds me of Cixous' observation in "The Laugh of the Medusa."  "A woman is 
never far from 'mother'....There's always within her at least a little of that good mother's milk.  She writes in 
white ink" (335).  Already the reader is being urged into thinking of blankness, silence, and whiteness as containing 
and carrying stories and their possibilities of collaboration and interpretation.
	The first section, "Primer," begins with three entries: the number 1443, information about the Hangul language, 
and the line: "This is the study book" (11).  Each of the succeeding pages of this first section is headed by a consonant 
in brackets reminding readers that this is a site of learning (and unlearning), and a didactic element related to the 
project of cultural transformation.  Some of what is being modeled here concerns languages and how to read, languages
 and their parameters, languages and their shapes and outlines.  Kim writes:

	[d]	
	
	underbelly     underscore    may no longer resemble
	where the barest suggestion of its shape
	remnant of another opulent, ample time
	in that reading...(17)

I read these lines as suggesting that there is something yet to be articulated concerning what belongs to a new 
time that requires a new reading and interpretation, something under the surface of traditional, conventional 
resemblance and languages.  The disjointed and unconventional syntax is evocative in that it requires both a 
suspension and an activation of reading.  One is asked to proceed along with the unanticipated movements and 
also to penetrate and participate.  The spaces in between the words of this first line offer the reader places 
to rest, to breathe, to listen to what happens in between the words, what sounds and patterns begin to accumulate 
in those spaces which persistently appear and reappear in the varying context of each page's composition.  
	The description of culture and identity as influenced by immigration is both enacted on the page and 
articulated in the fragments of images and information presented on page 23 of The Bounty.  It suggests that 
the poet hears and sees things simultaneously, momentarily, and in an overlapping palimpsest-like apprehension;  
she reflects her confusion and difficulty in acquiring a new language, as in the easy-to-confuse sounds of the words 
"call" and "cull."  The shifting focus of the page insists that no single perspective be privileged, negotiating for 
the development of many centers and voices.  The whole page can be seen as a canvas, as a field where the reader
 can enter its energy at any given place and exit wherever and whenever.  The white spaces of this canvas, 
the so-called negative spaces of this composition, instruct the reader in this freedom of breaking and entering.  
It also expresses another side of freedom and rulelessness: confusion and embarrassment.  Where do I go, where 
do I belong, how do I read this and what can I say?  Questions one might ask when confronted with an alien culture 
and language.  
	Occurring near the end of the first section, which among other things is exploring language and the study of 
it, page 28 is entirely blank, without even a page number.  This blank page can be read as a gap or hole: there 
is something missing.  I read this silence as expressive of Kim’s profound mistrust of language, of its limited 
abilities to give meaning and make sense of the world around her.  This page is an invitation to experience a 
particular kind of speechlessness.  
	The second section, "Anna O Addendum," begins with two epigrams, one from Freud's Studies in Hysteria 
and the other by the exiled Egyptian Jewish writer Edmond Jabes.  The Freudian quotation comments on Anna O's 
increasingly deprived hold of meaningful language, while Jabes expresses his distrust of language.  "'...there is no 
such thing as a word.  There are consonants waiting to become vocables'"  (35).  These two quotations seem to ironize 
each other, leaving each other in troubled positions as indicators or signposts for reading Kim's supplement to 
the story of Anna O.  The sparse, more airy, disturbing atmosphere of this section brings even more pressure to bear 
upon individual words and parts of words by using the white spaces as a means to create the intensified 
articulation in this porous system.  Particularly inviting, it urges the reader to enter and engage its offered field of 
energy.
	"Of twenty keep ten" (45) advises a line in the middle of The Bounty, which I read as a note by the poet 
to herself, and as an offered insight into her practice, the means by which some of the silences are outlined.  
In other words, of twenty observations, phrases, images, syllables, words, letters, keep ten, half of them.  
That the poet gives presence to her working process is also an indication of her desire to broaden notions of creation 
and authorship.  She establishes herself as a producer and maker of social productions that involves her in 
the project of cultural transformation and the establishment of new values.  In addition to relating her project 
to a larger cultural project, the writer allows different materials to enter the writing, expanding compositional 
and thematic possibilities.  The porousness and openness of The Bounty question the notion of "finished" poems, 
challenge ideas about closure, and suggest a model that breathes, that has white spaces for breaking and 
entering, for conversation, a model that allows a wider range of perceptions to be registered. 
	The book's third section, among other elements, takes up the interrelationships between creator and 
creation and between mother and child.  It is not a simple celebration of birth but rather an intense interrogation 
of the historical and personal conditions of women as mothers and artists.  Kim writes:

	Tombs of women ornamented
	Who wants me dead
	The children are the children are the children are.... 	(70)	

This complex presentation of woman as producer and mother gains even more dimensions as the section continues.  
"Mother confused with earth / Ankles leather bond // Left for dead the penetrable body mothers" (79).  
The interrelation between writing and bearing children is also articulated by "Point blank inner written 
last abode" (86).  The conflation of the sites of gestation and of writing makes for a powerful image in the midst 
of so much labor, starting and stopping, rupture and interruption.  On the page the compositional structures powerfully 
enact and echo these elements. 
	The final sequence of the book (91-99), is constructed in a highly innovative form.  There are two single word 
columns, each eight lines long, on either side of a block of text.  The push and pull through the space of the page 
that is created by this design radically question the status of the left margin as the traditional means of ordering 
poetry while challenging readers to assert and articulate ways of reading and negotiating these pages. 
 Readers encounter the last page and confront the decay and erosion of the structures that have been established
 just as they have begun to find rhythms and patterns for reading thereby demanding that an even more active 
participation in the compostion, listening, and registration of the silences being created.  
	The Bounty challenges not only the reader and traditional forms of versification but also questions and opens 
up the canon of acceptable genres.  It asks to be read not as a collection of individual poems but as a book, as
 something that occurs over an extended period of time and happens in an expanding space, thus seeking to
 rethink established aesthetic and literary notions.  By challenging traditional poetic structures, Kim is able
 to enact a central element of her poetic project: the revaluing of the spatial and temporal functions of silence.  
Endurance, bearing the silence, letting the silence be born and be borne are some of the associations that accrue 
around Kim's expression of silence.  The silences, in their most elemental role mark and register durations, what 
is endured by and born from women in successive generations.  In addition, while they honor a female heritage 
that at times escapes articulation, yet it is in this book embodied in the blank page, these silences also begin to 
outline the meaningful shapes that are being created. 



Works Cited

Cixous, Helene.  "The Laugh of the Medusa."  Trans. Keith  Cohen and Paula Cohen.  Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary 
	Theory and Criticism.   Ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Handl.  New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991 (334-49).
Fraser, Kathleen.  "Line. On the Line. Lining up. Lined with.  Between the Lines.  Bottom Line."  The Line in Postmodern Poetry.  
	Ed. Robert Frank and Henry Sayer.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988 (152-174).
Kim, Myung Mi.  The Bounty.  Minneapolis:  Chax Press, 1996. 

Translations by Pasquale Verdicchio

Andrea Zanzotto

from Fosfeni (Milano: Mondadori, 1990)




				Squaring-off the page



This is how it happens, like this pedaling -
pedal on the edge on the lip on the corner
	while pebbles intervene and shadows too
	fluttering from the aspen and valued green by green
Pedal, foot against foot
	and leg against leg,
	bone, pedaling, entangles tarsus and shins
Falls of butterflies sponsor you,
at the encounter in counter direction proceed
pedal  and press and breathless worse than during birth
among bright birthings of suns like butterflies
and among birthings of butterflies soft comments
Pedal and press like inside a large grape
and bend over all the grapes
in front of you, mundane, make-over fidelity
Recover recover and give
   prize, is at a premium beyond the anxieties and carnality:
   elsely press    sweet from sour from lucrative thefts
Pedal without trilling that no-one
the jumping flight on the gravel among butterflies
		will impede anyone


The squaring-off of the page has begun -
by kicks		 	       well pedaled.

Vivian Lamarque

Selections from The Golden Man (Milano: Crocetti, 1988)




Mr. never


He was a handsome and marvelous man.
One could not stay near him a long long time, in fact 
	not at all.
He, the Distant one, lived all arrogant with his family,
	in another place.






The man of the little box


A man had a wife.
On top of that, in a little box, he had a second one, 
	secret and very small.
How could the wife in the box breathe?
The box had a little window, as well as 
	a writing desk and a bed.
The man loved both wives very much and his wives
	loved him too.

 




The man here


Shining with sun the road carried him.
From far away to Milan it carried him.
Every single force of speed turned and turned the wheel
	so that the far away man might become a man here.






A perfumed man


Completely inebriated, that flower smelled that man.
Was he a perfumed man?
Yes, a man like a field of grasses.






The man and Rome


Come come said Rome to a man.
Rome could speak?
Yes.
Come come - it said - on a wonderful trip 
	with a window seat.
Was Rome so polite?
Yes, and the man was nicely caressed and embraced.

 




The man of nostalgia


At length at length the bells rang, nostalgia was about to 
	was arriving had arrived.
Whose nostalgia?
It was the nostalgia of a man.
Gone?
Gone.
Was it a large nostalgia?
It was the largest nostalgia you1ll ever see.






The caressable man


Most difficult of all was when the nights fell on the beds
	 and caresses began to walk away.
At the end of the road they could not find the caressable man 
	for whom they had started to walk.
Dazed they searched and searched for the man but he was
	not at the point of arrival.

 




The man of the moon


He did not want to tire him out but rest him like 
	a moon.
Like a bluish moon?
Yes, that shines on the paths of the hills and 
	the mountains.
And the cities?
Alright, a little on the cities too.
And that man wanted that he should rest?
Yes, sometimes that man wanted the blue arms of the moon 
	all for himself.






The man of the stars


The sun shone in the sky.
What for?
For her to go walking with that man.
Was it a nice walk?
Marvelous, even the stars in the sky, in a scattered 
	order, walked along.

 




The man of goodnight


From a distant distant bed with the best selfsame 
	goodnight he wished.
Was there a moon?
Oh, yes the moon and a thousand stars, and the branches 
	of trees and sleeping waters, with every everything 
	he wished him goodnight.
And did the man hear?
Yes, softly softly the man heard, as he fell asleep.





The man of the prints


In the light of the sky at five of that evening
	things stood out out so well oh had
	that man been there to see them with her
	the things of the universe that stood out.
So that man was not there to see them?  had he left?
Yes, the road has stolen his steps, put his footprints
	in line with the points turned
	the other way.

 




The untouchable man


Most kissable in dreams, untouchable like
	a thread bared in reality, was that man.
What to do then?
It was enough to confuse dream and reality
	a little, erase them with a white eraser
	the useless dividing line.






The man and the rain


Raining, he embraced her in his safe arms.
And the rain?
The rain rained outside.
And after?
Who knows after, they were at first



 




The man of orientation


Future orientations should have leaned
	in the direction of major berries
Oh naturally.
Superior berries of superior kisses?
Oh yes.  Always superior always superior until
	their quantity in its turn in the end 
	should have been reached.






The man of the curtain


He lived in a fancy automobile.
There were two seats with head-rests, two without,
	two drawers for food, a bookshelf,
	and a night curtain.
That didn1t leave much space, he could only
	receive very very small women (one at a time)
	he kissed them a lot (behind the curtain)
	especially one of them.

Cesare Viviani

from  Notes Toward a Poetics of the Garment  (Milano: Crocetti, 1990)




VI.

A writer can change tongue only non metaphorically: 
in a surgical sense.


The moan is an expression of the intellect.


Death wakes internally.  Externally the body 
keeps up appearances.


The last thing to die is society: 
the thing that most resists in a dieing person is education.


In the end you find out that your one great love was a door.


If I had to choose a "poetic" form it would be tautology.


Compulsion is the translation of the heartbeat.  
It is uneliminable in life.


Every time he asked me for a temporal reference 
("but when...?") he was stupid.


There is never anyone in the room of the dieing.
Never anyone near.


Repentance is the best example of sentiment of 
the definitive (in man): something of absolute
that sticks on us.


The mobility of thought is an absolute lack of stability:
it always wavers from the particular to the general
and viceversa.


A particularity always produces (or generates) 
a general argument.


Perfection - which psychologists despise - would be 
to conform to will of everyone.


In every case in the surroundings what one says happens.


It is disturbing to remember that with any object 
any other object has a closer relationship 
than the staunches description that we can give of it.


A toothless hag will say the most tender things.


God is neither good nor bad: He is a master that must be obeyed.


A sentence is true when no-one else can understand it 
except the one to whom it was said.


To convert the words of others into one's own energy 
is a feminine modality.


It is not an idle question to establish whether the sun 
or the rain is more of a determinant for the growth of green.


Intelligence does not mean to know: rather, it means to jump 
without falling.


In every context, the inversion of "good" and "evil" 
must be made.


Strong admiration is free of envy.  Love is not.


There is a point at which the new will no longer be 
of interest.


Examples are a characteristic of man: they do not 
exist in nature.


Time makes the incomprehensible useful.


Once broken, a faith cannot be restored.


He who makes cannot know if he makes good or evil.  
One cannot say: "I am doing good."  Intention follows the doing.


Adoption is hideous.


Every increment of hearing is explained in italics.


The greater part (her included, the elegant and charming one) 
lives on the back of others.


Reading is a synchrony of erotic movements.

LINKS