Dream Lives of Genders

[I received this email a few days back from Rachel Blau Duplessis in response to my Flash poem -- which she hasn't yet seen, I gather -- called "The Dreamlife of Letters," which was based, in a sort of twisted, algorithmically-enriched (or impoverished, depending on your pov), on her contribution to "A Poetics Colloquium: Body/Sex/Writing," forum enacted entirely through email on the Buffalo Poetics List in 2000. The email is also addressed to Dee Morris, who had presented a paper on Dreamlife at a conference somewhere (don't know the details on this). Rachel was spurred to write this by reading the dialogue, called "potentially suitable for running in a loop," that Darren Wershler-Henry and I had for a Cyberpoetry issue of Open Letter some years back and which appears now in Fashionable Noise. Anyway, that's the background. She gave me permission to post it here. (I've found my own original response to the colloquium online as well, which contains the original "dreamlife" poem.)]

email from Italy on 10 June 2003 to Dee Morris and Brian Kim Stefans. Hi both, one of you my dear friend, and the other an interesting acquaintance. The one will (I hope) forgive my odd tone in writing a double email,; the other will (I hope) forgive the bolt-from-the-blue aspect of this. I just received Brian’s book from Atelos, the day we left for Italy, and (while I left it at home) I had a chance to glance at the first essay and was struck by how it began with that orchestrated exchange that Dodie proposed a few years ago—in experienced time, eons ago. That is, Brian, you are talking about me, or being queried about that intersection of our work. So I just looked at Dream Life (again,) today, though, NOT in its flash form. I’m sorry about that, but I didn’t want to overload my simple hookup here (one laptop, thru an Italian server etc). That this unwillingness to have my screen saver taken over by your text (! scary warning!) might express a smidgen of resistance to things not lying flat on the page—well, so be it. That this is a belated response should surprise no one who knows me—it does not mean wound, hurt, insult, rage, etc—I am just slow. Brian—the wittiness of your work "The Dream Life of Letters" is patent. I think you did a remarkable thing with the terms I had set up. The alphabet and the mini-poems are charming and clarifying, actually. And gaffaw-laden. Although I don’t know whether my text was "too loaded," it does cover the territory in 2 ways, and I appreciate the challenge you met. It must have been hard to leverage anything into mine. Looking at your work today, I am intrigued by the words that repeat: dream, gender, in and no. No is actually a very important word for me, and the "N" of No actually begins Drafts. I’m writing because I want to tell you what I did, since you may not exactly have gotten it (or did you?) and tell Dee too, because now she seems to have written about this intersection of materials, but esp about Brian’s work as web poetry. (So I also wanted at long last to ask Dee to email me her paper by attachment if she could.) I frankly do not remember totally what Dodie asked us to do, but it was about sexuality and the polymorphous. I have read some Kristeva and Cixous and Irigaray, and Chodorow, and am intrigued (helped along by this theorizing) about oedipality and pre-oedipality in its ideas about how sexuality and gender are constructed. It seemed to me a simple extrapolation from this theory that people might not be gendered in their dream life, at least not in the same way they are in their day life, because oedipality is normativity, but preoedipality leaks thru in all sorts of ways including in the unconscious being explored in dream. This means we spend a lot of our lives not gendered in the way we more-or-less are, and not enacting the sexualities we expect of ourselves—but this part of our lives is asleep. I wrote a statement about this idea. Then I made a homophonic translation of the statement, as a staged example of preoedipal "babble" or the voice of the "chora." Two format issues then took over. One I intended, but the other just simply occurred, and will occur in any random formatted site that is run on its own default. The intended one: I placed the homophonic translated babble FIRST, before the sentences I wrote. I did not want the rational language to take precedence. The other—I worked by prose, but translated it line by line as the prose came up on my computer. One set of statements was simply set on top of the other, and in the original format, you could really see homophonic translation and then text, which gave a good idea of the pivotal balancing of analytic statement and broken-wild language. However, other formats will run the babble and the statement together in ways that differed from the original presentation. Brian—cutting thru this with alphabetization had a lot of flair. But it is also true that words without syntax, and playing with repetition necessarily changes the social and cultural bearing of my message, insofar as it was a message, or sort of a thought-provoker. This is the suggestion made by your interlocutor in the Atelos book: that your text has the effect of "losing" the feminism. You didn’t really answer him—and the issue might be unanswerable. You don’t, at any rate, seem to reposition the feminism. HOWEVER, there is a sense of aesthetic detournement, hard generationally for me, but something to face. That is, same story—**I** was supposed to be doing the "detourn-ing"! And you ended up doing it. Or perhaps we can share—we both did. But I think, nonetheless, that the exchange is great, even if your alphabetizatioon necessarily is an organization only of the babble part of my piece. (And the letters are in flight and play on the flash program—right?) So it’s interesting that you did The Dream Life of Letters, while I did The Dream Life of Genders. The relationship of any feminism to the avant-garde has been in play ever since Loy wrote "Feminist Manifesto" in 1914—or probably before. I think we (Brian and I) are re-staging this push and pull. any comment? thanks for listening. warmly, Rachel