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Abstract:
This chapter considers how and why deixis, the semantic activity of pointing or positioning, can be complicated in the textual and contextual compass of collaborative poetic practice. The question of cultural positioning is central to Frances Presley's 'Somerset letters' (1999) and Zoe Skoulding's From Here (2008), coproduced with New York artist Simonetta Moro. The reflexive spatialities of each work contest culturally freighted notions about "place" and literary history which intersect in the late twentieth-century female poet. Freed, for generic reasons, of the temporal sequentiality of speech, the poetic construct is more than capable of escaping the constraining "topography of the ideal textual space" (Nöth 1996: 603). Both women gender the aesthetic possibilities of this freedom in the more-or-less site-specific epistolary poem, problematizing the ways in which their texts might be said to "take place" to resist the over-determining of their own cultural-political position. What Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls the "sociality" of the deictic proves crucial to their common project.
Key names and concepts: Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Frances Presley ('Somerset letters'), Elaine Randell, Zoë Skoulding and Simonetta Moro (From Here); collaborative writing, contemporary poetry, cultural politics, epistolary poetry, female aesthetics, gender politics, literary deixis, pathways, poetic deixis, production of space, Situationism, textual space, textual topography, transgression, walking and poetry, women's poetry.
This chapter explores deixis, the semantic activity of pointing or positioning, in the textual and contextual compass of collaborative poetic practice. Susan Stanford Friedman suggests the usefulness of deixis in constructing selfhood when she figures identity as "a positionality, a location, a standpoint, [...] an intersection". Significantly, Friedman herself notices, each of her cognate terms depends upon "a point of reference; as that point moves [...], so do the contours of identity" (1998: 19, 22). However, as the poet Géraldine Monk confides,
[Creative artists] try every subterfuge we can muster to undermine or overstep our given social, temporal, geographic and individual entrenchments by experimenting with form and content [...] But no matter what subterfuge we employ if we work alone we always have the last word. Such an effective self-policing of the mind can only be truly disrupted by the invasive undermining or enhancement of an other. This other is "collaboration". (Monk 2007: 178-79)
This account examines the...