This game plays with hybridity at the level of genre, and acknowledges genre as just that: a question, a plaything, a protean game, an unfinished conversation.
Rules: Click on the deck to draw a card at random. Ideally, each section will invite conversation; this is not solitaire. Take turns drawing cards by clicking on the deck again and reading the text aloud. For any non-face cards, invent your own topic concerning hybridity; ask another player to compose a short, impromptu talk using your topic. Or, if playing alone, post your thoughts on the Poets.org Facebook page to join in on the conversation.
Naming Calling (Jack of Clubs)
The scene: French soccer star Zinedine Zidane head butts Italian defender Marco Materazzi after he verbally provokes Zidane during the FIFA World Cup final in 2006. Claudia Rankine's "Situation One" explores how linguistic agency emerges from this scene of enabling vulnerability. In her video-poem, nine seconds become an unsettling five minutes of examined life, of encounter with the Other, of polity constituting itself through exclusion and effacement.
In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler claims that as an "instrument of a violent rhetoricity, the body of the speaker exceeds the words that are spoken, exposing the addressed body as no longer in its own control." Rankine directs our attention to its pre-narration in a kind of linguistic flashback. In the news and in Rankine's piece, Materazzi's trash talk about Zidane's mother, sister, and his Algerian heritage is unheard; the silence (that is, the environmental racism that's always already in the air) creates a vacuum that the cultural moment rushes to fill.
Butler suggests that "to be inured by speech is to suffer a loss of context, that is not to know where you are." The viewer also feels this disorientation viscerally. To experience this piece is to inhabit its temporality: to hear and not to read words, to read and not to view images. Indexical and iconic signs of the screen collide with symbolic and conventional signs of literature. One effect of altering the speed of the original film is to exaggerate the silence of the exchange between the two players and induce an intimacy between the viewer and the subject.
The next auditory layer is also stripped back to reveal a counter-narrative. Rankine replaces the original sports commentary—itself usually harboring racist assumptions—with a voice-over that might be thought of as the voice of history itself. Rankine's steady, edgy voice channels a collage of male writers and protagonists who offer the image an inner life: Frederick Douglas, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Shakespeare's Othello, and others. The image is linguistically flayed in a kind of reverse-engineered adaptation that signals interiority. In this way, Rankine confronts the relation between subjective bodily experience, linguistic vulnerability, and public memory.
If in her last book, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, everything becomes citation, "Situation One" pushes further into a neverland of citation-as-invention and citation-as-document: written and spoken quotes marble, past and present collapse, fictional and nonfictional sources weave together an acoustic image. The plurality of voices boils down into a monologue, a historical dialogue issued through one voice. This documentary video-poem takes pleasure in violating and exceeding expectations – it debunks visual interpretation for an auditory one and uses the visual as rhythm and texture to set a linguistic performance of identity.
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Humanimal (Ace of Spades)
Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal sets new stakes for the hybridized text by permeating subject, form, and approach with an empathy that illuminates drastic human configurations and conversions. In the foreground of the text is the story of two human girls found living with wolves—as wolves—in the Bengal region of India in 1920: humanimals.
Though based on true stories, Kapil's book functions more like myth, with its orchestration of infinitely corruptible parts. Kapil reconstitutes given stories by subjecting their facts to the same kind of intense conversions that her characters undergo: a wolf girl, the author's father, and Kapil herself in three narratives magnetized by the force of relation.
Fiction, memoir, documentary, manifesto on aesthetics, Humanimal is interested in synthesis only so far as it offers a way to begin to imagine the narrator in relation to the subjects, in all their hybrid identities.
In Kapil's wandering course along fault lines of species, gender, class, and cultural identity, her characters co-shape one another in layers of reciprocating complexity.
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Nonpoetry (Queen of Diamonds)
When is the hybrid text refusing genre, and when is it improvising on or collecting genres? How many texts claim to "defy classification"? How many actually resist the conventions that promise intelligibility and possession? Why do most genre reinventions involve poetry? What might be opened up by simultaneously evoking and negating poetry, much as nonfiction offers only a denial ("I prefer not to be fiction," it says)?
Perhaps this has more to do with our love/hate relationship with poetry; after all, literary nonfiction doesn't in practice oppose fiction as much as it sets itself against unreality, opposed to the reality of imagination and interior life. Because writerly allowances of genre are co-extensive with readerly expectations, the possible tension between tag and thing itself explodes with potential.
Caroline Bergvall and Cathy Park Hong both use nonfictional devices in very different ways to shift the frame in which we understand their work. In Dance Dance Revolution, a deep historical consciousness informs the characters: Guide's urban, poly-tongued speeches and Historian's more transparent memoir excerpts and notes. An opening "Chronology of the Desert Guide" situates us in reference to "the real" and creates a nonpoetry context for the fragments of memoir, tour, speech, footnote, and almanac; yet rebelling and refuting this signal is the invented, collectivized dialect most of the book employs.
Like Hong, Bergvall uses an improvisational mash up of languages, dialects, and discourses, including disfluency. Bergvall, who regularly hybridizes performance and textual genres as well as languages, uses each situation of performance or publication to re-conceptualize her work and infuse it with process-driven documentation. For instance, "About Face," which exists as both a book and a CD, cannibalizes the fact of the writer's physical limitations (extreme pain following a tooth extraction) and the circulated audio of German and English conversations about the piece at its premiere performance in Berlin. "About Face" draws on art historical, philosophical, and performative rhetorics to address uses of the face in visual art yet enacts defacing, the negation of linguistic structures, as a necessary component of articulation and figuration.
Writers in the hybrid zone, like writers outside it, search for forms that confound the dangers of ideology and entrenched thought. That is, who cares what it is or isn't as long as it changes your life?
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Prose Poem (Jack of Hearts)
The prose poem is an example of hybrid vigor, a form that has long departed from its revolutionary French roots to be mainstreamed as a kind of catchall term in American letters. By filtering lyric through narrative structures of aesthetic thought, these works may provoke new ways of thinking about their subjects.
This form keeps questions alive. Is there such a thing as transcultural and transhistoric poetic language? What is gained by casting story and song as equal, perhaps competing, priorities?
Language isn't binary, as we were taught. Culturally, we caught a computer disease, along with its insulting viruses, every bit as weird as hoof and mouth.
As T. S. Eliot pointed out in 1921, it "seems to imply a sharp distinction between 'prose' and 'poetry,' which I do not admit, and if it does not imply this distinction, the term is meaningless and odious, as there can be no combination of what is not distinguished."
The prose poem is an excellent example of a genre that has been overly determined and codified and paradoxically so over used as to become meaningless, nervous, and confused.
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Prius (Queen of Hearts)
Your vehicle is a hybrid, feeding from contrastive fuel sources: two electric motor generators and a small gasoline engine all connected by transmission gears. The "hybrid control computer" determines what combination of motors the car needs and which will be most efficient. This car resembles every other car on the road physically and practically; it does not threaten the oil business or the car industry.
As a kind of talisman of literary hybridity, it moves us in an acceptable direction without wrecking expansionist ideologies. By contrast, the electric car, whose existence preceded the hybrid car's, was crushed for dubious economic and political reasons.
What other kinds of engines or mobility are available? Are we going to the revolution or to the designated scenic area? Writing is meant to move; it moves us with meandering digressions, interruptions, misdirections, multiple routes, and side trips.
Just try to follow Kazim Ali's Bright Felon as it travels through memoir by way of confessional lyric, political narrative, religious meditation, bildungsroman, travelogue, and poetics; you will get lost in the pleasure of it. The pressures that engender the hybrid are cultural and political anxieties; this holds true for the car and the writing.
A hybrid is a conduit metaphor, but a vehicle wants to take us somewhere else.
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What Kind of Poetry Do You Write? (Queen of Spades)
Possible answers from a hybrid mouth: I mix at least two different linguistic consciousnesses within a single utterance, creating a dialogic imaginative space that might rewire the very way we feel and think. I slide between frames of reference to create narrative disjuncture with sensual urgency as I foreground the music of language and frustrate normative reading practices. I attempt an expanded simultaneity of time and extension to more fully address and enact a contemporary mode of existence. I hope readers will change at a biological level and that their lives and language will dilate and move toward greater human inclusivity and vulnerability. You might say these things if you want to find someone else to talk to.
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Hybrid Zone (Ace of Diamonds)
Scientifically speaking, a hybrid zone represents a tension zone between conflicting effects of dispersing parental forms. Looking at genre via a biological analogy and evolutionary theories of literature, Sheldon Sacks says that genre exists as literary fact just as a mammal exists as a fact of the physical world. Though whales suckle their young and grow hair, they have at least as many traits in common with sailfish as they do with humans.
American literature is the perfect hybrid zone, except that it relies on choices meant to tame. Check one, say the applications for grants, MFA programs, and the like: fiction or poetry (or nonfiction). Yet these genres interchange and recombine to produce entire taxonomies of literary discourse. Unexpected mintings of subgenres flourish in a thriving literary biosphere.
Pure? What Does It Mean? (Ace of Hearts)
Breeding, not marriage, makes a hybrid—not "man and woman are one" (the correspondences between gender and genre being well documented) but the passion of a turned-on moment, the results of which don't smooth over differences, ignore renegade behaviors, or tuck in the excesses. According to Tzvetan Todorov, there is no "pure" genre; even new genres exist in reference to one or several pre-existing ones or through the transformations of older genres "by inversion, by displacement, by combination." Likewise, Derrida's "law of genre" is a "principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy" that denies the self-contained integrity of any practice of genre. No genre is "a pure, acetylene / Virgin" (Sylvia Plath as if in answer to Mina Loy's "Nobody shouts / Virgins for sale"), and no genre is truly "new" because no genre is entirely disruptive of power systems and dominant histories. However, subgenres often take on shiny mantles of newness the way capitalism arrogates metaphysical enchantment to its own mechanisms.
Mongrel Aesthetics (Ace of Clubs)
Some recent uses of the word hybrid show it's a mixed bag by nature. From the forestry industry comes a hybrid poplar; from the biological, a hybrid bear; from politics, a comment that Giuliani's supporters were hybrid. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported the following:
When Jordan Peimer booked an Argentine band that fuses Jewish Klezmer music with tango, he thought he had the perfect act to headline his "Fiesta Hanukkah" concert.
"It is hard to imagine any band more fitting than Orquesta Kef," says Mr. Peimer, the program's director at the Skirball Cultural Center here. The event was designed to attract a Jewish audience and the city's burgeoning Hispanic community.
That was before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services weighed in with some cultural commentary of its own. The band couldn't travel to the U.S., the agency ruled, because it didn't satisfy a "culturally unique" requirement for a performer visa called P-3.
"The evidence repeatedly suggests the group performs a hybrid or fusion style of music. . .[which] cannot be considered culturally unique to one particular country, nation, society, class, ethnicity, religion, tribe or other group of persons," read the denial. It was signed by caseworker CSC4672/WS24533.
The cultural essentialism here—that an artist must be Jewish or Argentinean, Mexican or indie, not all—flies in the face of much American mythology and visionary art, which often combines differing traditions or disciplines. Consider the genres and subgenres of music that have mixed for significant, exciting effect in your lifetime alone; consider the glee the industry has in naming them. The government's "culturally unique" expectation comes from the nineteenth century, when "authenticity" became contingent on perceived purity (religious, ethnic, national, socioeconomic). Perhaps using archaic ideology to determine artistic merit and political processes is the only kind of hybridity the visa office supports.
Son of 'Outragious Conduct' (Jack of Spades)
This is the meaning of hybrides, the ancient Greek word from which hybrid derives. It shares its root with hubris. By refusing to follow generic rules, writing may conduct outrageous currents and unheard-of behaviors. In this way, hybrid texts embody deeper freedom and responsibility than non-hybrids do. Claudia Rankine's "Situation One" uses slo-mo film footage of Zinedine Zidane head butting Marco Materazzi, after verbal taunts and insults from him in the 2006 FIFA World Cup final. If this is "outrageous conduct," its son is justice, a concept yet to come. Rankine's video-poem is a portrait that intensifies physicality—the spectacle of the black male body in motion—to such an extreme that the representation slides paradoxically into abstraction. Super slowed down and silenced, the television footage becomes visual rhythm, half human and half machine; technology protracts the human event, creating a pulse of jerk and spasm. This literalizing of one of the techniques of defamiliarization destabilizes visual logic. Second by second, we see each pixel bloated with color—the field, the uniforms, the skin, all marching toward the historically inevitable. Each lurch of footage harmonizes with the voice-over, yet the abruptness or surprise of the actual head butting is stolen from our visual field and given to our auditory awareness. We see in the blindness of crisis time the rupture; we see only the pattern, the weighty bounds of each step, the historic rhythm that has carried us here, to what Time magazine called the symbol of Europe's "grappling with multiculturalism."
'Anthropological Machine' (King of Diamonds)
What Giorgio Agamben calls the thinking that creates an absolute divide between animal and human. In our efforts to define ourselves, we have deformed ourselves. This chilling capacity for adaptability has led our species, Agamben claims, to "the total management of biological life," a global economy, and "humanitarian ideology"—three concentric faces looking toward post-historical humanity. Kapil's Humanimal unites its hybrid faces against this troubled physiology. The book is not as much concerned with transmission of ideas as it is with the creation of an atmosphere in which our automatic naturalization of sentience into sapience slows down or shuts off. Kapil does so by refusing to betray—that is, control—the senses: "We are here to cull an atmosphere; to scrape color and sound and light into jars."
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Taxonomic Enterprise (King of Clubs)
Genres are always defining and redefining themselves, debunking and resuscitating themselves: Aristotle's classifications of lyric, epic, drama; Northrop Frye's comedy, romance, tragedy, satire; Foucault's pejorative "history of ideas." Since the mid-nineteenth century, the rise of genre specification, discrimination, and hierarchization has gone hand in hand with its material result—the economy of discourse, the anthology, the bookstore, the department or school, etc. Genre is a social contract between the reader and the writer; expectations inform both actions. As such, it is a collective fiction. Genres create communities, but they also overly commit their authors. Genre invokes a conflict between a writer's desire for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world, along with a corresponding open response to it. Complicating the battalion of polar predicates that drive "perception," hybrid literature potentially creates an experience more real than realism, performing regions of emotional experience and intensities of expression that lie beyond the grasp of any known genre.
Board Books (Jack of Diamonds)
It's impossible for a new parent not to notice how many board books have a mirror on one of the pages, usually toward the end, asking: who's in the mirror? These starter books ask a baby or toddler to embed herself in the narrative, asking her to see herself as literally part of the book. This early training makes clear what we all always do when we read and when we write: look for ourselves. What we think of ourselves—fiction writers, poets, essayists—as well as how we write is often determined by marketing. But surely, you say, our cultural institutions (publishing houses, libraries, academies, bookstores) have nothing to do with my practice as a writer, and their rules don't conflict with the conception of the individual work of art as the product of a unique intuition. You say. You say. As writers, we must consider the boon of breaking the mirror. As readers, we must put down the bored books.
Transformation Myths (King of Hearts)
A hybrid just might be a monster, a myth, and a heretofore unknown vitality. Monsters are not created from nothing; they pose newness as a way of recombining previously existing parts. Semblance is a primal characteristic of hybrids. As in the alien Avatar landscape, everything exists analogically. Formal mutation or generic contamination marks certain texts as monstrously illegible. Yet engagement with these texts complicates our ideas of intelligibility and authenticity as it lets language be fully reciprocal with identity. Italo Calvino, for instance, saw the creation of narrative as "a combinatorial game which plays on the possibilities intrinsic to its own material." This willingness to allow narrative's newly released conventions to float, mingle, and re-cohere opposes any totalizing fiction of life and instead offers possibilities, stabs that foreground process and discovery. These monsters show us ways of growing a more capacious, more acute imagination, which might manifest itself politically, somatically, existentially.
Euglena (Queen of Clubs)
Genre fusion is often thought to reveal a thought-provoking third kind. The hybrid text relies on evolving strategies of reading—a mind willing to play with knowledge, cultivate multiple literacies, puzzle and sweat out meaning as well as risk incomprehension. Though scientists have named 1.7 million species, at least 3 million others are still out there, unidentified. In a similar way, we have not yet discovered many invigorating literary adventures and intoxicating experiences in language. To invent and to discover share the same root etymologically. The euglena, for instance, sounds invented. It has chloroplasts and can capture the energy from sunlight like a plant, and it has flagella that move it through water and allow it to capture food as an animal does. "In the beginning," Rikki Ducornet said in her keynote address at the 2009 &Now Conference, "an animal is a kind of plant." The reverse is no doubt also true.
American Express and the Melting Pot (King of Spades)
Some say Ralph Waldo Emerson showed how writing could reconcile competing traditions of language use—poetry and essays—into what is now called "the lyric essay." Emerson's most dazzling poems are his essays, infused with fluid, process-driven, energetic, lucid, unsettling reveries. There he developed his wonder-filled, veering habit of saying and unsaying arguments, of delighting in paradox and contradiction as well as a tendency to aphorize. Thus, he abandoned the sentence's traditional quest for wholeness and its legendary "complete thought" and conflated the subjectivity of lyricism with the objectivity of the public essay. It's a seductive mythology, but like our nation's origin myth, it relies primarily on dialectic irritants, dua/eling discourses, and modes that come to coexist to mutual benefit. It's based on the two-party system and its illusion of opposition, much as the prose poem is. And like the prose poem, the lyric essay is a restless genre that wants out of genre itself yet finds itself necessarily inscribed there nonetheless. Writers particularly exploit its awakening allowances and mine the possibilities for new combinations of form and method it emblematizes. As an object in the marketplace, though, will the lyric essay too become anxious about losing its novelty status, its outsider stance and permissions, and manage to survive only by exhaustive empire building and laughter?
Wild Card (Three of Clubs)
Invent your own topic; go to the Poets.org Facebook page to add your thoughts to the conversation.
Wild Card (Six of Diamonds)
Invent your own topic; go to the Poets.org Facebook page to add your thoughts to the conversation.
Wild Card (Two of Hearts)
Invent your own topic; go to the Poets.org Facebook page to add your thoughts to the conversation.
More on hybridity: a literary hybrid is a troubling concept in that it often exemplifies the very categories it gestures toward dismantling or assimilating; it reifies genres, traditions, and disciplines, requiring strict expectations and assumptions about literariness. Hybridity fortifies dualistic thinking of all kinds: aesthetic (academic vs. outlaw, conceptualism vs. flarf, official vs. innovative, quietude vs. post avant-garde), disciplinary (writer vs. artist, documentary vs. creativity, technology vs. inspiration), cultural (ethnic vs. white, double-consciousness vs. dominant, polyglot vs. monolinguistic). It invites a binary, oppositional vision of literary history (the game of war). These easy categories, however, won't be contained and often find ways of increasing infectiousness through cross-infection.
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