POLITIES &/or SONNETS
9 Enigmatic Quatrains / 3 Stealth Couplets
1.
the feminine subject &/or
dispossession &/or
the posthuman &/or
are(n’t) we all postracial yet? &/or
the lure of technocracy &/or
freedom to fail &/or
an imaginary racism &/or
the fanaticism of the apocalypse &/or
a biography of ordinary man &/or
the feminine subject &/or
general theory of victims &/or
intellectuals and power &/or
the insurrection of the victim &/or
classification struggles
2.
clint eastwood’s america &/or
spike lee’s america &/or
alfred hitchcock’s america &/or
steven spielberg’s america &/or
martin scorsese’s america &/or
foucault now &/or
derrida now &/or
rancière now &/or
nancy now &/or
xenofeminism &/or
narcocapitalism &/or
why philosophize? &/or
playstation dream world &/or
persons and things
3.
human dignity &/or
dream notes &/or
abstracts and brief chronicles of the time &/or
the feminine subject &/or
old women in bloom &/or
the art of freedom &/or
eve escapes &/or
zero’s neighbor &/or
philosophical introductions &/or
five approaches to communicative reason &/or
the triumph of religion &/or
networks of outrage and hope &/or
search engine society &/or
a history of silence
Copyright © 2021 by Joan Retallack. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 30, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The ‘&/or’ sonnets are derived from the 2018, Polity Books catalogue of Literary and Cultural Studies: New and Recent Titles. // There are found poems and there are serendipitous collaborations. The ‘&/or’ sonnets are a bit of both. When the Polity Catalogue turned up in my mailbox, I was struck by syntactic similarities from one title to another. There was something oddly, delightfully, playful about all those declarative phrases promising so much, so baldly competing with one another. I decided to compose an experiment, that turned out to be the 14 line spates of repartee among selected titles. // The sonnet form was probably an attempt at enough formal decorum to retain the force of ‘polite’ in ‘polities,’ despite the annoyingly persistent ‘&/or’ interventions.”
—Joan Retallack
Joan Retallack
Joan Retallack is a poet and essayist. The author of BOSCH’D: Fables, Moral Tales & other Awkward Constructions (Litmus Press, 2020), she is the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor Emerita of Humanities at Bard College.