Excerpt from Ærotomania by Adeena Karasick

we are “in harmony with our [prospective] annihilation”[i]

& asks you please put on your masque before debording[ii]

And as we rub shoulders

with abundance

between what is seen an unseen; heard between scenes, screens, schemes, screams

cockpits, lifts, radios, earbuds

as both a site of public and private space, the airplane celebrates itself

as an ever-shifting site of escape and refuge

reminding us how escape

is always entry into new dimensions –

This is particularly underscored in the fact that the gematria for the Hebrew word for airplane, “matos” also relates to the word for captive (ASIR)

and to flee (ARAH)

So not only at the nexus

of escape and refuge but

of concealment and exposure

  all servile, surveilled

a     salient      valence

of secrets swerves veils

the airplane functions

as a FOULCAULDIAN Panopticon

with a concerted distribution

of bodies, lights, gazes

a privileged place

where one is “able to judge at a glance

without anything being concealed from [it]

how the entire establishment is functioning”

---

i. For according to Batailles, “extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror”. See both
     Visions of Excess and Story of the Eye.

ii. In French, déborder means excess, exuberance, profusion, overflow; pleine à déborder: full to overflowing

Celebrating the 106^th year anniversary of the first commercial flight, Ærotomania

investigates how the airplane as an erotic theater, a social text of secret motives, is structured like a language. Like the cubism of Picasso and Braque or Gertrude Stein’s “studies in description”, through “a system to pointing” calls attention to the process of recognizing an object and to the role of language in that process. Between leisure, labor, utility and entertainment, Ærotomania exposes how the airplane, like language is neo-formally acculturating and reshaping telos, housing the flow of power and capital within it.




Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. 

TALMUDY BLUES: OR HERE TODAY GONE GEMARA II by Adeena Karasick

For Michael Wex

Said the lexicon to the dialect:

Fu*kin’ idiom –

Sometimes this poem feels like it’s

not the brightest candle in the menorah

that it was behind the door when the brains were being given out

That it operates like a wise person

At night.

And even though it’s 

all pulped up and pressed with polemical discord,

producing itself through performative memory and politics establishing its own force and affect 
of lived and embodied agency enabling a paradox of tam, timbre socio-cultural cues 
of ornamentation

like a messy meisse

finding its margins

it’s wearing its Talmudic lenses

waving its big yicchus

and groaning under the weight of its reference.

And though its schlepping its mental furniture

sometimes it’s doing so not well

knocking a teakettle --

And through a hetero-erotic outpouring

a perfect cleaving of the letters

secretly entwined in

a polyglotal heteronomy  --

Some of these words are already

of blessed memory.

Saying, may all your truths fall out –

But one.

And may it ache fiercely.

This poem, itself a translingual

spliced, polysemic undead dybbuk

all transubstantiated with

accents and inflections 

of radical necessity

and is complicit in its own undoing.

And if you don’t mind me saying so,

these letters look good for their age;

all dressed up to be messed up,

they are dropping their load.

This poem has a burden to bear:

And like no shtuppeh before the chuppeh

says, don’t eat it

before you read it.

*NOTE: Re title, in Yiddish a fukher is a fan

II

Gone is the lustre that lies longing through the shuttered gates

of sunwashed rubble, the gauged paste of narrowing displacement

girded in the burl

of skinside swirl

through the

sprig of ripe

albeit.

What can one see

in the picketed moor of loomed spool?

as lapsed apt porous spur slips

in the purring epoch. ellipse

So, lick the funicular

jiggling particulars sucking the sky

slick with ripped scripts of pulsing d’éspere

For, in the cathexis of unbalance

we are smashing hard

through prurient piers pierced logging shadows

in the flickening reflow / slow-stop swerve

of bursts, bands, bridled signals

*

And could it be a happy assonance

in the contiguous torrent?

These huddled borders screaming

against your skin fortressed by

weeping thresholds’ precipice.

So pass through me in the folded fancy

of cracked madness

You say pirate  

I say pirouette

contoured in shivering silhouette’s

wet arrêt / softened kisses’ brackets

pastures, pulsing

sleepless through

scarred triggers

Pass through me fleeced

in the nonce /

sensors of

fissured swarms

All framboissey-faire and

schikered up in the whet wait what?

Druthers by another other --

    Sometimes the poem grows like an onion.

                                                               And sometimes I wish it a sweet death --

  A truck filled with sugar should run over it.

You can’t live on light alone.




Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.