APPRECIATIONS

Profile: Caroline Bergvall

Publisher and Co-Founder of Kore Press

Poet-presenter at the Conceptual Poetry Symposium

University of Arizona Poetry Center, May 29-31, 2008

Caroline Bergvall:

poet and conceptual writer, based in London since 1989. b. 1962 in Hamburg, Germany to a Norwegian father and French mother; grew up in Geneva, Oslo, New York, Paris, and Strasbourg. She is trilingual, with English, so as not to be caught up in nationalisms of passports.

education:

Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris; M.Phil from the University of Warwick, Britain; Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts, Britain.

jobs:

Director of Performance Writing, Dartington College of Arts, emphasizing cross-media approaches to writing (1995-2000); Co-Chair of the MFA Writing Faculty, Bard College (2004-2007); recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Arts Fellowship in Britain (2007-2010).

publications:

Her latest collection of texts and performance pieces in book form is FIG (Salt, 2005); earlier books include Goan Atom (Krupskaya, 2001); Jets-Poupée (RemPress, 1999); ECLAT: sites 1-10 (Sound & Language, 1996—and in 2004, ububooks, available in PDF for download @ www.ubu.com/ubu/bergvall_eclat.html); and Strange Passage: A Choral Poem (Equipage, 1993). Her work appears in the anthologies Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & in the UK, ed. Maggie O’Sullivan (London: Reality Studios, 1996), Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (London: Picador,1996), and the new Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British& Irish Poetry, ed. Keith Tuma (New York: Oxford, 2001).

discography + netography:

Bergvall has developed audioworks, visual textworks, net-based pieces and live readings. "FUSES (after Carolee Schneeman)" has been published in Brooklyn Rail, June 2005. Ambient Fish, an animated text for the web is available, along with many of her other online performance and installation pieces, on the Electronic Poetry Center Buffalo website (though some links are currently down).

collaborations + sited performances:

In Europe and in North America: About Face (Berlin 2000 & Bard College NY 2001); Felt (tEXt 2002); the sound-text installation Say: “Parsley” (Liverpool Biennial, 2004); Lidl Suga (Bury Text Festival, 2004); Voice-Fold-Feed-Wash-Pass (for COMA festival, 2008). She recently presented work at MOMA (NY, 2007) as part of their Modern Poets series.

artistic practices:

Bergvall began to perform her text-based work in the late 80s on radio, video and at conferences and international festivals and began to publish. She often plays with perception through language games, sited texts, ephemeral gestures, sexual ecstasies and multilingual speech. In a 2005 interview with Charles Bernstein and University of Pennsylvania students in Philadelphia, she talks about the important connection between exploring sexuality and physical and linguistic marking in her writing. She says

“. . .thinking of the body as always having an accent, as being marked with a social accent rather than a seamless national literature, is a part of being in language and writing.”

on being a polyglot:

"What it has done is create a critical and an artistic interest in the crossing points between languages. The way languages and cultures meet, can or cannot meet. So I have become more and more interested in writing or literary work which is written in more than one language. My own work, more and more, is trying to use those. And that's not necessarily to create mongrel or hybrid languages, but is actually to show up the impact that languages have against, or into, each other. That also indirectly, I think, can explain my interest in installation art, in kinds of cross-art forms, an interest in mis-spellings, in idiosyncrasies of all kinds, of mis-translations.”

poetic concerns:

Bergvall says her interests as a poet are met by other art forms and artists through collaboration. Recognizing the importance of artistic process and of using material critically in relation to different ideas and in relation to other art forms, Bergvall considers poetry to be led not only by linguistic or verbal concerns but also by concerns of context and situation. She says, “poetry for me is the possibility of creating a verbal event in direct conflict or contact with all sorts of environments that it functions through and is affected by.”

"I really am committed to the idea of artistic practice as something that needs to sit and address and look at social structures such as where does art sit today. That it is part of a wider social frame, that it doesn't sit outside it. I am interested in art questioning the frames, like avant-garde might do, but also in being active socially within it. So actually the project of bilingualism is something that could try and bring out voices, through educational process or whatever, that might not otherwise get heard. I am quite keen on this idea that art finds again some kind of social impact, rather than the kind of alienation that has been associated with the avant-garde.”

influences:

Beckett’s use of silence, the violence of language and the violence of silence on the impossibility of settling identity. The conceptual French lesbian writers, Wittig and Brossard. Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper who deal with language conceptually to bring aspects of the body and of “sexualized, unstraightened” bodies into language.

"I'm interested in the whole notion of what do you do with the flesh in language. . . my motivation has been very much to do with gender and very much to do with sexuality. . . how would you use language to construct or de-structure assumptions about gender, about sexuality, about female gender. Where do you situate the use of language within that so that you don't fall into a kind of identity-based writing, or identity-based art, but so that the whole question of identity becomes questioned. You can only question identity through questioning yourself.”

becoming a writer:

"When you move from your first language into another language, as a writer, the person who manipulates language, verbal material, you become part of the activity or the commitment to writing. It became the fact that I am not English but I am writing in English. This throws up a number of questions. How do I read English culture? How do I situate myself in it? Am I a foreigner to it? All that becomes the project of writing and that's really linked to my being a writer. The fact that the more I write and the more I'm involved as a practitioner and thinking about it the more complicated and complex it gets and therefore the more open I get to various situations in which I could involve my being a writer. So that it becomes less and less clear that to be a writer for me is to generate books. It becomes an aspect of it. I become more and more interested in how are we thinking about setting up a context for writers involved in the new Tate Gallery, for instance. Or writing involved with plurilingualism and things like that. It is making my whole commitment, my civic commitment as an artist more and more clear in the sense that it's not just about text, writing it. It is about how that activity does in fact make you function or malfunction socially.”

what others say:

“Bergvall’s hybrid work . . . derives from post-punk music and sound poetry as well as from literary movements like Oulipo. Her sonic, verbal, and rhetorical devices are extremely sophisticated, encompassing Duchampian pun, phonemic bilingual (French-English) transfer, paragram, ideogram, allusion, and found text. In their complex assemblages, these function to explore such areas as our conceptual approaches to female (and feminine) representation as well as the power structures within which these sexualities must function. The doll, the bride, the daughter, the mesh: these participate in any number of games at once sexual and verbal.”

—Marjorie Perloff, “The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall”, Jacket 23

“Gong...is comprised of deliciously slippery phrases: "the girl laughing ejaculates in my hand;" "Cixous climbs the ladder of her name." The phrases swirl, grounding us here and there, touching screen, sound, books, commenting on everything from Arundhati Roy to her (the author's) niece's feet.”

—Lemon Hound blogger review, 2005 (lemonhound.blogspot.com/2005/11/structural-articulations-caroline.html)

On Fig

“One of the most interesting features to me is how it lets the reader in on an experimental poet’s writing and thinking processes. The way each section begins by providing a context to the poems therein makes Fig act as much like a catalog or a book of criticism as a collection of poems. Bergvall has shirked genre boundaries in order to let this book encompass her range of interests. When I read the works, I feel like they perform themselves on the page, and she doesn’t hide any of the stage directions. Language isn’t a tool for Bergvall, but a material, and this is how the corporeal “subject matter” of her poetry becomes tool—the body (the speaker’s, the reader’s, the writers of the source texts she uses for a lot of the works) is employed the way voice is employed in singing, the hands in sign language, etc. The poems become “of the body” rather than about it. Sometimes she makes language mimic the motor skills required in speech—“choreography of the physiological mouth into language”. . . [as if] the phonemes of language are the important material while whole words and even meaning become secondary.” —Bonnie Jean Michalski, poet

On 8 Figs (an Equipage chapbook)

“Caroline Bergvall's & raided the type drawers (or, in these days, the computer font files) to come up with 16 different versions of the ampersand (counting the front cover) plus one figure 8, the title of the book being 8 figs. Each individual poem then begins as a commentary on the figure of the particular ampersand, with two different ampersands preceding each of the poems in the book other than the first, which is preceded by the cover ampersand, the title page figure 8, and a single ampersand page. The ampersands are on pages all to themselves, large figures in black centered in a field of white. The poems take up an entire page each, from the very top to the very bottom, with little room for top/bottom margins. In a sense the book has no outside, as I take the first ampersand to be part of what we are intended to read, and the last poem is literally on the outside back cover of the book. This all sounds rather mechanistic, and the type font chosen for the poems looks rather mechanistic to me at first, although a bit more playful the more I look at it. The poems, though, are about shape, color, emotions, love, intimacy, and the world. And even the figs (which we think on the title page to be figures) turn out to be more, to be figs, as a person may be a fig.

So that finally the figures of language are the figures of thought are the figures of motion in the world are love and the conditions of love and are poetry. Because of the relationsip of the shape of 8 to the shape of the ampersand, there had to be just eight sections or poems in this book. I would gladly have read many more.”

—Charles Alexander, on the chaxblog

“She begins with the ampersand torqued title page into the given reclining body of a pun of Ingres or Rodin the birth of the Greek vase by way of Duchamp’s twisted eye. An 8, really, slipped, snipped, or broken. & the ampersand holds within it the question mark, too, so that it asks us: am I a keyhole, an infinity, a perfect knot, even?”

— Jake Kennedy, Verse Mag, 2004

Sources: Unless otherwise noted, long quotes from Bergvall are excerpts from a 1999 interview with John Stammers called “Speaking in Tongues” from Magma, Poetry On-Line.

You can see Caroline Bergvall present her work in person

at the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Conceptual Poetry Symposium, May 29-31. See website for full listing of symposium events and registration information..

FRIDAY, MAY 30

10:15 a.m. – Bergvall's session

2:15 p.m. - Panel Discussion with featured poets moderated by Tenney Nathanson

8 p.m. - Reading