Aufgabe 6 E. Tracy Grinnell

Editor’s Note: given the news

One of the most striking moments in Danielle Collobert’s Notebooks -8 (Litmus Press, ) is in the commentary on her time working for an activist network supporting the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the Algerian War of Independence and her difficulty reconciling political activism with the act of writing: these months speak years – many new things – to be completely current with present events – living the news as it happens – with no time lag – now it’s difficult to become a spectator again – what counted was the immediate – objective justification was impossible – for what I was doing – theoretical questions useless – when I make theory for others – I end up not believing it – immediate action justified immediately in its entirety – uncomfortable position but real – for months no writing – impossible to reconcile the two – ()

I love this passage precisely because it infuriates me. It infuriates me because in a sense it is impossible to reconcile these disparate manifestions of personal conviction, but the position that these things are irreconcilable (and why must they be reconciled?) is itself impossible – impossible to live with. But we do, we write also and anyway (Collobert did as well, for a time: this was written in ) because writing is often the most potent and effective response to an “uncomfortable position.” Collobert is making a distinction between immediate, direct action and the remove inherent in writing, of stepping back or out in order to observe and compose. Poetry may not be activism per se, but it is an act that contributes to the world at the very least, and potentially such acts become “points of resistance in practice”1 that create a momentum cumulatively. kari edwards first submitted work to Aufgabe in  and was an important contributor to the journal for me as both a writer and an editor. Hir writing plunges headlong into these uncomfortable positions – articulating, teasing out, reconfiguring and tearing into the material of our current conditions – whether physical, political or poetic. In the Poethical Wager (University of California Press, ), Joan Retallack writes: “Noticing becomes art when, as contextualizing project, it reconfigures the geometry of attention, drawing one into conversation with what would otherwise remain silent in the figure-ground patterns of history” (). So given the daily news, or one’s position as other in terms of gender and/or in relation to, as edwards puts it, the “passive mangling order,” noticing then drawing into conversation – this is art. edwards’s art/work is comprehensive, including three blogs 7

(“in words,” “transdada,” and “transsubmutation”), which functioned as sites (“nonlocation locations”?)2 for her reporting and commentary on news/current events, poetics, community and literary resources. These blogs are still accessible online and the conversation is most certainly not over. In Bharat jiva, an unpublished manuscript, sie writes: ...trying to fix my attention on what is so rigid to distort the ever changing changeless access apparition of myself drifting in soundless weight, measured by nets, writing fire, erasing the without end “erasing the without end” is gut-wrenching and takes aim in both a positive and negative direction – there is the imperative to end the potentially endless “war on terror,” but there is also our world (without end?) facing irreversible environmental damage. This is an uncomfortable position. What is also present in this passage is the internal struggle inherent in “writing nonlocation location”: the body as microcosm writing itself outward. “No Gender”3 is an uncomfortable – and admirable – position. What edwards consistently tackled in hir work is the difficult task of writing these various positions into being. This kind of embodiment is “uncomfortable but real” and an act of no small consequence. It is in this context – drawing or being drawn into conversation – that we may directly counter any notion that “to write in Portuguese is to be mute to the world,”4 or any language for that matter. The writers in this issue are concerned with (re)configurations, correspondences and translations, and collected here their work demarks a location where muteness is not a possibility. – .   Brooklyn, March 

NOTES

. Paul Foster Johnson, editor’s note in EAOGH issue #, “Queering Language.” [http://chax.org/eoagh/issuethree.html]. . kari edwards, editor’s note, ibid. . In an obituary for edwards, Stacy Szymaszek wrote: “If you asked kari to sign one of her books she often scratched out the title and wrote in ‘No Gender’” (Poetry Project Newsletter #, February – March ) . See Raymond L. Bianchi’s introduction to the feature section of this issue, page .