Adeena Karasick : part one

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. 

What are you working on?

Celebrating the 100^th year anniversary of the first commercial flight, and realizing that almost each of my 10 books of poetry features airplanes in some way, I am working on a borderblurring collage essay, called Ærotomania. Between leisure, labor, utility and entertainment, it exposes 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”. Its taking up all my time energy passion – every day and night I am obsessed; stealing into language and flying through planes of meaning and being; thinking about how Marshall McLuhan pronounced, “the airplane is an extension of the entire body” --

We are the letters travelling through space.
Seated letters speaking ourselves 
against the sky inverted through flying circuits 
coded ciphers secrets’ shaded silence 
of shuttered truance

We are the letters, the interletters between rows of text
awake / in the flux of discomfiture

The spoken sentence 
between destinations
of dissemblance
liaised in the labor of 

hours aisles eros sorrows aeros

parataxiing down the runway

in the heft of day --