Daniela Naomi Molnar : coda

What are you working on?

In terms of writing, several in-progress manuscripts:

The Lost is an excavation. It’s the book I didn’t want to write but had to. Via poetry, narrative, and image, it tells the story of my grandmother Rosalie’s life, the intense traumas she experienced, and the way that trauma passes mysteriously and inexorably from generation to generation. Fundamentally, it’s about the way that the invisible/unknowable world that lies beyond the visible/ the known is ultimately more powerful than any known or visible thing.
Or: “The visible is thick but the invisible is thicker.” Brenda Hillman

Pry is an unapologetically furious collection of poems and images that confronts the heteropatriarchy, trying to expunge its hold on and within my own (femme, queer) body.

A third yet-untitled water-obsessed manuscript, including:
“  }  ”     : a long poem about the ocean and its birds and its trash and its power;
“WEB” : a series of visual poems which are about the varied, maddening, urgent, beautiful experience of being bodied on a dying planet;
“we woke up early so we would know how to survive” : a long poem about what I call the Misanthropocene and is better known as the Anthropocene;
“River notes” : a lyric essay which wades deep into my riparian obsessions.

I’m also working on videopoems, teaching myself the form haphazardly as I go.

And a poetic/critical/memoir on feminist chomophilia*.

And a poetic/critical/memoir on poetic space and its social/political/ecological implications.

And I’m working always, moment-by-moment, on staying awake — politically, emotionally, spiritually, physically, creatively — in a culture that constantly nurtures and coaxes us into the opposite — a sort of resigned, comfortable, complacent deadness. This awakeness is the precursor, for me, for any type of creative pursuit.

* Chromophobia, in the words of David Batchelor: “Colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture. … It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that, in the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded. Generations of philosophers, artists, art historians and cultural theorists of one stripe or another have kept this prejudice alive, warm, fed and groomed. As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear: a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable. This loathing of colour, this fear of corruption through colour, needs a name: chromophobia… [C]olour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. … Colour is the corruption of culture.” Chromophilia the opposite of the above. If an embrace of color is ascribed to a demeaned feminine “other,” chromophilia is an embrace of this otherness, a colorful confrontation.