Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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"Sketch", "What it takes to keep the mind going" and "Drag(a) de mama"
No full textThese poems address the manner in which white space lives in harmony with words or in the margins/ in between the lines of the poems. A good portion of meaning is found outside the written words; together with line breaks they teach the reader how to read the poems out loud and inside their minds. In these poems, white space plays several roles: it is a stylistic technique, it asks the reader to actively read the poem, and it visually creates an aesthetic. 
Scars of a Colonial History: White Privilege, Race Relations and Anti-Apartheid Sensibilities in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold”... and the Boys
Get PDFCentral to virtually any indictment of South African literature, its historiography, or otherwise culturally and politically influenced modes of representation persist themes of social, political, and racial inequality. That is not to say that all South African cultural productions revolve around a centrifuge of racially focused social commentary; rather, that when historicizing a work of South African aesthetics such themes inevitably arise because of the nation’s colonial history and the Eurocentrism that have pervaded its modern socio-political foundations. When examining South African aesthetic/cultural representations (in this case, a literary text) it is thus crucial to properly locate the work in as full a historical context as possible. My research therefore aims to link South Africa’s history of colonization with the damaged race relations that ensued in the twentieth century as represented in a prominent work of South African theater: Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … And the Boys. My essay traverses the history of British and Dutch colonization in South Africa and seeks therein to register foundations for the Eurocentric, whitewashed ideologies which would eventually translate into official state policy in 1948 and which precipitated the broken race relations that Fugard’s semi-autobiographical play interrogates. I discuss Fugard’s depiction of white privilege while systematically linking such representations back to their colonial foundations, and ultimately assess Fugard’s play as a condemnation of white supremacy and as a plea for the recalibration of prejudiced racial hierarchies
"The Invisible Woman" and "In the Rehab Waiting Room"
No full textI have been ruminating lately on the notion of “white space,” “writer’s block,” and selfhood following a traumatic brain injury that caused word-finding problems during the acute phase of my recovery. I have coined the term, “neuropoetics” to denote the attempt to describe in poetry and flash fiction the experience of “drawing a blank” or being silenced by a medical condition.
Attached you will find three poems for your consideration: “Memory Villanelle,” “The Invisible Woman,” and “In the Rehab Waiting Room.” I was inspired by Laurie Clements Lambeth’s statement regarding the use of formal structure in her poetry about her Multiple Sclerosis, the blurring of bodily boundaries: “I needed the cage of a villanelle—so restrictive, in that very few lines can truly further the poem along, and yet so obsessive a form—to house the poem” (171). I have tried the same technique to describe the connection between memory and identity. “The Invisible Woman” takes as much from the Marvel universe as H.G. Wells; in it, I use the figure of Sue Storm and her dubious gift of being ignored as representative of the experience of an “invisible disability,” or something neurological rather than physically identifiable. Finally, “In the Rehab Waiting Room” was accidentally inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem, as per the epigraph. It was an early attempt to capture the feeling of being a “blank slate” or having that post-traumatic “blank stare” that avoids eye contact with other
Poetic Space of Intimacy and Movement: Re-Imagining the White Space of the Page in the Erasure Poetry of Carolyn Thompson, Sonja Johanson, and Lisa Huffaker
Get PDFThis paper explores the transformation of poetic blank space in the work of three contemporary poets: Carolyn Thompson, Sonja Johanson, and Lisa Huffaker. Specifically, Thompson's Actions Speak Louder Than Words, and The Eaten Heart, Johnson's Untitled Erasure poem series, and Huffaker's 6 Images are compared and contrasted for their unique approaches to using the space of the page to add to the reading experience. The works discussed by each poet are erasure works that transform the page's white spaces surrounding the poem, using various additive or reductive methods to reimagine this space. If the white spaces surrounding a poem are often read as silences or voids, then using multi-modal techniques, these three poets transform these spaces in ways that signal intimacy and movement instead. This creation of intimacy and movement is explored through the intertextual jesters, an essential aspect of erasure poetry, along with the intersections between poetry and sculpture, bodily interactions with and implications within the texts, and poetry and avant-garde notions of cartography.
 
“It’s all to do with the breath”: (Un)Sound in M. NourbeSe Philip’s “The Ga(s)p” and Zong!
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Diving into the politics of radical hospitality, the acceptance of alterity, and the erasure of black women’s bodies in “The Ga(s)p” (2018), m. NourbeSe Philip demonstrates reciprocal breath as a thread of connection that is central to human existence. Throughout this essay, Philip counters prominent, male-centric theories on receptive bodies through the emphasis on the ubiquity of contingent respiration. Philip contends that this “process of shared breath … and dependency becomes useful as a model of community and connectedness in a more female-centred, embodied symbolic universe” (36). Philip enacts this theory on the page in her book-length poem Zong! (2008).
Using the court report of Gregson v. Gilbert as a source text, Zong! grapples with the November 1781 massacre of 150 Africans aboard the slave ship Zong on its passage from Ghana to England. Zong! is an erasure poem of 173 pages with movements that Philip describes as “the bones” and “the flesh.” The linguistic material of the poem and its arrangement reflect corporeality and respiration; the textual fragments are physically separated on the page—leaving room for breath. The body and breath of Zong! extends beyond the page to performance. In theory and praxis, Philip uses challenging linguistic material and arrangement to inscribe the body on the page; consequently, she causes the reader to interrogate their positionality and their relationship to the body, to language, and to performance.
Keywords:
erasure, erasure poetry, body, performance, breath, respiration, reciprocity, positionalit
A Personal Account of Being the Fat Teacher
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A personal narrative on the experiences of being ‘the fat teacher’. This paper details the physical and emotional challenges faced and the liminal space between fat-shame and fat-acceptance. Acknowledging the body as a location for learning, this paper describes the author’s unique and individual experience when thanked for being fat by a parent of a student. Written in illustrative prose this paper explores the entanglement of identity, oppression and acceptance
