BathHouse Events had the honor of hosting Joyelle McSeeney for our Fall 2022 reading series. The event featured compelling reading and discussion of McSweeney’s most recent collection of poetry Toxicon & Arache (2020).
This BathHouse Event ran concurrently with the Creative Writing @ EMU graduate course CRTW 522: Intense Life Writing taught by Dr. Rob Halpern. This class intergotates necessary questions regarding How do we write what we live? How do the generic conventions associated with “autobiography,” “memoir,” “confession,” and “lyric” both condition and impede our efforts to write dynamically through the experience that our writing constructs? What alternative formal methods and experimental models are available for intensifying the relation between life and language in the interest of being ever more faithful to both (life as writing; writing as life). How does the writing work as writing in its effort to register, organize and channel intense experience? How do we arouse and organize feelings of rage or disgust, longing and loss, in our work? What do the structures of identity, race, gender, sexuality, and “ability” have to do with these things? How does writing shape rather than reflect experience? How does it allow us to access what might otherwise have been inaccessible? In this graduate workshop, you can expect to run far and wide with these questions, while developing a range of written works in both poetry and prose.
Below you will find the formal introduction composed and presented by Creative Writing M.A. student Gates Domeier:
In the months preceding the birth of her daughter, Joyelle McSweeney had written a book titled Toxicon; a collection of poetry metastasizing themes of contamination, gestation, and mutation. Subtle threads and consistencies weave through the writing as McSweeney harvests language from a myriad of semantic fields to delineate the aforementioned themes. Her writing includes meditations on technology, ecology, ophthalmology and much more. Her threads are grounded in deep-seated social contexts that amplify the sensory experience; pomegranate, Chrysler PT Cruiser, Jon Benet, Whitney Houston, Nancy Drew, baby soap, Kinetic Sand, worms, the opera. Yet, it was the birth of her daughter Arachne that transposed Toxicon from a series of inquiries and curiosities, into an embodiment of prophecy. As McSweeney tells us in her essay, “How I became a Prophetess,” Arachne lived thirteen days until she died, and thus McSweeney had written a book she deemed “a quiver of poisoned arrows,” now followed by its companion book, Arachne.
My personal experience of reading Toxicon and Arachne trapped me in an aperture of the necropastoral; a term coined by McSweeney to identify the political-aesthetic zone of the Anthropocene where, to quote McSweeney, “mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.” In other words, McSweeney suggests that there is no wall between the bugs, viruses, and mold of nature and culture, or Art there is, rather a membrane. Most of the poems within the collection serve as that very veil inviting readers to not only bear witness to the membrane, but to press your palms through it.
Toxicon and Arachne is visceral somatic writing; a figurative embalming of verse. To quote McSweeney herself, as she describes Sylvia Plath, the writing is a “punch in the gut that starts the heart.” McSweeney braids physical and spiritual diction, carrying language into the texture of grief and agony. She enacts a lyrical knowledge and affective agency of the sensory world by encrypting experience through and by language. Her lines are guided by seismic sonic quality as if the language is an incantation manifesting through etymology. The poem OOCYTE is sonorous with the dancing of alternating assonance and consonance; “I beat retreat, made a nest of spun spittle within my nest of scum”. The language throughout the collection is swollen with paratactic juxtaposition of rivaling emotional registers. The poem WEIGHT LOSS is seized by this exalted use of bathos; “I’ve gone off my Zoloft because I want to lose five pounds. I want to either look pregnant or like I never had a kid in my life.” Overall, McSweeney is not replicating the suffering, rather she is cultivating it. As if it were a virus, Toxicon and Arachne seeds itself in cognitive tissue and inflames our unconscious perceptions. Moreover, the writing becomes the scene of the experience, rather than being about the experience. The cognitive and affective dimensions are a phenomenological labyrinthine, providing a perception of the world in a way we would not be able to perceive otherwise.
Joyelle McSweeney is a 2022 Guggeheim Fellow and author of nine genre-crossing books spanning poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. In 2022 McSweeney was recognized with the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, honoring exceptional content in any genre. Toxicon and Arachne was awarded the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America. McSweeney is a co-founder of the international press Action Books and teaches as a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.