Pornstars Reading Poems (and other news)

7 min read

Deviation Actions

b1gfan's avatar
By
Published:
2.4K Views
Okay I have to share this; it's just too good a bit to keep all to myself.  

I was online yesterday, reading a little of this and that, and I ran across this post over at HTMLGIANT called Laurel Nakadate’s Untitled : Pornstars Reading Poems, and it made me pause and think, "Hm, there's something you don't hear about every day." It starts off like this:

Poetry readings. Whether you love them or hate them, they can sometimes be an uncomfortable or bland affair. Some contemporary authors are committed to reinventing the format of “the reading”—using vulnerability, performance, and other attention-grabbing techniques to pump a little life into these often humdrum happenings. But video artist Laurel Nakadate takes the “the reading” to a whole new level.

In the video Untitled, Laurel has porn actresses read poems by Dora Malech. The interplay between Dora’s poems and the premise of the video is brilliant. The poems grapple with the tension between corporeality and disembodied intellect—being pure body or pure voice, being of the flesh or of the mind, but they settle on neither. Laurel’s video project and Dora’s text collapses those distinctions, using the body itself to speak. “If you give me a dollar I’ll take my top off / and let you see my heart,” reads actress Robbye Bentley. The body is not that which is mute, but that which sings. Another poem speaks to the ecstasy of being an embodied human with the line, “Believe me / when I tell you I’m kept / awake by the light / from my body, splayed star.”

The porn actresses in the video were asked to come to the “audition” (the audition being the final video itself) wearing their usually business attire: lacy lingerie, bright color bras. One woman—Robbye Bentley—even delivers her poems topless, covering her breasts with the poem “script” about a woman taking her top off for money. In recontextualizing the poetry reading event by having porn actresses read poems in settings like bathrooms and bedrooms, the video also dashes another expectation: that the porn actress is somehow less intellectual than the poet. The pairing of poetry and porn initially seemed unnatural to me. On the phone I asked Laurel, “Did the actresses think it was weird to be asked to read poems? How did they react?” She said no, that they loved it, that they were excited to be a part of the project.


Well, as I read and watched, I found myself thinking that this is a pretty nifty piece of work in its own way. I did. And I'm wondering, what do you think? You can read the rest of the article and watch some of the video "auditions" shot by Laurel Nakadate over at HTMLGIANT if I've made you curious.

And when you tire of that, I'd invite you to hit Lemon Hound's blog Conceptual Writing 101 were you'll find many fine little gems of conceptual writing, including this fine post about Mayer/ Bernstein Writing Experiments.  

* Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from
a piece of writing: eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or
take out all words beginning with 's' in Shakespeare's sonnets.

* Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.

* Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of
prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing
work.

* Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form
these words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let
them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way.
Design words.

* Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a
few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with
a non- connotative word, like "so" etc.

* Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until
it is "ultimately" reduced, or, read or write it backwards, line by line or
word by word.


(Only six more shopping days until Christmas you know - it may be time to start thinking about poems as gifts for all the friends you find it just too hard to shop for :D) Then you can pop over to  wewhoareabouttodie and check out a load of clips and links exploring the nature and process of "Conceptual Writing". Sound like a plan?

:peace: :earth: :stormtrooper:

Simons Cat _Fly PWNED_ Stamp by EmeraldAngelStudio Conflict and Terror by StJoan Yellow Stamp by MammaThatMakes :thumb60045796: I support DLD by HugQueen I dreamt I WASN'T dreaming... by cos22 284 : Hot, Throbbing Stamp by witegots


Visitor Map
Create your own visitor map!
© 2010 - 2024 b1gfan
Comments14
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Lit-Twitter's avatar
Chirp, it's been twittered.

And way catchy title =p