Mindful Less (2019)
Nichola Shaughnessy’s Affective Performance and Cognitive Science acknowledges the generative possibilities of an overlap between performance studies and research in psychology, calling for practice-based researchers to work across the disciplinary boundaries of the sciences and the arts.[1]ThroughMindful Less, a series of poems presented as film, I consider ‘process’ in relation to both poetics and cognitive therapy, wherein the repeated process of my practice simultaneously functions a way of psychologically processing text-based trauma.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1919 ‘In the Evening, Lying on Her Bed, She Reread the Letter from Her Artilleryman at the Front’ functions as a prime example of text-based trauma.[2]Language vibrates across the page, constructing a visual explosion. Fragments of words and individual letters are refigured as shrapnel, which, when read aloud, violently interrupt all language which has remained intact on the page. Through the piece, Marinetti draws his reader’s attention to the violence of newsprint, with certain letters reoriented to resemble bullets. Marinetti’s concrete work was vital in the conceptualisation of Mindful Less, a series of film-poems which work through the violence of language and formatting in tabloid newspapers.
I regularly use public transport where publications such as The Metroand The Evening Standard are readily available, which, alongside working as a public relations account assistant, means that, willingly or unwillingly, I am excessively exposed to a range of newspapers in both my working and social life. Consequently, I began looking for new ways to interact with the paper and establish new methods of reading and interacting with tabloid newspapers. By doing so, I hoped to refigure my relationship with the violence of newsprint. I looked toward the ritual-based poetics of CA Conrad as an example of how procedural writing exercises can function as a way of psychologically reprocessing violence and trauma. Conrad’s 2017 collection, While Standing in Line for Death, outlines a ritual carried out to overcome the depression which surmounted from the murder of Conrad’s boyfriend, Earth. Whilst Conrad deems the ritual a ‘Restart Button’, allowing them to continue functioning within a world where they have experienced an horrendous, personal trauma, Mindful Less looks toward ways in which ongoing national traumas can be processed within the space of the personal.[3]On their blog, Conrad proposes that we reorient our approach toward moments of the every day, and by doing so, treat these mundane actions as exercises to generate poetry.
We take many of our daily movements for granted: going to the refrigerator for instance. The possibilities of the fridge and freezer are endless. You could hold an empty drinking glass against the side of it and study the sound of its motor. Use a magnifying glass to examine the exterior and interior in ways you had never done before. Use binoculars to sit across the room to look at it very carefully while far away.[4]
Using Conrad’s technique as a starting point, I looked towards different ways of interacting with newspaper publications. I carried out a series of reading exercises, including sewing fragments of print together and reading across the new page, attempting to grow cress from the centre of an article, and taking a bag of 37 newspapers on a walk around my village. Like Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’, a piece which moves back and forth between different poetic structures in order discover a form which best enunciates trauma, my process for interacting with the newsprint was in a constant state of flux.[5]Throughout the majority of the exercises, I listened to an EMDR soundtrack, ensuring that my brain was immediately working through and processing any anxiety generated by the text-based content.[6]Following each exercise, I wrote a poem, sourcing language from the newsprint itself or my personal reflection on the exercise.
However, unlike Conrad, whose recent collections, While Standing in Line for Deathand Ecodevience function as text-based write-ups of and poetic responses to rituals, the final product of Mindful Lesshas materialised as aural and visual documentation of my interactions with the newsprint. Through the films, which are intended to be viewed on a personal device such as a laptop or mobile phone, I invite my viewer to participate in the processing exercise. Visually moving back and forth between pieces of footage, accompanied with left-to-right ear aural output, the films are curated to replicate EMDR processing for the viewer. My voice simultaneously oscillates throughout each piece, reading the resulting poem, which mediates the visual and aural output.
[1]Evelyn B. Tribble, John Sutton, ‘Introduction’, Affective Performance and Cognitive Science, ed. Nicola Shaughnessy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) p. 27.
[2]Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘In the Evening, Lying on Her Bed, She Reread the Letter from Her Artilleryman at the Front’, Les mots en liberté futurists, (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di "Poesia", 1919).
[3]CA Conrad, While Standing in Line for Death(Seattle: Wave Books, 2017) p. 3.
[4]CA Conrad, ‘(Soma)tic Poetry Rituals: The Basics in 3 Parts’, (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals <https://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/2018/08/somatic-poetry-rituals-basics-in-3-parts.html> [accessed: 24/03/2019].
[5]Riley, Denise, ‘A Part Song’, London Review of Books,34 (3) (February 2012).
[6]EMDR refers to Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing, a form of psychotherapy in which the patient is asked to think about distressing memories whilst carrying out side-to-side eye movements or listening to specially constructed left-to-right ear audio content.