Deborah Luster and CD Wright ONE BIG SELF

Wed 4/20/11

Introduce and Discuss ONE BIG SELF

Last 10-15 min. view more photo-essays.

For Friday:
Finish ONE BIG SELF
Prompt for Friday Paper (optional): What is CD Wright able to "document" with her poetry that possibly could not have been documented with other writing methods? Essentially, what are the unique advantages of her writing poetry about the lives of women prisoners in Louisiana?

Looking Ahead:
Next Friday 4/29: 3-4 page response to sources due. You will want to summarize each of your four total sources, and then compare and contrast the sources both in terms of subject-matter, and also for the researching and writing methods used by each author. I will give you more formal information for this assignment on Mon 4/25.
Initial Draft of Ethnographic Writing Project due at CONFERENCES 5/2 - 5/4. For this project, you will combine your Field Research, your "library/internet" research, and your own analysis (which you've already practiced in your "Symbolic Action" papers into 1 cohesive research paper of at least 6 full pages. I will provide more formal information for this assignment also on Mon 4/25.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myz_W7A33As -- Luster on NPR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1IZYf6ODug -- Luster at San Fran MOMA

"I wanted to see if my art could handle that hoe"

"The obvious truth, people are people"

"What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the feel of hard time"

From The Boston Review

The photographer Deborah Luster had already spent a year taking photographs of prisoners in Louisiana when she invited the poet C.D. Wright to accompany her to the minimum-security East Carroll Parish Prison Farm in Transylvania, Louisiana; the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel; and the maximum-security prison at Angola, Louisiana, the largest such facility in the United States. In the end, Wright wrote a series of poems to accompany Luster’s photographic project. Their image-and-text collaboration was published in 2003 by Twin Palms Publishers as a glossy art book with the title One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. Inmates cooperated with Luster in deciding how they might be depicted (within the limits of a prison milieu, obviously); as a result, the photographs range from conventional portraits to images incorporating props, special clothing, or, conversely, degrees of undressing. Tattoos feature prominently in an environment where micro-control over the body is a preeminent struggle between imprisoned and imprisoner. Some of Luster’s subjects wear costumes for Halloween or Mardi Gras celebrations; some are dressed for prison rodeos or culinary classes. Not all are African American, though the majority are. They are divided fairly evenly between women and men.

Copper Canyon Press recently published Wright’s poems separately as One Big Self: An Investigation. By switching the original subtitle to “an investigation,” Wright emphasizes an exploratory descriptive mode that complements and comments on Luster’s more straightforward approach. Luster produced actual documents: she claims to have given nearly 25,000 wallet-size prints back to the prisoners she photographed. While Wright provides plenty of direct testimony—her own and from inmates—accrued during and after her visits, her writing also displays skepticism about poetry’s documentary capacities. After all, there’s more concrete information on the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be gleaned from relatively short sections in history and reference books than in the 600-plus pages of Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. The transmission of pure information isn’t poetry’s task. But then, there’s no such thing as pure information, which is what almost every type of poetry reminds its audience. Language mediates; and poetry—perhaps more than any literary form—continually materializes its mediations.

Distrusting poetry as unmediated communication doesn’t necessarily hinder its imperative to convey. If anything, it gives it a sense of urgency and instigates creative forms of expression. Similarly, the trajectory of Wright’s poetry over three decades reveals an ongoing development of innovative ways to present precise details. Her writing in One Big Self consists primarily of found and constructed fragments, ambiguous lists, and partial confessions that fail to provide much consolation. “Nothing will be settled or made easy,” she writes near the end of the book where it might be tempting to generate summaries or conclusions. As anyone familiar with the work of Michel Foucault knows, the all-seeing panopticon is a primary means of control within modern prison systems—and in society at large. (Readers of Foucault are less likely to know that the panopticon structure was originally schemed as a way to subjugate not inmates but labor, as Peter Linebaugh points out in The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.) Wright subverts this totalizing awareness and its dream of omniscience by letting slip what might not be known and what mostly eludes—so far—technology’s unblinking gaze: memory, hope, regret, love, and the fundamental errancy at the heart of what it means to be human.