Dear Alain

by Katy Bohinc

Poetry. Fiction. Philosophy. Katy Bohinc's DEAR ALAIN is a headlong, investigative imagined conversation between Poet and Philosopher (who happen to be of different genders). The poetics is a channeled response-imagining, sampling contemporary experimental poetics in long love poem set to the arc of the thought of Alain Badiou. (The philosopher is the "structure" after all.) DEAR ALAIN at once "a romance novel of a sort" and a metaphor for the relationship between contemporary poetry and philosophy. An infinite series of metas on metas, a place where "We meet at infinity." "She's terrific, and I don't even think very often about Alain Badiou--I'm just enjoying her exclamations, and her explanations of how poetry, for her, embodies intuition and provides evidence for embodied experience. It's a very good book and I'm going to quote it at people."--Stephen Burt "Surely, certainly, amusingly, thoroughly, this book is the perfect book in its loving address to that collapsed beast, philosophy. Between its slick covers, Katy gambols. She defies the parameters of the epistolary mini-drama her letters to Alain Badiou act out: a park, a platonic table, a parallelogram that meets at the horizon. 'How do you not wonder if the canon has made a mistake' she asks. The sheer vitality of her quest shows us that philosophy depends on being dead a little bit."--Lisa Robertson "This book should be banished!"--Slavoj Zižek

Genres: Poetry

222 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2014

Reviews

[Daniel Donatelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never would have heard of, purchased, or read this book had it not been written by a friend of mine -- a friend who generously donated to a Kickstarter campaign I'd created for one of my own books, a friend who received a copy of that Kickstarted book and yet never said anything to me about it, which means she either never read it or read it and didn't like it. (You know what they say about not having anything nice to say.) Nevertheless, I did the opposite: I bought and read this book, and I have only a few nice things to say about it. But first I'll say the bad things: This book is a classic example of what I consider the inaccessibility of modern literature. It is absolutely loaded with references to other modernist literature (that is to say, unpopular literature that is only popular among the people who are referenced -- an inner circle that doesn't seem all that interested in transparency but rather the inscrutable depths of predominant opacity. Strewn throughout the book there are, of course, random eruptions of French lines and Chinese lines and mathematical formulas and mentions of place-names in Europe and Asia. I got the feeling that almost none of it was written for me, the actual reader, but rather for some sort of theoretical reader who is a perfect amalgam of Katy Bohinc (whoever that is) and Alain Badiou (whoever that is). The best thing that I can say about this book is that the letters to Alain (the majority of the book) are a somewhat fascinating mix of poetry and prose, but the amount of information that would be needed to fully enjoy them is far beyond my or the average reader's ken (it's like being told only the middle of a joke). That said, Katy, the author, is quite capable of clever/interesting flights of prose-poetry, wherein every five or six pages she'd let out a real humdinger of a line of literature. But the content between those random gems was mainly, to me, an awful lot of groping at walls of soot in the dark. Additionally, I was quite confused by the syntax/usage nightmares strewn throughout. Some titles of works of art are italicized, and some are not; some lines have punctuation, and some do not. I would have been accepting of these unusual choices had they been a bit more consistent, but perhaps a dismissal of consistency was part of the intention of the book. If so, it's again an example of the perils of modern literature; if not, Tender Buttons needs to replace their proofreader(s) with someone containing a true mastery of both prescriptivist and descriptivist usage doctrines, who can employ one or both with real grace. Anyway, while I don't understand why this book was written/published, I do think there are times it points to some real talent on the author's part; I guess I just wish it had been written for actual readers, because there are many interesting things to be said about the intersection of poetry and philosophy, but none of them consists of about 9 different letters to a philosopher telling him to fuck off.

[Carrie]

Really interested in reading another woman's writing about philosophy via poetry (like me). I approach it as poems about reading, mixing up the cerebral and the lyrical, and she seems to approach it via the female form of the love poem addressing the male form (hate to be so binary, but) of philosophy. What I really want to do is utterly feminize this traditionally male form and turn it androgynous. But this is not that either. It is overlaying a feminine emotionality over the male cerebralism. How to write about philosophy as a woman without having to address the genderedness? Rosmarie Waldrop! Who else?

[Bryony Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

"i think it is okay for poets to cry, we must cry for all of us"