Semblance: Two Essays

by Divya Victor, Douglas Kearney (Preface)

The eponymous two essays Divya Victor produced for Semblance: Two Essays are prefaced by an original contribution by the poet and librettist Douglas Kearney. Victor's first essay, "Cicadas in the Mouth," is a revised and annotated version of her 2014 Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture. Victor explores the politics of language and meditates on the meaning of being a plurilingual writer in relation to the history of colonialism. In her account, the cicada becomes a complex figure for the historical layers present in language ownership and usage. The second essay, "An Unknown Length of Rope," is a completely original essay/lecture on the history of black representation via an insightful discussion of Singleton Copley's painting, Watson and the Shark. Sir Brook Watson had lost his leg in Havana, Cuba to a shark attack in 1749 just as Cuba was becoming a thriving slave post and Victor speculates on the meaning of Copley's painting "gaining" a black actor thirty years after the incident he was commissioned to depict had taken place.

48 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Divya Victor is the author of Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow, 2014, winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc, 2015), Things to Do with Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014), Swift Taxidermies 1919–1922 (GaussPDF, 2014), Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (GaussPDF, 2012), PUNCH (GaussPDF, 2011), and the Partial trilogy (Troll Thread, 2011-2012). Her chapbooks include Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011) and SUTURES (2009). Her criticism and commentary have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Jacket2, and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet. Her work has been collected in the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, the reedition of bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, Hobo, VLAK, The Best American Experimental Writing, and boundary2, among other venues. Her poetry has been translated into French and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Mandeville Poetry Collections at University of California San Diego, and a writer in residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (LACE). She lives in the United States and Singapore, where she is assistant professor of poetry and writing at Nanyang Technological University.