i just want to speak. i want to tell you. how it happened. i didn’t
know how to tell you. i didn’t know how to step out of that magic
circle an event inscribes around you. the circle that binds you to
the spot, the moment. i wanted to tell you. i wanted you to know.
what you do with these words is of small import. words travel.
change shape. visceral. a gesture. a movement. the stomach of the
world. to spin out, to weave. spellbound i watch the conjuring of
utterance. tattoo of the gaze. i was trying to tell you. i needed
to speak. your eyes missed a beat. the circle wavered. i fell into
speech. i moved into darkness. listening is dampness. the word
touching. the warm body nurses restlessness into speech.
enchanted i was in the world again. there were lights and the music
was spinning. there were bodies fully opaque. everywhere words
were weaving their spell.sentience takes us out of ourselves... images... engage not so much with
mind as with the embodied mind
Walter BenjaminFrom ‘sucking on remembrance: encounters with the vampire and
other histories of the body’ (Brewster 1998, pp. 209–11)Brewster’s prose poems, and the accompanying quotations, are symbiotic.
The creative writing takes up some of the ideas from the theory, while we
are likely to read the quotations differently because of the prose poems
which accompany them. At the same time this is not a simplistic relation-
ship, and the connections between quotation and creative writing are
diverse and fluid. We will read the theory against and with the creative
work, and the two will resonate with each other. But the theory does not
‘explain’ the prose poetry, and the creative writing is not simply an illus-
tration of the theory. Rather, Judith Butler’s formulation of the body as a
variable and politically regulated surface resonates with the evocation of
vampirism to produce ideas about vulnerability, exploitation and the
regulation of gender and sexuality. Similarly, the theme of the third
section—the ways in which language is inadequate, but is also embodied
and felt—rubs well together with the Walter Benjamin quotation. The
symbiosis is also stylistic: the theory uses language creatively and imagina-
tively, and the creative writing draws energy from theoretical ideas,
blurring the distinction between the two.
To write a fictocritical piece, Exercise 4, you may find it productive to
employ a discontinuous prose form so you can write in sections. Choose a
theme which has some theoretical mileage in it, and then write poems and
The invert, the cross-dresser, the fictocritic 209