FANTASIAS IN COUNTING
Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014)
Out of print.
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Thinking about lines now.
Thinking about lines now.
Thinking about lines now.
Thinking about lions now.
Thinking about lie-ins now?
The reader says
lots of words sound like
other words
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“Sophie Seita’s Fantasias in Counting furthers an evolving, intense and remarkable body of work with performative textuality, spatiality and ethics of presence. Her poetry and poetics test the very limits of prosody; her theatrics work the defamiliarised into the known: a fantasia of the writer’s making defaulting into non-ownership. Rhythm and its predications and failures are central to ‘speech’. Seita writes: ‘[Begins to play a rhythm on or with scattered sounding-material—whatever is available. Ideally, this is a polyrhythm or cross-rhythm, either 4:3 or 5:3, or even better 4/4 : 4/3 or 2/5 : 2/3 or something of that kind; over the repeatedly spoken phrases: no I cannot; no you cannot (ad lib with pleasure)].’ The rhythm becomes word becomes the ‘theatre’ itself. At first experience a viewer, a reader, a fly on the wall, might undergo the epiphany of the ‘new’. But in Seita’s melding of ancient and modern performative techniques, her investing the moment of articulation with an awareness of the social and political constraints it operates within, we actually start to question what is ‘new’. Rather, we might apply to her work something akin to Stravinsky’s observation that Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge was ‘absolutely contemporary’ and would remain ‘contemporary forever’. Sophie Seita is one of a handful of brilliant ‘new’ poets and performance-enhancers who are changing and will continue to change how we receive and resist the ‘limits’ of poetic form and performative spatiality. She creates texts that are investigative and synaesthetic. When we read ‘my theory is better than my praxis’, the irony ripples through the manuscript, because rarely do the metronome, the drum beat, the tones of voice resonate so strongly. The page becomes the acoustically desirable space, with all attendant ironies and wit. Character and writer are of no fixed address. Sophie Seita is a writer of genius who will never stay still, who will constantly work the boards in ways as yet unimagined. Watch, listen, and be changed.
—John Kinsella
“Appearing in the drag of scale exercises, wrought and precise conceptual variations, and playful improvisation, the performance scores in Sophie Seita’s Fantasias in Counting might cause their readers/audiences to wonder whether they’re clothed or nude. Yet the pleasure of these works is their refusal—tartly apropos our digital times—of such binary codings: countable v. mass nouns, wholes v. parts, the one v. multiples, original v. proxy, integer v. fraction, feigned v. felt, and, perhaps most importantly, repetition v. difference. For while Seita’s jargonate arias may instrumentalize the count of the metronome, they also “ambivalize” to reach an “acchord” or “communichord”; remaining unaccountable to a beat, they transmogrify uniform temporal divisions into the bumpy, opaque spacing of socio-linguistic relations. In Steinian tradition (“a craving so little as that like as if it (then) would be then it would be simple. simple and countable. more simply countable. a slice please. much cream.”), Fantasias in Counting effects, against the preterit, new performative grammatical modes: “cannot be counted, only done,” “practised, not counted.” Likewise, the book forges forced ways of being among languages: Seita does not just notice how “lots of words sound like other words” but stages language in states of “hyperarousal,” finding, for instance, an opera within an opera by unfolding a narrative spelled by its paratextual musical directives cum characters: “Po may be generally slow or fast at wasp-speed.” “The subversive subject has lost. Now only irrational measures,” Seita writes, but perhaps that subject is not so much lost as distributed both within and without itself, just as protagonistic or quantifiable models of action have here fissured into mischievous, disturbing agencies, even the agency of aporia. Here’s more than “A little ‘hey’ for true mathematics”: “Please take some time with this line.”
—Judith Goldman
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Scene I
[DE LEMPICKA’s decorous parlour. A long dining table, no chairs. To the right, a dressing table, to the left a floor-length painting that looks like a mirror. DE LEMPICKA wears a flashy grey table-cloth intricately wrapped around her intricate body.]
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Press:
May 2015. Tears in the Fence
May 2015 Poetry Foundation/Harriet
June 2014 Bookslut