Poetry is Not the Final Girl: V Manuscript

On a facebook thread not too long ago I told V Manuscript that I would like for him to come to the Bay Area and deliver a large volume of his own blood directly into an open wound located somewhere upon my body. Which ok, sounds really dodgy, but it's really not, especially if, like V and I, you share similar sentiments about freak family, to the extent that this would really be just a gesture of mutual admiration and getting-to-know-each-other. V and I like letting blood (literally and conceptually), but it's only because the gesture of it leaches vitality out of its own transgression. I mean, everyone was a cutter, right? And yet the cut is a literal transgression of bodily boundaries—in other words, its violence remains real. Blood letting is a paragon of an interplay between the sacred and our denial of it.

There's many ways to talk about horror, performance and masochism; almost all of them intensely annoy me. But I feel kinship with V because when I see him perform, I can see he knows, as I genuinely believe—that masochism is not ultimately a performance, or vice versa. It's not the way to even know a sadistic Other, threading its movements with our erotics. Instead, as Felix Bernstein once said to me, it's total passivity —exhausting, grasping passivity, nothing to feel safe, or good about, or consensual about, it is about letting, which brings us full circle, back to the blood, and performance. The kind that is sleepless.

V Manuscript is a poet / pervert / blasphemme. The texts of V Manuscript are assemblages of writing and algorithmically-sustained text regenerations and focus on the marginalia of masochisi, eroticism and the fluidity of gender. The intimacy necessary for the project hinges on blood-stamped self-published chapbooks and intense live performances combinig text and music which underscore ornate corporeal and poetically virulent practices of endurance, tension and concentration. V Manuscript runs the small press VILE_TYPE, the reading series The Empty Room, and is half of the performance due HUMANBEAST. @v_manuscript

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TL: Let’s start with the most obvious, but also most telling question in honor of my favorite horror franchise, SCREAM: What’s your favorite scary movie? But also, why? Do you think this has any bearing on your aesthetic practice? And I do mean that in the most general of terms, since no one in this series identifies purely as a poet.

V: Tbh, not that into movies. I watch them, and I enjoy them, as one might enjoy a roller-coaster or a sunny float on a raft, but I often hesitate to give them my critical attention. Nor do I feel the need to watch them twice, as opposed to the addictive dizzying dementia of staring again into the dusty cracks of Lautréamont. I dunno why, really. I do enjoy the hive-mind applied aesthetics of large-scale and funded artworks, but film doesn't come to mind when I think of artworks that have affected my work. Laundrylist “horror” that comes to mind: Poltergeist 1982, Wickerman 1973, Possession 1981 (originals only, remakes are garbage and as disgusting as reunion tours). Meet the Feebles 1989 (the darkest movie I've ever seen). I'm a huge fan of classic erotica (Olympia/Grove etc) and though plagued w misogyny, the writing still influences my work heavily. And since you're asking about aesthetic influence, I would make this exception for the career-long sexploitation horror-aesthetic of Jean Rollin (The Nude Vampire, Night of the Hunted, etc).

Ahh, but the true master-of-horror has to be the ineffable slime-prince, Carlos Gonzalez (aka Russian Tsarlag). Carlos has been begriming the underground with its finest treasures for the last decade or so as bleached-out pop-musician, xerox comic book artist and film-maker. As far as horror and aesthetics are concerned, I would cite him as the greatest single influence (not to mention greatest living artist). I guess this would tie in to why I feel like I don't like movies—the idea that your art would require funding. I prefer freaks that make their art no matter the circumstances. The why of why Carlos is an influence would range from obsessive self-publishing and the self-existent drive to create, to subtler things such as his thoughts on the fragment here, “...the majority of life is mysterious and confusing. There is rarely closure, as there often is in most stories and plot lines. Almost everything I encounter is in fragments... I like that. You don’t need to read every issue of my comic, or any other ones to appreciate a weird hand touching a door knob, or a swollen, exotic mask being applied to a damp face. That’s just good stuff, take it for what it is.” Check out his films Heaven's Rope 2013 and Night Sweats 2015 or anything Russian Tsarlag if you can find it and keep it from dripping through your human hands.

TL: I really love what you’re bringing up here, which is: not simply of horror as genre or form, but as mode of total aesthetic existence. A jurisdiction of freaks making art for other freaks is what one might call a community but I think it runs deeper, is more intimate than that. Because a freak art family, like a fragment, is also unmoored from a kind of generalized economy of poetry or whatever. Which means that the work it makes technically available and accessible, but it’s also always partial—difficult to find, or obscure unless you’re also a freak. People are always already shut out. I’m being vague so I’ll clarify. It’s like people who produce music and only circulate it on tape, poets who only publish on tumblr PDF —the means of production itself becomes a way to articulate a coterie—something Joey, big bro in my own freak family, said to me a while ago. You don’t know about it unless you know about it. It actually serves a function in that who ends up even obtaining the work depends on a kind of circus mentality—you’re in or you’re out (one of us a la Tod Browning’s Freaks).

But this is also freeing. Work that doesn’t have to satisfy an audience apart from fellow freaks means there can be replication, generosity, intensity and exclusion. These qualities mean one can make literally horrific work—work that is unfit for everyone else’s consumption. I feel like I want to make art that hurts other people, or like refuses to neutralize itself for outsiders in that way. Do you feel like any of your work (music, writing, performance) strives specifically to be unfit, or unforgiving towards audience?

V: Yes! Writing has only been my primary practice for about 5 years now. I started as a musician and performance artist in the punk and noise scenes. These underground families gave me tools I still employ when working as a writer. From making hand-made replications of my work with no budget, to performing my writing on the road in a variety of underground spaces / the self-existent drive as opposed to a corporation, university or grant-funded artwork. Though I'm hesitant to say I feel any allegiance to any community that defines itself by a genre. The reason I quit punk is the same reason I don't aspire to join a poetry community. I don't see much benefit in the imitation and recycling of forms to any community predisposed to give praise for your efforts. What I meant by freaks (for lack of a better word) is this community I believe I am a part of who don't identify by genre. I feel what blossomed/exiled out of the noise community (which of course now is primarily another community of imitation) is a sort of bottom-bracket catch-all of art makers, musicians, poets, performance artists, dancers, etc who for whatever reason have been shunned by another community, whether genre or academia or whatever. This community has also often (self)exiled themselves from straight society and/or (self)orphaned themselves from family. There's a no one is watching kind of freedom. This allows for strangely beautiful free forms of expression. It's also a wonderful challenge to share writing with a creative community who aren't primarily writers.

So, to answer your question, unfit/unforgiving?—I feel yes, in a way. But only because I don't want to self-censor. Historically, I've worked performatively with quite a bit of sexuality and violence. I spent 13 years out of school, and since returning I find myself self-censoring for a variety of reasons. I don't want the violence or sexuality to be the first and only thing someone sees and remain blind to the work as a whole. What I like about the freak community is there is no value in shock value. The work still has to stand on its own. Academics feel like they are trained in understanding such works, but they are trained to understand them from a distance, (I'm thinking of the Viennese Aktionists pissing in each others mouths etc) but when you perform in their space, they are too uncomfortable. With some of the violence I've worked with while performing writing I don't think it's fair to say that I want to make audiences comfortable, but I do know that I am only growing as an artist when performing those works where people are less uncomfortable (the difference between performing an unforgiving performance at a university or bookstore vs. a freak space, whether inner-city noise warehouse or the in mountains of Maine). There's a stiffness I want to avoid. Sometimes that performance space is off the grid. Maybe one run more by spirit than pattern.

TL: It’s so funny that here we’re identifying horror, or freakishness as a refusal to identify within medium or genre because on the other hand horror as a genre seems so arbitrarily defined. I guess being faced with conventions that only exist for you to flout is something that forces work to stand on its own because it means it can no longer be judged by any critical terms that exist. We could think about someone like Hannah Weiner, whose clairvoyance seemed kind of a method through which her work couldn’t be identified or assimilated into any kind of discourse. But I also really appreciate in what you’re saying about shock value—the fact that work that plays with horror means it also, in fact can’t be reduced to it because the two are very different things. Horror is not simply transgression, it’s a craft—it’s a tight space for manipulation because you’re trying to create an affect (composed of many different things) rather than simply a text (singular), something that exists as both just enough and too much. Which, in performance, is very different because everything is so contingent upon on shifting contexts.

Can you say a little more about spirit—do you feel like this mode of creation can be transformative, or cathartic or redemptive for an audience? This is kind of one of my eternal struggles. I want to make things that don’t transcend the hurt but become more materially sublime from being saturated with it, I guess. I don’t like the idea that things get "better" or they can be "different." I just think that you can learn something when you orient someone so their experience of something familiar feels different. That’s the ultimate horror, right? That defamiliarization?

V: Yes. I've used this example before, but I think of the violence inherent in football or ballet, which society has come to accept. But if two footballers staged an ankle break with composure and grace, without the spectacle of the game, it would seem more perverse, somehow even more violent than if in the forceful and chaotic impact of a tackle. Recently I've been removing any remaining aggression and chaos from my performances. The violence then intensifies because all of it becomes incredibly intentional, even if the actions themselves are quite gentle. As for the spirit and the sublime, I think this is again why I choose to perform in cross-genre spaces. There's a sort of trial by fire that might not occur in a single genre space where mostly subtleties of form are explored. To perform beside intense dance or high-volume noise music and seek cathartic and transformative performance of poetry? I seek exposure to extremes in all genres.

And I think Hannah Weiner is a great example! Life-changing work, genre defying, inspired. I also suffer/benefit from a form of hypergraphia, I can't stop writing, creating. Never suffered from writer's block, never a blank page. Usually don't quite know what to do with it all. Been thinking recently about religious texts, or other divinely inspired works. I think the error in criticizing the work as truly inspired or not is foolish. Anyone with an absurd dedication to their art is inspired. You don't give a shit about being right or not, you're obsessed! The “what's it about?” of writing becomes irrelevant. It doesn't matter. It takes a certain drive to follow the horror of your instinct to ignore arbitrary restrictions. I'm also thinking of Kathy Acker in the interview with Lotringer speaking about her early novels. Writing before theory—but then upon being introduced to some of the french philosophers afterward... yes! yes! But the impetus of the ideas was there instinctually as a form of inversion of the status quo, syntactically, stylistically, conceptually. What I often hate the most about conceptual writing is the, “what I did here was...” as if the text couldn't stand on it's own without the exposed mechanics or the philosophy to back it up. Wonderful writing should please its critical and casual readers without much exposition.

TL: What you’re saying brings up two of my favorite things (and classic horror tropes) possession and subjugation: both of which have create interesting tension between what is staged, and what is being suffered. Not that the two are mutually exclusive. In fact, I believe that the interplay of the two is what makes something visceral, or as you say, inspired. Because the friction between is usually contradictory or overwhelming. But I do think that begging to be taken to task is something that cross-genre artists often have in common—something will always be extraneous or alienated. Do you feel like channeling, or possession is a mode that you can cultivate? There’s a sense of predestination or inevitability in how you talk about it (as well as in horror as a genre more generally) and I’m wondering if you think about it as a practice of belief or something that is more inevitable than that. Something more like a compulsion, which is what other people might even call a destiny.

V: “to possess one's own language within the sphere of language that possesses us so that we may finally be dispossessed of it.”

~pink (informal), extraordinary bookshelf, ab/normal, weird and peculiar, erratic, invert, un/natural, left-hand, outré, aberrrant, a/typical, homosexualscissors, dizzy, queen, pansy, poof, shirt-lifter?, pettifogger, pointilleux, anspruchsvoll, quisquilloso, antie or aunty, lily (informal), Lily (formal), whimsical, mysterious, ecccentric, romantic, occult, mystic, enigmatic, intentional, some magical fact, exponential, oblivionnamed, distractiornography, descending staircase, illuminated manuscript, pillowcase, dictation pencil, satanic inscription, curled up lesbian listening, immolation withousand paper cranes, babblingverse, sisternightstand, empressswasp, unsheathed non-penetrativism, unclothed prudish lighthouse, porcelain unconscious, fuckpoetry, mymother demonology, ellipticallaconic, cryptisexual, book-burning, humiliateful, soft-weapon, crueltype, elocution, lunatic, arcane, carnal, come-hither, psychogenic, abraxas, allocentric—autoerotic, allographic instep, quietdemon, hearing-itself-speak, hummingbird, mallarmé, mollusk, mythopoeic, masochistorian, agnostinctually perhaps, hundredlettered, twelvemouthed, spearpoint, snowfield, nightshade, bloodlicker, obscene perhaps, worse in my journal, I'm masturbation razor, I'm nude wound-bearer, I'm empty-glass writer's-whiskey, I'm shitting cousin, serpentine, I'm showering housewife, nothing particular today and house keeps getting dirty, I'm sharp-upset widowhood-writingnightly, I'm anytime cinnamon, I'm drunk and argumentative, I'm curse-god chronic-pain daughter, I'm hair-bleaching never-eating child-cutter, I'm pissing on your paperwork mother—stop child. (sic)