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136 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century defeat effete defeat effort defeat fort defeat eat eat de teat at art faart or fete tete ear eat fete tete do to oat to o deaf effort fort ore eee or taa tort or at eat taa tat or de de ten effete neat tete defeat lulu lang loop bay bay bay rad hip hole cleave o decalogue boober hover mine hammer am bubble slumber pressure song cover over every wrong abridge my sigh with over wing oh swim again beyond thy hand points are reached at every point slimmed mirror prunes mere mourning rave poetics statement Siren1 Siren Diary It is said that the Sirens knew everything that had happened in the past and everything that was to happen in the future. Thankfully, I am not an ancient Siren and do not possess their gift or curse of knowledge. Those who do and will suffer, including you and I my sweet, are at the mercy of other forces beyond revelation. Still I wonder, what if I did know the future and could tell you about it? That I saw a decrease of sunlight west where I already was and an increase of drought and flooding like that occurring in the world today? And what if we both saw the same thing as if reality were transparent and no medium were necessary to transmit a vision? Or what if we collaborated in constructing something, in words, that we both saw as if we were seeing the same thing? With you speaking and I listening and me listening and you speaking? If you saw what I was seeing, would it be more real? As if what was envisioned were actually happening now? And what if we each shared the same vision of the future already, in advance? Would this mutual sight be convincing? Does not the messenger author of the future get in the way of the message? The messenger may obstruct the vision she invokes by her physical presence, voice, image, or symbolic stature. Or perhaps it’s that the person behaved as if at the real death of a real girl2 complicates the text: seeing them together, person and text or you and me, qualifies an attachment to either. Detroit, August 5, 2009 Carla Harryman | 137 An impending sense of catastrophe stops reverie, me coated in sand. A siren makes its way through traffic. My autonomic nervous system reacts . Before I can know it, I have scrambled onto the sidewalk, ducked under a tree limb, observed I’m in a crowd. What was that? Where was I a cave in Cambodia before? I continue on my way, a little more dazed than I had been just previous to the siren alarm. I can’t get back to where I was before the sound, before I jumped off the roadway, before I noticed other people. Numbness or dazedness, a hovering sensation, that obstructs . . . what? The alert creature, the able-bodied soul, and death thought. I had been daydreaming in the middle of I hate mythology3 the street. Then I forgot the town I was in: Detroit, Berlin, San Francisco, Red Hook, Ypsilanti? Siren Diary Notes with interruptions on “Adorno and the Siren”:4 Odysseus sheds copious tears during the blind Demodocus’ song of the downfall of Troy at the table of Alcenous. The bard has brought the history of Odysseus’ experience of the Trojan battle to life in song, and Odysseus responds hysterically, like a post-traumatic stress victim. He recuperates his masculinity (men don’t cry) when he recounts his encounter with the Sirens; he shows he has no way to revelation learned how to control his hysteria, by lashing there’s location, attention , and tension5 himself to the mast to protect himself from the powerful allure of the Siren Song. Sirens were half-bird, half human. They become identified in Adorno with what about the animated things popping out of anything one notices6 the femme fatale. Yet reading with Adorno, this fixed “fatalistic” image reduces the Siren’s capacity to operate within the circulatory system of music: their power comes before gender. The recovered “voice” in this system is a separating mechanism—the same as the bard’s song—distinguishing “song from cry.” It brings us to the “perennially” irresolute site between human and inhuman.7 I like Engh’s argument but there is something wrong with her reading. She seems to forget, under the spell of...

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