Olena Kalytiak Davis and the Retro-New

ONE OF THE MANY MEASURES OF AMBITION in poesy is the extension of the medium. individual thinks of how Charlie Parker's and Dizzy Gillespie's use of chord progressions expanded and transformed jazz improvisation, in what way Cezanne's landscapes altered composition and representation, or in what manner Caravaggio's live working-class models re-configured the couple painting and religious mythology. These artists were not alone in creating those techniques, nor were they na??ve about artistic precedent: clearly they absorbed conventions of their be in possession of and past ages. But with an inner exigency drawing from the world they already knew they stumbl upon some discovery (from their art or elsewhere) that triggered an innovation, and, upon rare occasions, extraordinary change. You can hear Haydn and Mozart in Beethoven, on the other hand you wouldn't find sufficient antecedent for the Ninth Symphony or late quartets. Sometimes those changes, as in Confessional poesy or Superrealism in painting, provide more unobtrusive extensions of their art. through extension in poetry I mean making use of literary antecedents, on the contrary bringing one's formal gifts, obsessions and, greatest in quantity of all, imaginative faculties to occasion change. We call these writers innovators, a boundary as fraught with complication as originality, on the contrary some of the recent work of Olena Kalytiak Davis demonstrates a freshnes and vitality that makes her work recognizable and in a certain number of ways singular. One of Davis' casts in her use of "sampling" or "covers" adduces from and interprets others' metrical compositions inside her own, much the way bebop musicians quot "I Got Rhythm" or the way hip-hop arts sampled Motown carols to create a dialogue, an argument, or to parody those historic romantic voices. Her objective is to emphasize literature's experiential function: to enlarge consciousness, to make literature emotionally and intellectually applicable to the self The work's smart, alternately witty, disagreeable, and moving; the resultant piece of poetrys seem entirely intimate, but also gather the affects of the age while employing a variety of poetic styles and linguistic practices. Her work admits crossings on the outside Freudian slips, IM-type talk and archaic diction. Words and their function clearly excite her. Above all, innovation aside, her piece of poetrys bristle with a love of weft and the exploratory, substantive implications of language as emotional expression.

Davis' approach to intimate writing is intriguing on the other hand also artful. She presents the reader with seemingly unmediated and uncensored, almost diary-like details of daily life side by means of side with the willful theater of a presentation self: the bard writing, the poet constructing and choosing what she wants us to diocese Thus the "I" (which she lately placed in quotation marks) is always at stake and upon view; at the same time, she acknowledges that identity is a necessary socially and artistically put togethered fiction. These complex and conflicting notions of self (I'm spontaneously making myself available, I'm making this up and I'm figuring this without in the act of writing) are inextricably entangled: the bard and the person, the public and the private, are impossible to stabilize. Negotiating these overlapping arenas-what's literally actual what's metaphorically true, what's imagined-has always been individual of poetry's many tasks, on the other hand Davis' poems implicitly and explicitly bring to the forefront the one and the other the function of writing and wide-ranging emotional exploration. Her metrical compositions ask questions: who do we write for, in what way do we represent ourselves authentically given what words can and cannot provide, when self-knowledge is incomplete, transient, driven by means of mystery, desire and need, repression and wish-fulfillment fantasy?

One of Davis' strategies is engaging and manipulating the reader's discomfort: she's simultaneously "confessional" and "postmodern" Romantically drawn to the self at the same time proposing it as elusive and fragile, she brings the reader closer to the lyric voice of the poet; at the same time we can't locate exactly what's real who's addressed, or whose fact is it? At a time when the culture's in a tizzy about fact and memoir, when everyone is confessing everything (and usually for standard of value on Oprah, which is as shut up to hooking as a writer can get) Davis' vulnerability draws the reader into the empathie, while she occupys and satirizes the voyeuristic pleasures of the bard "exposing" herself. So her interrogation of those facts becomes both her project and single hot-button signpost of our age.

One way Davis reach forths the medium is by postmodernist collapsing of high and popular tillage (in a variety of tones, dictions and voices); on the other hand she also borrows forms from popular agriculture So the original literary sources, from William James to Emily Dickinson, become re-configured as competing or reinforcing voices. She appropriates, honors converses with, finds correspondence in all these voices, frequently inside a single poem. A version of Dickinson's "I Cannot Live with You," will appear side by the agency of side in a poem filled of contemporary slang. She can repeat from Catullus (or use a Lowell-like "version") and use IZ in the same piece of poetry While knowing the source of the literary cites enlarges the context for the reader, the easy in mind of the material is almost always available in the metrical composition itself. The function of knowledge, literary or otherwise, in Davis' work is always acknowledging integration or fissure, probing the gap between words and experience, between perception and reality. Her desperate identity search then, is tempered by other voices reminding the piece of poetry of the blurry limits of self