As we reach the semester's midpoint, we're taking a conceptual left-turn with Ara Shirinyan's 2008 collection, Your Country Is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana. Originating as a diversion during the writing of his previous book, Syria Is in the World (2007), YCIG, took on a life of its own after Shirinyan showed a few sample poems to a friend and received encouragement to continue with the full-blown project.
As his book titles suggest, an international awareness is a key facet of Shirinyan's poetic perspective. Born in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia in 1977, he moved to the cross-cultural nexus of Los Angeles at the age of ten and has been a major player in that city's arts scene, as a publisher (Make Now Press) and promoter of events (through the Poetic Research Bureau). YCIG takes that focus to almost-absurd ends, employing Flarfist techniques to construct eighty-one snapshot portraits of the world through its own eyes. Starting with a list of countries and territories from the CIA-produced The World Factbook, Shirinyan then googled "[country] is great" and mined the search results — using all or almost all of the material in cases where there wasn't an overwhelming amount of search results — to construct each poem.
Clearly, form takes a certain precedence over content, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to say about what we find in YCIG. We might consider the panoply of voices found within the book and their relationship to Shirinyan's authorial voice, the cultural contexts for each poem, differences between the time of the book's composition and the present, and what the book says about the role of online communication (for better or worse) within our modern lives.
Here's our reading schedule for the book:
- Tues., October 7: "Afghanistan Is Great" to "Croatia Is Great"
- Thurs., October 9: No Class — Fall Reading Day
- Tues., October 14: "Cuba Is Great" to "Guyuana Is Great"
And here are a few supplemental links:
- a setting of several poems at Triple Canopy
- my write-up of Your Country is Great as part of 2010s Attention Span survey (it's at the bottom)
- Eric Rettberg writes about YCIG at Jacket2
- an oral history of Poetic Research Bureau at Jacket2
- a number of Shirinyan readings on PennSound's LA-Lit series page
No comments:
Post a Comment