Footnote to Forfeit | Ransom Notes

footnote to forfeit is ransom notes on top of love poetry on top of rumors. I used Wite Out to obliterate the poems collected in the 1972 Peter Pauper version of Emily Dickinson’s love poetry. Then, (like the author of a ransom note), I collaged lyrics over the Wite Out by cutting and pasting individual letters from a variety of vintage media (such as 1970s Playboys).

This is one strategy for transforming transgression, faith, love, and forgiveness from things (as commodity) to events (as “matters of care”). What I also found was that I liked transforming the machine-made aspect of Dickinson’s and my own poems (the reproduction) and turning them back into something handmade, the way our experiences (i.e. love and its consequences) themselves are handmade before they are "saved" and reproduced.

The layering—like sediment—of texts foregrounds the processes of intervention and interpretation involved in any reading: of self, of sex, of history, of memory. The tension between what can be read and what can’t, what survives and what has been erased, absence and presence, underscores any story’s participation in history’s larger conversation on who, as feminist biologist Ruth Hubbard writes, has the social sanction to define the larger reality into which everyone’s everyday experiences and perceptions must fit “in order that one can be reckoned sane and responsible” as well as why certain ways of learning about nature (both human nature and Nature) and using that knowledge are acknowledged as authoritative and others not.

The combination of Wite Out and collage (or open-ended parenthesis and white-space) is also, as I practice it, a particularly powerful way of accounting for life’s essential incoherence: the way our experiences misstep or mistake, mishear and get lost in “what might have happened,” “what never happened,” or even “what should have happened.” The footnote is a lyric strategy, however short-term, for “keeping it real”: to defer conclusions, prolong suspense, and interrogate meaning (like Scheherazade of the one thousand anyone nights). The entire project contains 40 ransom notes and is part of a larger recuperation effort by contemporary female artists—Susan Howe, Jen Bervin, and Cynthia Hogue, to name a few—to re-vision our understanding of Dickinson’s work and life.