the new poetics colloquium, august 21-25, 1985, vancouver, b.c. (excerpt from a letter):

s/he says we're t/here "north of intention "dollar's downlacan's ex-wife meets althusser's former mistressthey gossip talk shopirigaray's commodities among-themselves play volleyball on wreck beach nude burn refuse to go to market

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gather together the poets in their all weather coats absorb themselves in work-in-progress/totalizing textuality/signs of pleasure etc. the women talk among themselves between questions refuse to speak the same language of difference talk among themselves address this reader, an/other woman, advise: go into the market. remain indifferent. ask for your tomatoes. are they ripe? or (she says) go into the market. speak your mind. tell them you don't like the arrangement of the vegetable stalls. confront their interior design. then ask for your tomatoes. are they ripe?

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from time to time Wittgenstein's lion dominates discussionwomen in the room. silent, flatten into two dimensions beside quiet mysterious men (after the semiotic narrative she is speechless. signs of weeping

"there was no silence before armies" the true forgotten story of the captured woman is a fiction the fractured poetry, true   historylater history is killed off along with the telling story

he says we live/write in a patriarchal racist culture these bodies write in circulation no ex/change questions are deferred for the momenthe says language IS patriarchal he says etymology leads to false authorityhe says note our desire in punctuation (rooted in "peuk"/to prick/or fist / pun / pugilist / trapunto

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after the market closes, the dance partners pair off. rhumba: transendence and the quotidian. tango: street-wise vulgar feminist and discrete dyke semiotician. non-stop tarantella: exotic post-russian formalist and wild-eyed discourse analyst. during the last set ideology dismisses his former mistress, experience, who cooly observes, "just like people words develop illusions of grandeur. "her parting words are overheard by the Symbolic, transcribed as marginal notes.

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tomatoe / tomato / tomate(f)

--Janice Williamson, University of Toronto and York University

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