Scripting in the shower: locating the politics of procedural and conceptual Anglo-American poetry 1990-2021

In an interview, Thom Donovan asks CA Conrad to situate their work in relation to “an avant-garde lineage that privileges art as an autonomous space, one that doesn’t have to account for its sociality, or for a particular political or economic position” (2012, 172–73). This creative-critical thesis begins with that question and its implied reference to conceptual writing of the late 90s and early 2010s Anglo-American poetry scene. I argue that, rather than being autonomous, poetry’s “spaces,” including the private family home, the institution and extra-institutional spaces, as well as the space-time of ritual are produced by and productive of inherently social subject-positions that are encompassed in the role of a “poet.” Throughout this thesis, I analyze process-based modes of poetry writing to unmask the social relations that are hidden within space that appears abstract, focusing on the political, economic, racialized, gendered, and otherwise social relations that produce and are produced by those spaces. I approach process and ritual-based poetry broadly as work that emphasizes the process of making in addition to, or even in favor of, the output of the process in the work of Bhanu Kapil, The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, Kenneth Goldsmith, Catherine Wagner, CA Conrad, and Nisha Ramayya to ask 1. What are the politics of participating in the practices of process-based poetries, especially as they relate to specific social relations in domestic, institutional, and extra-institutional space? 2. How do process-based modes of writing participate in, critique, or otherwise unmask the processes of producing certain subjectivities? and finally 3. What does (writing) process-based poetry do? Does it merely unmask processes of production, or does it also modify them? If it modifies them, under what conditions does this take place and to what ends are they modified?

In both the critical and creative portions of this thesis, I use the shower as an exemplary fragment of space through which I access some of poetry’s spaces and subjectivities. Specifically, I use an unconventionally placed shower within my rented studio apartment which, through its placement, unmasks an otherwise dissimulated relationship between the concept of private space and the bathroom within the domestic family home. In my creative project, “Wet Space: water-closet dramas,” I take the processes of inscription and de-scription that are built into what it means to have a shower as a facet of what Kristin Ross calls “the sign of technique” that accompanies modernization’s “theory of spatial and temporal convergence” (1996, 10). In a series of shower scenes, I literalize the shower’s “script,” by which I mean the gestures, habitus, and normativizing forces that it helps to uphold, with the intention of bringing the shower’s private and privacy-making actions back into social space. The shower in my flat provides a fitting space from which to perform this work not only because it is architecturally similar to one kind of stage but also because of the way its walls, which constitute it at first glance as a separate “space” within the studio apartment, draw attention to the apparent separation between private and social space and to the ambiguous continuity that persists between what is constructed as “private” space and the social space that it is nonetheless a part of. In the scenes, I put the shower and its use directly into conversations about itself by bringing some of the actors who participate in writing the discourse of the shower (and, alongside it, discourses of public and/or private space, colonization, imperialism, racialization, and gendering) into spaces in which the shower is performed.