CONCLUSION

In the introduction to one of the portfolios for my comprehensive exams, a requirement for my doctoral program, circa autumn of 2010, I outlined my general focus as:

multi-genre and co-authored collections that frequently employed images within their framework, as well as the theoretical and historical lineage of the word “hybrid.”

Moreover, I was intrigued by “questions about the efficacy of the term” hybrid and “sought a new manner of speaking about this type of work.” I linked these “questions” directly to political, economic, and cultural issues:

One of my main concerns was the possibility [that] the “cheerful populist claims” now associated with hybridity muffle the “traces of colonial and white supremacist ideologies” from which the concept initially developed, so much so that its contemporary usage signals the “multiplication of differences as commodities” and thus negates its capacity for “radical, political action in favor of mainstream commercial, academic, and institutional interests.”

As the years pass, my interest in the theoretical and ideological aspects of “hybrid” works has waned; likewise, my interest in the then-heated debates about the term “hybrid” has also dissipated. In fact, even the use of the term seems to me to be a bit passé. This, I would guess, is as much a reaction against academia, as it is against the concept of hybridity.

With that said, my interest in these strange works of art and literature persists. Instead of theorizing about them, though, I would rather create them in a less self-critical and self-conscious manner. I would rather immerse myself in the materiality of creation, experiencing the visceral pleasures afforded by razor blades, scissors, rubber cement, glue sticks, paper, pastels, crayons, graphite, and ink. I find something inherently gratifying about my fingers cut by their edges or coated in their residue. Likewise, I find a certain, chaotic beauty on the floor of my room when it is littered with the remnants of my creations.

No doubt, my previous studies have shaped the way in which I work and think about these creations, but the ponderous (and often times stifling) qualities of institutionalized education/thought have given way to more primal, perhaps more instinctual, practices.

This, maybe, is all to say that I have no grand claims or conclusions about these immersive/intensive experiences and the record of my readings which exist. All I can say is that I entered these works of poetry in a manner that forced me to approach the artifacts as something more than words on a page: to re-think the reading process.

In the future, I suppose, I would like to expand upon the immersive/intensive practices further. The idea of exploring texts and poetry in space through installation art has been something I’ve been thinking about lately; likewise, integrating texts directly into the fabric of one’s life, natural surroundings, or urbanscapes.

Regardless of where I take such ideas, though, I hope, at very least, the videos and process-narratives on this site will act as crude documentation of these immersive/intensive experiences.