When I write poetry, I go down into my experience. I take that experience and try to make something through words that will make you feel what I want you to feel. […] I cannot do it unless I can touch my own feeling, unless I can touch the experience that that feeling is buried in. And the most important thing is I can take that experience and siphon it through the left brain, language, and make it usable for you. If I open my mouth and scream, that is an expression of feeling, but it’s not a poem and it’s not really useful to you. I have to take the scream and put words to it in such a way that it will make you feel why I was screaming. When I am writing prose, I am trying to make you understand why I am screaming.

Anureet Watta
‘Where do you put down the scream?’

 Where du you put down the scream?
It keeps me company, the way a pebble
 in a shoe, an itch you cannot reach
does; the familiarity of inconvenience.
 And to let it out now would mean
to admit that I am haunted; so, I look
 for an unquestioning tenant.
The mantle, the bookshelf –
 the usual suitors, but the way it
grows feral makes my mother
 mourn. Perhaps, I must put it on
a leash, become an exhibitionist
 “this is the scream; these are its hands
and this is the hideous show
 it puts on (improv mostly.) Here is
the cream. I hope you can keep it.
 Here is the scream that will not
deafen you.” But the audience is
 meagre they have their own scream to
listen to, return to the mundanity
 of their own lives; to plant daisies on the grave
of their own dead dreams.

What will survive of this
 Tired throat? Afraid I am, if I let out the
scream, my own being will
 Spill onto the floor. And the scream grows
inside me, the scream
 is a friend, limbs and toes and ears
grow, a dizzying throb at the
 bottom of my chest. The scream sits
across from me on the cold
 bathroom floor. To let out the scream
must mean there was once a
 moment without it – but I feed off it
like a lovesick addict. The scream
 is the only coherent part left. What would
I be when I do not have this holy
 agony to keep me company? This
harrowing rage to keep me together.
 I realize this company is short lived,
at least in death it gets to unlatch from
 my throat. So, until the grand exit,
I intend to be a good host.

How do you swallow the scream?

Adrienne Rich
Cartographies of Silence

1.

A conversation begins
with a lie. And each

speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature

A poem can begin
with a lie. And be torn up.

A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own

false energy. Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.

2.

The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone

the syllables uttering
the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word

3.

The technology of science
The rituals, the etiquette

the blurring of terms
silence not absence

of words or music or even
raw sounds

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence

4.

How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here

This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

5.

The silence that strips bare:
In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan

Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank spaces or as words

stretched like skin over meanings
but as silence falls at the end

of a night through which two people
have talked till dawn

6.

The scream
of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself

How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them
This is useless to you and perhaps to others

7.

It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything–

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew

It if could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare

8.

No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child’s fingers

or the newborn infant’s mouth
violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciations to the eye

the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a simple ear of grain

for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, these conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green

Barely representable or representative, she [Valerie Solanas] was a speck and spectre on the margins of extreme writing. Her texts were loaded with irony yet pointed at the real. Confined to the precincts of parasitical utterance, she adopted the language of a pest, plugging the kind of speech that counters while resembling hate speech. Strangely, she was meant to ride the dark side of a foreclosive wave, opening up a field of startling intensities by saying the unspeakable and then vanishing with the near notarization of what she had dared to say. She was on the verge of instituting her sexual hermeneutics, at least in terms of language games. But Solanas was not about to acknowledge her part or participation in any male-driven language game. Perhaps it would be helpful to allow that she had positioned herself on the other side of hate speech. When launching a verbal assault she struck where no terror had been located. Or, the terror against which she set up her linguistic shop had not been heeded, addressed. Not even recognized: “Most philosophers, not quite so cowardly [as most men], face the fact that male lacks exist in men, but still can’t face the fact that they exist in male only. So they label the male condition the Human Condition; pose their nothingness problem, which horrifies them, as a philosophical dilemma” (Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 53).

So. Sometimes you have to scream to be heard. […] If you are pegged as a woman your scream might be noted as part of an ensemble of subaltern feints – the complaint, the nagging, the picking, the chatter, the nonsense by which women’s speech has been largely depreciated or historically tagged. Other quasi-linguistic words open up in this space, springing from the noncanozed tropes of moaning and bitching.

Elles disent, malédiction, c’est par la ruse qu’il t’a chassée du paradis de la terre, en rampant il s’est insinué auprès de toi, il t’a dérobé la passion de connaître dont il est écrit qu’elle a les ailes de l’aigle les yeux de la chouette les pieds du dragon. Il t’a faite esclave par la ruse, toi qui a été grande forte vaillante. Il t’a dérobé ton savoir, il a fermé ta mémoire à ce que tu as été, il a fait de toi celle qui n’est pas celle qui ne parle pas celle qui ne possède pas celle qui n’écrit pas, il a fait de toi une créature vile et déchue, il t’a bâillonnée abusée trompée. Usant des stratagèmes, il a fermé ton entendement, il a tissé autour de toi un long texte de défaites qu’il a baptisées nécessaires à ton bien-être, à ta nature. Il a inventé ton histoire. Mais le temps vient où tu écrases le serpent sous ton pied, le temps vient où tu peux crier, dressée, pleine d’ardeur et de courage, le paradis est à l’ombre des épées.