NOW, IT IS JOY THAT IS PROHIBITED—THE THING THAT ESCAPES ALL ECONOMIES

Kara Candito:
I was trying, with three other poets, to write a chapbook in 48 hours. Blame the writing residency zeitgeist. Blame the Northern Vermont heat wave. I was writing very, very quickly and trying not to think about process or subject. Precious stuff, one poet said. We put our feet in the river and ate bananas. At night, I read Cixous’ Stigmata thinking I wanted to write like this; brain-blind, with so many instances of joy, joyous, joyfully, Joyce, a joy like a wound. It was so hot. I wanted that joy like a breeze from Canada. Does Hélène Cixous have air conditioning?—I wondered in the little twin bed where I began this poem with her words. In “Unmasked!,” Cixous dreams about the uncleanliness of the stork, about people’s disgust for roots and their fear of joy. I was trying-without-trying to dream with her. I was thinking that I, too, loved a language that shouts its proud filth and tears off its little mask. We swam and shouted our poems to river. That afternoon, it rained and the temperature dropped.