🎱 Not On My 2024 Bingo Card 🎱
+ NOTES ON NOTES ON CAMP BY SUSAN SONTAG
✍️ NOTES ON NOTES ON CAMP
It’s me, Kelly, your favorite Taurus with flaming hot takes for hot poets everywhere!! ♉ 🔥
This week, I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, Notes on Camp. And as I slow-roll through January, I’ve been thinking about how PTK is very much the camp-ification of poetry and poetic practices. In one of her opening lines, Sontag states that,
“13. Camp effaces nature or else contradicts it outright. And the relation of camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.”
And I was like, this… THIS is what PTK does.
It’s the main question we’re asking ourselves in our poems like, what does it mean to contradict the capitalist “nature” of work, gender, sexuality, neurodiversity, and even poetry itself, while still holding a nostalgia for our collective experiences of “girlhood”??* 👧
*gender-inclusive
It reminds me of the collaborative writing exercise we did at our Pansy workshop last year, where we had participants from all over the world making art together - in the present - based on the shared sensorial souvenirs of tweendom (Pixy Stix, AOL instant messenger breakups, Nokia flip phones…)📱
At PTK, it’s almost like our poetry is the living embodiment of the Lady Justice Tarot Card, holding with equal weight in each hand:
The grief of being conditioned under oppressive capitalist systems and
The joy of subverting them - especially in our trend-a-day media landscape that’s obsessed with remixing the references of our past (Mean Girls reboot anyone?)
Sontag goes on to state that camp is “different but isn’t; a relish for the exaggeration” and that, “things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them”.
The other day, I was lamenting to Larissa that THIS WHOLE TEENDOM THING WON’T BE RELEVANT FOR PTK WHEN WE’RE 40. But like, it’s easy for us (as literal adults) to engage with the simulacra of girlhood through a lens of nostalgia, and it becomes “camp” because we’re no longer “girls” in the sense of age, gender identity, deprogramming of patriarchy, etc.
It’s almost like, through poetry, we use exaggeration as a tool to make the space for processing in real-time:
It’s poetry, but it’s not.
It’s us, but it isn’t.
It’s the thing, but it’s also the secret third thing.
You catch my drift?
Like Crista described in her opening essay for our “Overheard at the Slumber Party” performance in Berlin last year,
“The world of PTK is a world in which instead of wondering if everything is actually cake, we’re wondering if everything is actually a poem when you slice into it.”
Either way, Susan Sontag has invalidated my intrusive thought about us not being cool enough for the kids in ten years. She goes on to highlight, “the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in camp” and yeah, our poetry is very much a hyperbolic caricature of THE KELLY and THE LARISSA (and all of the hot poets who hang out with us). But this space between the “us” and the “not us” allows us to excavate ourselves - looking at who we are, what’s happened to us, what we’re thinking, and how we’re feeling - with compassion.
“Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy.” Sontag states.
And that’s very much the vibe of this poetry newsletter (hiiiiiii old and new subscribers alike 👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻). We want to be welcoming with our work, with our events, with you - both for totally selfish reasons and also because we believe that the mash-up of camp and poetry can be used to infiltrate communities that normally wouldn’t be reached via more traditional avenues of writing and publishing.
It’s not like PTK set out to make camp happen!! Camp only happens when you’re not trying to make camp happen.
And with that, here’s my response to Larissa’s camp AF New Year’s Bingo Card poem…
🎱 Not On My 2024 Bingo Card 🎱
🍣 grocery store sushi 🍣 👩🏻⚕️ botched psychiatric 👩🏻⚕️ 👯♀️ intake co-regulation 👯♀️ 💩 privatized grief 💩 🧘 dangerous yoga 🧘🏼 🛼 the will to leave 🛼 🐨 eucalyptus dreams 🐨 🌨️ crosshatched sky 🌨️ 🍭 sensorial spectrum 🍭 🎀 pepto abysmal 🎀 🕸️ contentment caught 🕸️ ☕ coffees betrayed ☕ 🍄 sensibility deep 🍄 💺 seated sympathy 💺 💉 attention’s tension 💉 🐶 acoustic woof 🐶 🌟 dramatic success 🌟
So yeah, how do you use exaggeration and parody in your poetry?? Drop us your thoughts in the comments. 🩷💚🩷💚🩷💚🩷💚🩷💚🩷💚🩷💚🩷💚🩷💚🩷💚