In My Columbia Blues (folk-cited song)
So some of you may have noticed that I took a short hiatus to publish elsewhere.
I wrote a piece for Public Books called “diss(ertation) track” which was rejected due to their no longer accepting anything that wasn’t prose. I instead wrote “On Dressing Down Myth” which I limited my citations for so that it could be more accessible to the public. I further elaborated on that essay for Pasts Imperfect this week, however my expanding on the central role that sexual misconduct played in my theorizing unfortunately exceeded the word count and so I lost a middle portion of that segment where I explicitly thanked the Columbia students who first helped me theorize around that pedagogical failure as it happened in one of our departments.
I was sad to lose this section because I have never intended on mentioning the name William Harris in anything that I publish unless it is presented within the context of the students who helped me understand that impact more broadly. What happened in the fall of 2017 at Columbia was incredibly personal for the students, who were the only ones who would openly talk about it.
Without that acknowledgment, his placement in my writing feels little more than spectacle. Because I am working on a project interrogating the trans-classical intersections between racialized sexual violence and the spectacular, I am very wary of reproducing the spectacle of sexual violence by sensationalizing it in my writing outside of its due context. This is the opposite of my intention, and so I must work harder to try and align my impact with my intent.
From this experience in publishing elsewhere, I’ve learned that people don’t like reading citations and acknowledgments (or at least, the general public is perceived as not being interested in citations). I’ve also heard that prose is far more publishable than verse, or at least the sense of things rhyming can at times come across as elementary, or difficult to critique in its poetic form (as I’ve now heard from three different editors that I’ve sent “diss(ertation) track” to).
I wonder…what is the ancient myth archive, if not citations and acknowledgments told in the most poetic verse possible?
In that vein, I wonder if I have to complete this self-referential loop by joining these observations together: Are people averse to reading citations and acknowledgments, or are certain academic disciplines just trash at writing them in an engaging way? Does the role of student support take away from the broader idealized glamour of academia and so makes for “bad reading” both at a public-facing level, as well as from professors whose power is asserted through their dominance of citation? Is academic poetry/verse inherently elementary, or are we just more receptive to it through the sense of sound rather than sight?
I want to figure out these questions because citation is something that’s very important to me, and fundamental to Black Feminist thought and praxis. If what I write isn’t interesting enough to truly listen to as one reads, it’s my job to figure out a way to communicate it that holds people’s attention better. Because who and how I cite is as of paramount importance as what I say. It’s what I care about most, so I should be centering it more in my work. I should make it explicit that the last thing that should be cut from any piece of Vanessa Stovall’s writing is the part where she’s citing students.
And if the actual issue is that platforms don’t yet exist to explore new forms of citation practice, then the necessity of Corona Borealis’s existence keeps proving itself.
In My Columbia Blues
N’Chi-Wana was the first Columbia I knew
A fierce and flowing snake of sapphire blue
Its endless surging currents and liquidy fatigue
Aren’t dissimilar to the rushing courses of the Ivy League
Within the academic labors relentlessly herculean
One can find collaborators in all of that cerulean
Like in the program that got me through the door initially
The students of five departments making up C-L-S-T
I sing of Alice Sharpless, who I first bonded with through seething
And who pointed my hairy contentions towards Athenaeus’ wreathing
Not to mention getting professors out of their individualized loop
To ensure CLST actually functioned as a group.
At this point I’m still not sure why folks often doubt her
(Who knows what Villa Adriana’s dig is gonna do without her?)
And to the beaming Katy Knortz for empathizing across every axis
As we’d dream up ideal ways of community ethics and praxis
To the spatial mappings that Mary-Evelyn Farrior has compiled
(And for letting your Southern side come out when we’d start to get wild)
Giovanni Lovisetto for first showing me the dog-binding-dick-gizmo
And for ever-poetically taking the piss out of Italiano machismo
To Kuang, Giulia, and Andrea, my cohort resonating
And to Debbie’s side-eyes of GSAS council meetings detonating
Last to Joe for Shepparding me past giving up and folly
Plus connecting me to Indigenous weaving practices (and Molly!)
Over in the philological department, a world bound by intent,
Were my colleagues spoon-fed rhetoric to undo how we consent
From Derrida, Deleuze, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Foucault, and Sarte
They argued for children consenting to sex — and they surely signed their part
As we’d carefully read through those thinkers, slowly fathomed the ops
Bitterly realizing our professors were merely intellectual cops
(Those 70s French folk really fucked with the Left’s academic ways
But don’t worry, you don’t take my word for it — just take the CIA’s)
Yet bringing us together amidst this most gruesome fabrication
Was the brilliant Emma Ianni in her limitless unbound imagination
For the future, for ways of caring, for creative methods in this fight
And her willingness to experiment outside of what is “right”
And John Izzo, one of the first people to ask me if I was okay
As we attempted to survive the rigors of Imperial Latin survey
(You’ve always met me where I’m at in our respective intellectual immersions
And thanks for helping me think through white heterosexual male diversions)
To Erin Petrella for giving me a break from all of those un-inked puritanicals
And getting me back into classification through your work in the botanicals
Roy Salzman-Cohen who brought forth trans-graduate interest in speculation
And Izzy Levy who first queered Helen for me out of mythological regulation
To Anna Conser for further remixing Euripides as Sapphically enthralled
And the bookworm Cat Lambert in her willingness to call a theory bald
Many thanks to Brett Stine for focusing my thoughts and impressions
On the absurd epic tragedy of male wombs across lyric expressions
Cristina Perez still echoes through my mind in Andromachean refrain
To remind me that practices of refusal are tangled up with acts of pain
Marianna, Jeremy, Elizabeth, Maria, Charles and Tal
Truly…not sure I’d’ve made it through that time without you all.
(The stars blinked out at midnight on February 4th this year
To remember the one now watching us within the astral sphere.)
Fungal Encore:
Yet lurching out of that blue rush and back into mud and leaves
I found myself sounding forward like mycorrhizal weaves
Bet Hucks and Chris Gipson both agreed we needed perspective
And they helped me slowly assemble the Afro-Ancientist collective
I’m ever-grateful to Sierra Mannie’s use of myths for humor and delight
Creating the early stages of Black Echology texting late into the night.
Kiran Mansukhani sure damn stays a wellspring of information
For creating new strategies towards disoccidentation
And finally my cohort for picking apart the classical monoliths
Of America’s fascination with Greco-Roman warfare and myths
Going back and forth with Ben, Jermaine, Theo, and Nicolette
Steering the Ship of Theses through a twittering world-wide net.
