Heliopolis: Lisa Jarnot’s rewriting of a legendary city
Mark Tardi
University of Lodz, PolandAbstract
In her second book Ring of Fire, American poet Lisa Jarnot offers the reader a dynamic sixteen-poem sequence entitled Heliopolis. Jarnot’s Heliopolis uses the legendary City of the Sun as a starting point, but rather than describe or depict the life of antiquity, Jarnot considers the city as an ongoing posthuman vortex where animals perform a range of implausibly or absurdly anthropomorphic actions. Moreover, Jarnot’s recursive poetic structures both heighten the rhythmic and ludic qualities of the actions described while toggling between poignant humor and ethical confrontation. This essay seeks to examine what the social and ethical implications are in Jarnot’s reimagining of this legendary city. Moreover, the work of Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, and others within posthumanist discourse will be considered as a critical lens into how Jarnot is leveraging playfulness and anthropomorphism. Why does Jarnot consistently (re-)present non-human animals in her poems? How do her stylistic gestures collapse distinctions between physical and temporal boundaries?Keywords:
Heliopolis, American poetry, posthumanism, animals, experimental poetryReferences
Agamben, G. 2004. The Open. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bachelard, G. 2015. The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin.
Bentham, J. 1907. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dobrowolska, A. & Dobrowolski, J. 2006 Heliopolis: Rebirth of the City of the Sun. Cairo: the American University in Cairo Press.
Gass, W. 1973. “Introduction” for Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. 24-25. New York: Vintage.
Gombrowicz, W. 1989. Diary (vol. 2). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Haraway, D. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jarnot, L. 2001. Ring of Fire. Boston: Zoland Books.
Johnston, D. 2002. Book review. Chicago Review, vol. 47, no. 3: 139-141.
Kaufmann, D. 1999. Repetition, noise, and pleasure, or why I like John Yau and Lisa Jarnot. English Matters, no.1. 1-7.
Maso, C. 1995. The Art Lover. New York: Ecco Press.
Perloff, M. 1979. Poetry as Word-System: the Art of Gertrude Stein. American Poetry Review, vol. 8, no. 5 (Sept/Oct.): 33-43.
Raimi, S. 1995. The Quick and the Dead. Film.
Selby, N. 2005. Mythologies of ‘Ecstatic Immersion’: America, the Poem and the Ethics of Lyric in Jorie Graham and Lisa Jarnot. In: W. Blazek & M. K. Glenday (eds.), American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature, 202-225. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press.
Stein, G. 1914. Tender Buttons. New York: Claire Marie.
Tardi, M. 2019. ‘Dressed Like Stars in the Blades of Night’: On Lisa Jarnot’s Poetics of Nonhuman Animals. In: P. Austin & E. Rokosz-Piejko (eds.), Re-Imagining the Limits of the Human, 55-67. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Tompsett, D. 2014. Heliopolis: A City of Two Tales. http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/history-ancient-egypt/77175.aspx. (4 March 2020)
Wolfe, C. 2009. Human, All too human. PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2: 564-575.
Zawacki, A. 2002. Book review. Boston Review, vol. 27. no. 1 : 1-4.
Figure 1: Gilli, B./ESO. 2009. http://www.eso.org/public/images/milkyway/
