Camille Roy is a writer and performer of plays, poetry, and fiction. Her most recent book is a work of fiction entitled SWARM, published by San Francisco's Black Star Series in 1998 with funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Earlier books include The Rosy Medallions (poetry and prose) from Kelsey St Press, published in 1995, and Cold Heaven (plays) from O Books, published in 1993. In November 1998 she was the recipient of a Lannan Writers At Work Residency at Just Buffalo Literary Center. Roy's work is accessible online at the website http://www.grin.net/~minka.
Forum response
Risk is an element of knowing where you are. Think of all the information that pours through your sensible orifices, simply because you are afraid. Class, race, sex: forms of risk. At the risk of sounding facile, it's a marvelous alertness.
It is often proposed that experimental writing has political value because disrupting traditional literary forms is also breaking conventional structures of identity. That's so true it's become truism. It is less apparent (or just less valued) that experimental writing can use the shattering mechanisms of oppression formally. I'm talking about the autobiographical contradiction that happens when you map the breakage of the personal. It's just another aesthetic choice, yet more loaded–I have a stake in the process.
In the hierarchy of aesthetic value, low-valued choices are perhaps the hardest to critically discern. Theory is still a rich white man's luxury, as Ron Silliman told us back in the 80s. Not that I love theory. But experience is still associated with dumb [bodily] suffering, aesthetically unredeemable. (This view seems too silly to mention, but I still hear it and see its effects.)
Class is specifically the social region which has not established its own experimental literary variant. Is this why experimental literary scenes always feel so well-ordered, polite, so back-handed, so middle class? Even stuffy. I don't know. Maybe I'm just cranky. Or maybe it's an artifact of the rules which govern public speech. You get to choose between academic culture or Spoken Word. (Guess which scene of discourse has power.) These divisions create constraints–of audience expectation, critical understanding. It's too familiar because it's a daily theme: limits related to the nausea of crossing social boundaries...How do we get outside?