GUEST WRITER/SABRINA RUBAKOVIC

“Alternate Dark”

© Sabrina Rubakovic: portrait of the writer

“There are many ways to follow a thought”

– Anna Moschovakis

About the author

Sabrina Rubakovic is a filmmaker, poet, and media artist born in the California desert. Taught Serbian and Arabic before being allowed to learn English, language became that which could salvage—a mother’s Yugoslavia; a father’s Palestine. She received a Bachelor’s from Duke in Arabic, finding in its script first the way that a word could melt into an image. After a graduate fellowship in visual poetics at Duke, she published a novella, Sunbled, with Huner Francis press. Her work has been featured in the Electronic Literature Organization conference, Barnard Feminist Film Series, Bridges International Film Festival, and the Asian-American Writer’s Workshop Margins journal.

© Sabrina Rubakovic: Sunblend

The Poet’s Proclamation

I’m interested in how language can be led gently towards its own collapse, as if dying while asleep. Instead of moving forward, lines buckle at their breaks, grow close to a simultaneity of communication usually reserved for the visual. It’s a syntax that cannot help forgetting itself and where it was going, and in so doing perform the loss native to language’s forward press.

Poets I’ve been influenced by take different tacks along this end (or beginning) of revised movement. They interrogate the linearity of linguistic communication, and the divisions it rests upon, attempting to circumvent the dictum that verbal meaning is delivered through a temporal chain, governed by grammar, in which only one unit can be experienced at a time.

© Sabrina Rubakovic

Ed Roberson’s work in particular defuses language’s tendency towards velocity, the functional and the discrete, while Nathaniel Mackey disarms in a different way—through an elliptical that is held taut, felt as rhythm, as falling. And in Anna Moschovakis’s latest collection the reader is allowed to ride comfortably on the tangential surf; on the ineffectually associative. The physical dashes that break up her poems facilitate this movement—we are made hyper aware of the existence of these urgent moments of choice in linguistic communication, when the tack is decided and perhaps rotated away from the forward.

© Sabrina Rubakovic

When language isn’t moving the way we’d like it to, there’s more space to play in the realm between sense and sound, an aphasic space where you’ve heard but not yet understood. Studying Arabic in college, I was made to memorize sounds before my knowledge of their meaning was secure. Later I found pleasure in using poetry to write open those pre-meaning moments, extending them however briefly.

© Sabrina Rubakovic: “Floating Altars” 3

The aphasic space suggests loss as triumph, and so can be a site of redemption for the distress that surrounds attempts at linear communication, either as sender or receiver; offering instead failed lines—curves. I’m interested in further exploring the potential of language to speak from the white around the line that’s rejected it; its capacity to celebrate the tangential and ambient, delayed and amnesic, confused and distant.

© Sabrina Rubakovic

Drenched Ascent
I call this music, others color the dormant thread. A line extends towards a summer made entirely of glass. We gathered the departures into chords, felt a churn of silence in the– We swam in circles towards the blinding edge. the distant split of silence. the reduced crush of feeling. I looked out from behind my eyes. saw the sun-stained stoned the spinning glow of my gaze. saw the ships At sea. Alone in the company of Frost on the screen. A person held by her edges, a flexing of the eyes towards Driving uphill in the shade. The view leaks blue while the surges shift. the instants diminished. the fused delays

© Sabrina Rubakovic: echo image

We sleep in different shades of green
In the memory nothing moves but the angle. my eyelids a strip of sound where ultraviolets have decomposed Into a layered scream. all day long I studied spaces drenched in modes of light. tried to tear into A fire in its lips. the approaching curve in our vision. we channeled the obscure into We smoked up in the operational tear. frame rate faster than Green all over. dead heat of the grid we laid Like vapor etched into Motion in the slit my eyes make. (and now without music) Like filmed sleep Refracted. the series too thick to see past. and all the ships At sea. It hurts everywhere But the eyes, the adhesions working their way As the light turns. my brain entertaining chemical changes, the recording so fast it sounds like (move in ripped) Sculpture. the thought scarred By creases where I made little folds during golden hour, As the angle of truth left Like strains of drug you could See through. the music released into old light, familiar compressions, this trouble standing Our eyes taped open in the dark. Rhythms fail, the resonance felt in lines of flight. observe the effect inflicted You are a rigid lift. deep inside the raging blue of it. So we course through the black on our backs. on our knees. a movement of the head towards The grips loose. In the memory the colors break, the line moves. blood on our stomachs we play hide & seek

© Sabrina Rubakovic

More about Sabrina Rubakovic:

Recent poetry: aaww.org/sunblend

moving image work: vimeo.com/rubakovic

Instagram: @against_light

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