The Ethics of Errata: A Study of the Posthumous in Emily Dickinson, Emmanuel Lacaba and Araki Yasusada
Francisco Guevara (De La Salle University-Manila)

Second session:
Risk and Elegance: The State of the Address and Redress in Literary Texts
Monday, June 10
14:00 – 15:30
Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

In this paper, I inquire into the concept of the posthumous in radical poetic practice and the way it implicates interpretations of spaces on the page within the spaces they are circulated in and translated into using these posthumous publications: The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Variorum Edition edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 and Ralph W. Franklin in 1998), Emmanuel Lacaba’s Salvaged Poems (1986) and Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (1997). I address variations to the concept of the posthumous cultivated by these texts and the ways in which the circulation practices of posthumous publications reorient the logic of authority and participate in 21st century poetic practice.

Emily Dickinson is noted for the way she and Walt Whitman are archetypical figures of American Poetry from the 19th century, however this version of Emily Dickinson was only revealed with the release of Thomas H. Johnson’s variorum edition in 1955. I speculate on the continuing curation of Emily Dickinson’s work and how the interpretations of its posthumousness are implicated in the reading and utilization of her lyric address.

Emmanuel Lacaba is a Filipino poet who was killed in 1976 while he was with a group of New People’s Army rebels in Tucaan Balaag. Since his death and the publication of Salvaged Poems, the wide range of his oeuvre has been strategically appropriated and published within the aesthetic constraints and motives of specific communities. Meaning, there are radically different and often conflicting versions of Lacaba that are symptomatic of a specific community’s aesthetic investments. I inquire into the way posthumousness creates what John Ashbery writes about the critical reception of Raymond Roussel: “[its] critical success is the ease with which it can, as the French say, be served with every kind of sauce. From Jean Cocteau to Foucault and beyond, critics who discuss Roussel tend almost to unconsciously write about themselves.”

Araki Yasusada is a Japanese poet who does not exist. His biography states that he was born in 1907, and he was peripherally connected to the Mimeo Revolution poets in the US. He passed away in 1972, and his poems were allegedly discovered by his son who began to publish them around 1991. This literary hoax complicates the lyric address utilized from readings of Dickinson and the reception of multiple conflicting versions of Lacaba inasmuch as it questions the way circulation practice participates in reading the spaces of the text and questions the contours of poetry itself. This paper discusses the way ethics are cultivated on the liminal space that the concept of the posthumous negotiates through multiple versions of these three authors and their works.