The multilingual background of conceptual writing is reflected in the work of contemporary poets who use conceptual, documentary, investigative, or, to quote Michael Leong, “documental” methods that create friction and dissonance between English and other languages. Multilingual poetry reveals the importance of reading as an embodied critical practice, since the presence of different languages makes it less easy to “assimilate” a text, prompting a reading that recognizes difference rather than erasing it. A linguistic border within the text may be understood in the light of Lyn Hejinian’s response to Theodor Adorno
in which she asserts: “Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities.” This claim for poetry as a border zone that is “addressed to foreignness” echoes the double face of Walter Benjamin’s much-quoted statement: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” While the word “document” has a particular aptness to conceptual poetry’s use of existing texts, “barbarism” is an onomatopoeic word relating to the sound of the unknown or foreign
language; it is associated with speech, aurality and the body. Through discussion of poems by North American poets Harryette Mullen, M. NourbeSe Philip and Don Mee Choi, this article shows how sound and multilingualism are used to foreground strategic embodiment and assert the double-facing role of the poet-translator as central to the documentation and contesting of barbarism, especially barbarism associated with the English language and its implication in colonial and neocolonial relationships of the past and present. It considers the
ways in which such work disrupts power relations, and how, as Evie Shockley has suggested, embodied forms of “conceiving” (with its implication of physically giving birth) might replace more abstract “conceptualizing” approaches in order to resist extractive or colonizing appropriation.